\ & EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH E vangelical Doctrine BibleftfTruth Rev. C. ANDERSON SCOTT M.A Kensington Presbyterian Church gg j j SECOND EDITION LONDON HODDER AND STOUGHTON ^ ^ 27 PATERNOSTER ROW 1901 Butler and Tanner, The Sehuood Printing Works, Frame, and London To J. A. S. Preface THE appearance of another criticism of the principles of the Anglo-Catholic movement will not be judged either untimely or superfluous. The question is still a burning one ; and no one who is at all interested in the religious life of England can be indifferent to the issue. It must have struck any attentive observer of the controversy, however, that writers on both sides are too much in the habit of deploying their arguments on ground of their own choice, and with a curious indifference to the whereabouts of their adversaries. The result is that in very few cases do the controversialists ever come in sight of one another ; and, though there is plenty of noise of battle, the issue remains undecided. This futility I have sought to avoid by selecting one well-known handbook of Anglo-Catholic teaching, and showing the successive fallacies and deficiencies of the reasoning it contains. In this way I hope to provide those who may be assailed by like arguments with a sufficient answer on each of the controverted vii Vlll PREFACE points. In order, however, that my work might not be merely critical, or useful only as an antidote to one book, I have gone beyond these limits in two direc- tions. I have, to some extent at least, indicated the line of defence against arguments drawn not from Scripture but from the early Church, and I have sketched the positive doctrine on Church and Sacra- ments which is the common heritage of the Reformed Churches. As to the form which this volume has taken, that, namely, of Letters addressed to an Anglo-Catholic, it may be said that it arose out of an actual correspond- ence with a Churchman on one of the subjects here treated, in the course of which I recognised consider- able advantages in such a form. It has been employed in connection with this controversy by Canon Knox Little and M. Edmond Scherer, to speak only ot moderns. I have made a point of drawing my quotations as far as possible from Anglican sources. As a matter of fact all the English writers I have quoted, with, I think, two exceptions, are, or were, Churchmen. At the same time, I venture to think it will be recognised by those who know, that those authorities are really authorities on the points for which they are quoted. It is only adherence to this purpose to depend on Anglican authorities that has prevented me from PREFACE IX making use of such excellent works as Dr. Fairbairn's Catholicism Roman and Anglican, Dr. Mellor's Priest- hood", and Dr. John Brown's Apostolical Succession. , To the last, however, I owe some useful quotations from Anglican sources. I should like to express my thanks to Rev. R. E. Welsh for much kind help, especially in reading the proofs. I have written in the earnest desire to guard and fortify those who are in danger of being led into serious error, but also in the not less earnest desire to promote that spiritual unity which has been set before us by our Lord as the condition of the Church's victory over the world. This will not be achieved by saying " Peace " when there is no peace. With priestcraft and superstition we can make no terms. But on this side of the lines so clearly drawn by the Reformation there is a unity real and deep ; all the more real because it is held along with many diversities of type in thought and organization. The recognition of that unity within a certain area was the great achievement of the closing years of last century. May the fruits of it be found in this. C. A. S. KENSINGTON, March, 1901. Contents i PAGE "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" . . 3 II THE AFFIRMATIONS OF PROTESTANTISM . 27 III THE " UNITY " OF CATHOLICISM . . 37 IV WHAT is THE SCRIPTURAL MEANING OF " THE GOSPEL " ? . . . .49 V THE PRAYER-BOOK SERVICE AND THE CHURCH YEAR ....... 63 VI BAPTISMAL REGENERATION . . . -75 VII THE MEANING OF BAPTISM . . . 99 VIII THE LORD'S SUPPER . . . . 113 Xll CONTENTS IX PAGE THE LORD'S SUPPER : THE FIGURATIVE VIEW . . . . . 133 X THE LORD'S SUPPER : THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 143 XI THE LORD'S SUPPER : THE CATHOLIC RE- FORMED VIEW . . . . .165 XII CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE : FALSE AND TRUE . 181 XIII THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY : Is IT A PRIEST- HOOD ? ...... 205 XIV CHURCH GOVERNMENT . . . .225 XV CHURCH AND MINISTRY .... 247 XVI APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION . . . .267 XVII THE CHURCH 289 D "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" " He is rather the schismatic who makes unnecessary and inconvenient impositions than he who disobeys them because he cannot do otherwise without violating his conscience." JEREMY TAYLOR. Letters to an Anglo-Catholic i "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" You call yourself a Catholic and me a Protestant ; and you seem to think that that establishes a comfortable barrier between us comfortable for you I mean, for it does appear in some odd way to add to your comfort as a Christian to be separated as much as possible from your fellows. A list of the Christian Churches or "communities" with whom you have " no dealings " would embrace all Christen- dom, with the sole exceptions of the two Churches, the Roman and the Greek, which decline to recognise you. I have nothing to say against such isolation. In itself it may be " magnificent." There are traits in human character to which it may minister gratifi- cation ; but I must say that when this is presented to us as the result and fruit of " Catholic teaching," as the issue of a system which more than any other lays stress on unity and claims to have a special 4 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH recognition and commission from our Blessed Lord, we cannot but be filled with surprise and pain. But without enquiring at present how far this eager desire to keep yourselves apart from others who worship the same God in the name of the same Saviour, is consistent with the spirit of Christ, let us first examine this verbal barrier which you set up between us. You claim the name of Catholic in some sense which excludes me. You call me Protestant in some sense which denies that I or my Church or its teach- ing have a right to be recognised as " Catholic." Now, do these two names represent a true anti- thesis ? You use them as if they were mutually exclusive. In the practice and fashion of to-day they may be so ; but historically and theologically they are not. We have never surrendered the claim to Catholicity which was made by the Reformers on behalf of their doctrine, their discipline, and their Church. They knew themselves to be Protestant but also Catholic, the more truly Catholic because through the Reformation they had recovered the doc- trine and discipline of the primitive Catholic Church. The names " Catholic " and " Protestant " seem to you to be mutually exclusive only because in quite recent years you have put certain meanings into each of them which properly belong to neither. And if "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 5 we are to discuss the differences between us in any- thing like a scientific spirit, we must recognise that the true antithesis of " Protestant " is " Roman " or " Papal," and the only true antithesis of " Catholic " either " non-Christian " or " heretical." It is indeed by a curious irony of linguistic history that this almost sacred name of " Catholic " has come in recent years to be appropriated as the private property of a small party in one of the dozen Churches to which it rightly belongs. The other Churches of Germany, Scandinavia, France, America, Scotland, the other " communities " alongside your own in England, are Christian j they are not heretical. According to any definition of " Catholicity " which you would give or be prepared to accept, the faith they hold is the " Catholic " faith. And yet they are Protestant. You invite me to become a Catholic. I cannot, for I am already one, a member of the Catholic, Universal Church. When I say, in the course of public worship, "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church," I sincerely own that there is such an in- stitution upon earth, and as sincerely claim and believe that the particular Church to which I belong is a branch of that Universal or Catholic Church. But you reply : " That is not what I mean by the Catholic Church. Whatever else the Catholic Church may be, it is something which excludes O EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH your Church, seeing that it is not governed by bishops, and is not in communion with the Arch- bishop of Canterbury." Quite so. But then the question is, By what right do you give this meaning to the word " Catholic " ? Is it on the ground of Scripture, or of reason, or of history ? You must have some sufficient answer to these questions, for you take away from my Church an honourable name which justly belongs to her, and then you upbraid her with the want of it, with being only " Protestant." Let us examine the history of this name which you claim as honourably distinguishing your teaching, your practices, your Church from those of other Christians. Needless to say, the name is not Scriptural. In that respect it has no advantage over the names bestowed upon, or assumed by, other sections of the Christian community. So far as the word appears in our Bibles at all, in the late titles to certain Epistles, it furnishes evidence of the sense in which the word was used in the second or third century, the simple, etymological meaning of " general," " universal." It is attached to those Epistles which are not designated to any par- ticular community but to the whole Church at large. We turn to the history of the word in Christian literature. Its earliest appearance as a description of the Christian Church is found in the Epistles of "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 7 Ignatius ; and the meaning he attaches to the word is one I am quite prepared to abide by " Wherever Jesus may be, there is the Catholic Church." The writings of Ignatius have proved so useful a storehouse of evidence in support of " high Catholic " views of the ministry and the episcopate, that it is all the more surprising to find him so defective in his conception of Catholicity. So comprehensive and so spiritual a view would, I fear, be branded nowadays as " Pro- testant." It depends, of course, on the simple and etymological meaning of the word, and is, in fact, a touching echo and interpretation of our Blessed Lord's own words, " Where two or three are gathered to- gether in My name there am I in the midst of them." The same conception underlies the use of the word by the Church of Smyrna in their Epistle narrating the martyrdom of Polycarp. They address it to the " Church of God which sojourneth at Philomelium and to all the brotherhoods of the holy and universal (Catholic) Church sojourning in every place." The consciousness of Catholicity was still (about A.D. 1 60) a consciousness of spiritual unity in a common ex- perience of redemption. A very different conception is that which came to be defined towards the end of the fourth century, having been developed in the course of the Church's struggle with heresy. A definition of Catholicism 8 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH was laid down by imperial decree. They, and they only, who held the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity had the right to call themselves Catholics. And once more, after an interval of five centuries, and in con- sequence of a further development, we have a third conception embodied in the authoritative declaration of Hildebrand, " Let no man be accounted a Catholic who is not in agreement with the Roman Church." These three definitions of Catholicity may be taken as representative of the three main types of Christian opinion on the subject which have at various times prevailed. The first, which was held throughout the first two centuries, presents a conception closely re- lated to the origin of the word. " Catholic " meant " general," " universal." It was applied by Justin Martyr to the resurrection, by Tertullian to the good- ness of God. As a distinguishing epithet of the Church, the Church's faith or the Church's practice, it expressed the universal mission of the Church to all mankind, the completeness of the Church's teaching of things necessary for salvation, and the common basis of Christian life and worship as realized in the many scattered communities of Christians. Even among those communities which claimed for them- selves and granted to one another the name of Catholic it cannot be supposed that there was abso- lute uniformity either of thinking or of practice. From "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 9 the very beginning there was a recognition, at least implicit, of the distinction between things essential and things indifferent. In this stage of the world's history the force of the word was primarily inclusive. It expressed the Church's sense of unity within itself, of the unity of all those who worshipped Christ as the risen Son of God. It emphasized that breaking down of barriers, social, national, and political, which was part of the actual experience of the early Church the Christian consciousness that in Christ Jesus there was neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free. In the course of the second and third centuries, however, the direction of the word came to be reversed. Differences of opinion on great doctrines of the faith made their appearance, which went so deep as to cut the bond of Christian unity. Heresy which impinged upon the essential contents of the Christian conscious- ness forced that consciousness to define itself in opposi- tion to false views. Not all that claimed to be Christian could establish its right to be called by the name. Whatever failed to approve itself by the test of Scripture and continuous tradition was extruded. Over against these developments the term " Catholic " acquired a significance of exclusiveness in the sense of orthodox as distinct from heretical. To the criterion of spiritual unity in Christ was added a new criterion of intellectual agreement about Christ. But still 10 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH within the Catholic Church so understood there was much variety of opinion on subordinate questions, much diversity of practice. That is to say, the later criterion did not invalidate or supplant the earlier. Room was still found for the principle enunciated by Ignatius, " Wherever Jesus may be there is the Catholic Church." But the second criterion tended gradually to displace the first. Intellectual agreement became the dominant consideration. The Church gave formal definition to its faith in the Creed of Nicaea. It also entered into an alliance with the State. Spiritual unity is not a thing of which the State can take cognizance. " Catholic," therefore, became a legal and technical term to describe that institution which the State had taken under its protection ; and the State proclaimed its own definition of the term. Those and those alone were to be recognised as " Catholic Christians " who held the doctrine of the Trinity in accordance with the Nicene Creed. But the same decree of Theodosius which thus defined Catholicity on a purely intellectual basis also opened the way for yet another, a third, conception and definition of Catholicity. For the religion which the Emperors required their subjects to profess was further described as that which had been communicated by the Apostle Peter to the Romans. And though this imperial definition of "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" n Catholicity remained unchallenged, it was gradually modified in practice by the growing influence of that other conception which had also received recognition. The Church of Rome emphasized more and more its claim to define the contents of the Catholic Faith, and the form of Catholic practice, until the terse formula of Hildebrand, " Let no man be accounted a Catholic who is not in agreement with the Roman Church," became a true description of the situation. This formula was arrived at as the result of a process which, though it began before him, received its chief impulse from Cyprian (c. 200-258). It was a process the effects of which were seen in all departments of Christian thought and worship, a process of return to the religious level of Judaism, the exaltation of letter and form above spirit and life, a process in the course of which all that was most characteristic of Christ's religion was lost ; and of this process we have a striking illustration in the history of this word " Catholic." Throughout the Middle Ages the Roman Church adhered to and elaborated the definition of Hildebrand. The idea of universality which inheres in the word " Catholic " was interpreted of the universal jurisdic- tion to which that Church laid claim. The notion of orthodoxy which had become attached to it was governed by the vast and incoherent mass of patristic 12 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH and scholastic tradition inaccessible and equally in- comprehensible to the people. The dogma of the Pope's infallibility is at once the logical issue of this process and a necessary escape from the confusions and contradictions of Roman theology. That was the final step in the externalizing and materializing of Christianity. And it is the conviction that your party has committed itself to a like process which stirs us both as Englishmen and as Christians. It is not only that the end of the process is a tyranny or the worst kind, but that somewhere in the course of it there is a point at which both truth and righteous- ness are relegated to a subordinate position in the heritage of the Church. The cynical acknowledg- ment that a man can be a good Catholic though a bad Christian is not unjustly taken to reflect the conscious- ness of a Church which has made Catholicity to con- sist in spiritual and intellectual subjection to the Pope. Now the question which presses for a solution, and to which you are bound to give an answer, is this : When you call yourself a Catholic, what do you mean ? on which of these conceptions of Catholicity do you claim ? You insist that your Church possesses ex- clusive privileges because it is Catholic, that its teach- ing has special authority because it is Catholic, that its sacraments and forms of government have exclusive validity because they are Catholic. What then is "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 13 the significance in which you use this all-important word ? The Catholicity which depends on submission to the Pope you neither have nor are willing to have. You continue to reject his supremacy. By what right ? You repudiate some at least of the doctrines which by the Roman Church have been declared to be of the Catholic Faith. It is true that through representatives of your party you have approached the Pope asking for even a qualified recognition of the Catholicity of your Church. By so doing you have acknowledged that he is, at least de facto, an authority on the question. And, indeed, if extent and con- tinuity of external jurisdiction, if worldly prestige and influence, lend any weight at all to claims to Catho- licity, your anxiety to be even in some measure recognised by Rome is easily understood. On such grounds as these no Church on earth can challenge comparison with her. And she has declared against you. Your claim has been contemptuously rejected. On the Roman theory of Catholicity your Church is not Catholic, your Sacraments are not valid, you are mere pretenders. You fall back, therefore, on some other theory or Catholicity. You allege your harmony of doctrine and practice with some ur.corrupted Catholic Church in some unspecified century. I observe that it is 14 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH exceedingly difficult to discover what is the minimum or the maximum of truth or practice which is rightly called Catholic and for which we are in search of a criterion. You have no standard, no authoritative documents, no authoritative persons from whom you or I or any one else can ascertain what is Catholic, missing that quality neither by excess nor by defect. You have endless handbooks and manuals, of which I suppose you have taken one for your guide ; but every one of them is the product of individual idiosyn- crasy and bears the marks of its origin. Practically you depend for your standard of doctrine and of practice quite as much on your particular religious newspaper as on anything else. St. Paul remonstrated with the Corinthians for styling themselves after par- ticular teachers, and you are not slow to mock at cer- tain branches of the Church of Christ which happen to be commonly described by the name of a man. But wherein are they better who say in effect, " I am of the Church Review" and " I of the Church Times" and " I of the Guardian " ? Careless or ignorant outsiders may be willing to grant to all these the title they claim of " Catholic," but you know even better than I do that each one of them represents a different level of practice if not of doctrine ; each one breaks off at a different point from the stream of development which ends in Trent and the "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 15 Papacy of to-day. And of the point where he shall break off he himself is the only judge. You call it Catholicism, but could there be a more rampant individualism ? But even supposing you were agreed as to what is Catholic in doctrine or practice, how do you prove that this and no less, this and no more, is the Catholic faith and the Catholic standard of practice ? At what point in the development of Christian theology do you part company with the Romanist, and what reason can you give for stopping there ? If you pass the limit of the undivided Church, you have nothing by which to determine where orthodoxy ceases and " corruption " begins. On the other hand, if you stop short at that limit, you may have a better reason ror calling yourself Catholic, but you have no reason for calling us anything else, no reason for denying our claim to be as truly Catholic as yourself. For we too hold the Creeds of the first six oecumenical councils, the faith of the undivided Church. Every article of the Nicene Creed is part of the faith of all the great Reformed Churches. If by calling yourself Catholic you mean to distinguish yourself from Pro- testants on the ground of orthodoxy, you must point to some article of the faith which is yours and not ours : if by the use of the same name you wish to connect yourself with Romanism, you have to show by what 1 6 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH right you reject so much which Rome has declared to be de fide. It is possible that you have some vague notion that your Catholicity finds support in the so-called Vincentian Canon, " quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus." But a moment's consideration shows how little that can help you. For what doctrine outside the Nicene Creed fulfils any one of these conditions, not to say all of them ? What practice beyond preaching and the administration of the sacraments can claim to have been observed always in all places and by all Christians ? In appealing to such a standard you really deceive yourself, and are in danger of " building the highest castle of your faith upon a guess." It seems, therefore, that orthodoxy as a criterion of Catholicity fails to give you what you require. It neither differentiates you from Protestantism, nor does it put you on an equality with Rome. You are thrown back, therefore, on the first and earliest sig- nificance, of the word. If you desire to be Catholic, you must be so either in the primitive or in the fully developed Roman sense. Between these two there is no logical standing ground. And if you accept the only alternative that is really open to you, and seek to realize your Catholicity in the primitive sense, in the sense of the first two centuries, you will see in it the "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 17 most comprehensive description of Christianity as a system of thought and life. Used to describe what is, it embraces all those " that love the Lord Jesus in sincerity," all those communities where the word of God is faithfully preached and the Sacraments duly administered. Used to describe what by God's will is appointed to be, it presents to our faith the con- summation towards which we are slowly to approxi- mate, a kingdom of truth and righteousness world- wide in its extent and absolute in its authority. The word " Catholic " signifies that universality of the Church whereby all divergences of faith and practice which do not touch essentials are held together in one bond of spiritual union. It ought surely to weigh with you that not only can you produce no other ground on which to explain and justify your claim to Catholicity, but that this was the view of Catholicity adopted by the Fathers of the English Church at the time of the Reformation and for long afterwards. They denied the Catholicity of Rome on the ground that she had erred in certain essentials of the faith. On the other hand, they never doubted that they themselves were truly Catholic in doctrine and worship. They acknowledged and rejoiced in the Catholicity of the other Reformed Churches those of Germany, France and Switzerland on the ground that they too had retained or recovered the primitive 2 1 8 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH purity of doctrine and discipline. The martyrs of the Marian persecution suffered and died as Catholics. They were Protestants too, but that does not convict them of absurdity, but rather convicts you of a false division. It is a solecism of thought, a perversion of history, which denies that a Church can be Protestant in doctrine, in discipline and in organization, and yet be truly Catholic. This was understood with perfect clearness by the great divines of the Church of England in the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, by the men who shaped its polity, framed its Articles, and compiled its Liturgy. Your clergy, when they take orders, solemnly declare their assent to the proposition that, " The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men in the which the pure Word of God is preached and the Sacraments be duly administered according to Christ's ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same " (Art. XIX.). This is not your (Anglo-Catholic) theory of the Church, but ours. It came into your Articles from the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg. The same conception of the Church is enshrined in your prayers, even if it be denied in your teaching. " More especially we pray for the good estate of the Catholic Church ; that it may be so guided and governed by Thy good Spirit that all who profess and call themselves "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 19 Christians may be led into the way of truth and hold the faith in unity of spirit." Or again, in the Prayer for the Church Militant : " Beseeching Thee to inspire continually the universal Church with the spirit of truth, unity and concord ; and grant that all they that do confess Thy Holy Name may agree in the truth of Thy Holy Word." If there could be any doubt that the Catholic Church is here described in the one case as "all that profess and call themselves Christians," and in the other by the phrase, " all they that do confess Thy Holy Name," it would be re- moved by the language of the Bidding Prayer : " Ye shall pray for Christ's Holy Catholic Church ; that is, for the whole congregation of Christ's people dispersed throughout the world." I do not wish to trouble you with many long quotations, but this point requires illustration. The fact that the English Reformers, both lay and clerical, took for granted the Catholicity of their position and of their Church is overlooked and obscured by your writers in a way that is hardly creditable. I take a few cases almost at random. John Philpot, Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Arch- deacon of Winchester, was martyred in 1555. In the course of the prolonged examinations to which he was subjected his appeal is consistently to the Scripture and the primitive Church. "I do not dissent," he 20 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH says, " from the true Catholic Church ; I do only dissent from the Bishop of Rome, where if you can prove to be the Catholic Church of Christ, I will be of the same also with you." 1 But the position of the Reformers is most clearly seen in such questions and answers as the follow- ing: Bishop of Worcester : " You said that if we did burn you, we should burn a Catholic man. Will you be a Catholic man and stand to the Catholic Church ? " Philpot : " I will stand to the true Catholic Church." Bishop of Worcester : " Will you stand to the Catholic Church of Rome ? " Philpot : " If you can prove the same to be the Catholic Church, I will be one thereof." In like manner (to show that this was the view held by the laity also) Mistress Anne Askewe, burnt at Smithfield in 1546, relates of her examinations : "Then my lord (the Bishop of London) sat down and took me the writing to set thereto my hand, and I writ after this manner : c I, Anne Askewe, do believe all 1 Examinations and Writings of Archdeacon Philpot, p. 113. He quotes Augustine : " The Church is defined by St. Augustine to be called Catholic in this wise : ' The Church is called therefore Catholic because it is thoroughly perfect and halteth in nothing'" (p. 137). "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 21 manner of things contained in the faith of the Catholic Church.' Then because I did add unto it * the Catholic Church,' he flung into his chamber in a great fury." l A characteristic exposition of the doctrine of the Church of England during this period, when its liturgy was being formed, is found in the Catechism of Thomas Becon, Chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer. Thus : Father : " Why is the Church called Catholic or universal ? " Son : " Because it is not bound to one certain place, kingdom or empire, but is dispersed throughout the whole world, so that in all places God hath His elect and chosen people, which believe on Him, call on His holy name and worship Him according to His word, even in spirit and in truth according to the com- mandment of Christ." The son then proceeds to enumerate the " four tokens," " whereby we may truly and undeceivably know the true Catholic Apostolic Church." And they are, first, the sincere and uncorrupt preaching of God's Word ; second, the true administration of the Sacraments according to the institution and ordinance of Christ ; third, fervent prayer and the diligent in- 1 Select Works of Bishop Bale, p. 177. 22 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH vocation of God in the name of our alone Mediator, Jesus Christ ; fourth, ecclesiastical discipline according to the prescript and appointment of God's Word. This is plainly a totally different conception of Catholicity from that which you are now trying to establish and enforce upon us all. And the awkward thing for you is that this conception did once prevail in the Church of England, and that for many years among its bishops, its divines and theologians, and also among its lay members. It is this conception which colours all references to the subject in your Prayer- Book, and the same which is made authoritative by your Articles. Now, quite apart from the question which of the two conceptions of Catholicity, yours or mine, may be right, you have to explain how your Church could make such a breach with what you now call the " Catholic faith," and on this very question, and yet preserve her continuity. The latest fashion among your party is to treat the Rerormation as a " regrettable incident." This is a great deal more astute than the line adopted by such men as Dr. Littledale, who taught that the martyrs of the Reformation deserved their fate. But it is every whit as false to history. The breach which your Church then made with the Roman conception of Catholicity was only one of many like breaches, any one of which was sufficient to destroy the kind of continuity you claim, while all "CATHOLIC" AND "PROTESTANT" 23 of them taken together spell, not a " regrettable inci- dent," but a Revolution. And, indeed, I wonder you do not see the quandary you are foolishly preparing for yourselves. If " Pro- testant " and " Catholic " be really mutually exclusive, if a Church that is Protestant has lost Catholicity, then you must surrender the claim to Catholicity for your- selves. For beyond all doubt there was a period, and that not a short one, in the history of the English Church, when it was frankly, conscientiously and officially Protestant. It was as a " Protestant Power " that England had to face and fight the Armada. We have the authority of the late Bishop of London for saying that Elizabeth herself was a Protestant, and spoke of her country as " Protestant England." Arch- bishop Laud declared at his death that he had " always lived in the Protestant religion established in England." Archbishop Sancroft urged the Bishops of his Province to take " all opportunities of assuring and convincing " " our brethren the Protestant Dissenters " " that the bishops of this Church are really and sincerely irrecon- cilable enemies to the errors, superstitions, idolatries and tyrannies of the Church of Rome." And while the Church of England was thus wholly cut off from Rome, it was, on the other hand, on terms of closest sympathy with the Reformed and " Protestant " Churches of the Continent. Their 24 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH orders were recognised. Men who had been ordained abroad passed freely into the ranks of the English clergy. " During the reign of Elizabeth and of James I. the clergy of non-episcopal Churches out- side England were, in the opinion of the day, accounted regularly ordained priests; under Eliza- beth, and temporarily after the restoration of Epis- copacy under Charles II., priests who had not been ordained by bishops were allowed to officiate even within the Church of England." l Beyond all challenge the Church of England has been for more than three centuries Protestant in its head, in its name, in its doctrinal standards and in its sympathies. It is surely a very dangerous thing, then, for you to teach men that what is Protestant cannot be Catholic. You are, as I said at the beginning, trying to establish a false antithesis. Much that is Protestant is truly Catholic, and the Catholic Church of Christ is larger than you think. 1 See Makower, Constitutional History of the Church of England, 1 8. THE AFFIRMATIONS OF PROTESTANTISM " It is a mistake to judge the work of moral emancipation achieved by the Reformation by the incident of that protest against the diet of Spires which gave rise to the word Pro- testantism. Protestantism was not, as neo-Christians affirm, a work of negation or of criticism with regard to that epoch ; it was a positive Christian production, a solemn manifestation of the individual man sole object and aim of Christianity." MAZZINI. 26 II THE AFFIRMATIONS OF PROTESTANTISM I HAVE honestly tried to understand your use of the word " Catholic." I cannot think you either under- stand it yourself, or can justify the use you make of it. It is an innovation in our diction, a solecism in our literature. It lacks equally a rational and an historical basis. I must confess it annoys me, in the first place, as an offence against our common speech. But still more it distresses me as involving the degradation of a great idea, an idea which is part of the heritage left to the Church by our Blessed Lord Himself. And to what end do you do this damage to our common heritage ? By a somewhat unscrupu- lous use of this word " Catholic " you annex to a section of the Church what belongs to the whole. You speak of " Catholic doctrine," " Catholic wor- ship," " Catholic saints," as if these belonged to your denomination alone. You have taken one of the great ideas of the Christian consciousness, the con- 27 28 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH ception of an all-embracing unity in the Spirit, and degraded it into something artificial, sectarian and untrue. You have taken from the Church the name which expresses its most glorious characteristic, and turned it into the badge of a party. If you so little understand the name you take to yourselves, it is small wonder that you misunderstand and so persistently misrepresent the name you put upon us. I have no objection to the name " Pro- testant " as an appellation, a convenient label for certain Christian communities which have thrown off the yoke of Rome, or for certain opinions and practices which require to be differentiated from those of the corrupted Roman Church. But the name for our Churches and for those of our opinions in which we differ from the Romanists, which is both historical and accurate, is " Reformed." The name of " Protestant " is popular, accidental and uninform- ing. And when you argue, as so many of your con- troversialists now do, from the supposed meaning of the word " Protestant " to the ethos of our system or the character of our doctrines, you are simply mis- leading yourself and others. You must be familiar with the kind of statement to which I refer. I take one example from a well-known handbook : " The word Protestant means making a protest. Protestant is a negative term, and does not express positive belief THE AFFIRMATIONS OF PROTESTANTISM 29 of any kind. It is a mistake for a Churchman to describe himself as a l Protestant,' for the term is no- where to be found in the Bible or the Prayer Book, and ought not to be adopted as a designation by the Church or her members." If the reason given in the last sentence were universally applied, it would make sad havoc of much that is called " Catholic," but has no authority either in the Bible or in the Prayer Book. But from the assertion in the former sentence it is but a short step to that which is so often made, that Protestantism is " a mere bundle of negations." There is, in fact, so much loose thinking and hasty assertion on this point in the popular literature on your side that I must ask you to examine what ground there is for these vague but not the less injurious charges. At the same time observe this difference between us. You assert a doctrine, a practice, because it is " Catholic." To you the name is all-important. To me the name Protestant has no such importance. I assert a doctrine, or a practice, not because it is Protestant, but because it is Scriptural, and in the true sense Catholic ; in some cases also because it is not Roman but Reformed, not mediaeval but primitive. I am not bound to all that is Protestant as you are bound to all that may be proved to be Catholic, but only to what is Scriptural and primitive. In the first place, then, we are told that the word 3O EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH Protestant carries with it the condemnation of the sys- tem it describes, because it denotes a system which is critical and not constructive, one which protests and denies, but does not proclaim and assert. To dismiss a system simply on the ground of an interpretation of the name which you give it is of course mere quib- bling ; but even your interpretation is wrong. For the word, so far from always denoting denial, criticism, attack, may be used with equal propriety in the sense of "assert," "maintain." One man protests his loyalty, another protests his innocence, another his readiness to do whatever he is asked. Is not that good English ? Have your friends forgotten, " Bid me to live, and I will live, Thy Protestant to be " ? Or do they suppose that the poet was offering to Althea a " mere bundle of cold negations " ? So memorable a case to the contrary ought to have made impossible this unintelligent assertion that " Protes- tant" always means negation, denial. But if that be not the necessary meaning of the word, is it not the meaning historically connected with the party of the Reformation ? We must look at the origin of the word in its ecclesiastical usage. People talk and write sometimes as if the Reformation sprang into being at one moment,from the brain of one man, THE AFFIRMATIONS OF PROTESTANTISM 31 Luther, and had been baptized on the spot by the name of " Protestant." Even those who habitually convey such an impression must be well aware that it was something very different a continuous movement of human thought, having its beginning far back in the Middle Ages. As an organized revolt against the dominion of Rome it makes its appearance almost simultaneously in several centres, independent of one another. Both as an intellectual uprising and as an ecclesiastical movement it had been active, and had made already great strides, several years before the Reformers received the name of " Protestants." And even then the application of the name was due to the accidental extension to the whole movement of the title of a single political document. We are in the habit of dating the Reformation as a deliberate and successful attempt to restore primitive Christianity from the year 1517, the year in which Luther nailed his theses to the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg. It was not till more than ten years after that, not till 1529, that he or his party or his teaching began to be called by the name of " Protestant." All the main doctrines which are to-day associated with the name, doctrines which you now seek to condemn by discrediting the name, were being taught and rejoicingly accepted by a large part of central Europe long before the word " Protestant " was used at all. And when 32 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH it was used, it was not in a religious but in a political sense, to describe those princes and other members of the diet of Speyer, who joined in solemn protest against the invasion of their political rights by the Roman party. It was only by a historical accident that the name " Protestant " was afterwards extended to those who agreed with them politically, and then to those who were also in harmony with their religious and theological opinions that is, to the Reformers. It is seldom either wise or fair to argue at all from the name or any party which is opposed to us. It is generally a nickname, not expressing its real char- acter, and accepted, if accepted at all, only through force of circumstances. But it is specially unfortunate in this case, where, through misinterpretation of the name, a totally false impression of the system is pro- duced. For so far was the Reformation from being: a O merely negative movement, that its strength and suc- cess lay in the vigour and pertinence of its affirma- tions. Men do not die for negations, neither are they fired to enthusiasm by a system which " does not express positive belief of any kind." The affirmations of Protestantism were plain enough to preclude any possibility of mistake. They were 1. The Bible is in itself sufficient as a guide to faith and as a standard of practice. 2. Men are justified by faith. THE AFFIRMATIONS OF PROTESTANTISM 33 3. All true believers are by Christ made priests before God. The joy with which these announcements were hailed, the readiness with which they were accepted, and the exulting sense of freedom and spiritual enlarge- ment by which they were followed, prove that not only in form but in essence they were positive affirma- tions. You will not, I hope, fall back on the retort that these affirmations imply corresponding negations. Of course they do. You would find it difficult to assert any important truth, especially on a subject which had caused great difference of opinion, without at least tacitly denying a number of contrary errors. When Galileo declared " E pur se muove," he denied that the sun stands still, but he also made a positive contribu- tion to human thought. Your Athanasian Creed con- tains a large number of positive assertions ; but there is not one of these which is not there for the very pur- pose of denying some contrary error. Nevertheless, you would hardly call it a bundle of " cold negations," or the system it represents a merely critical one. I beg you, therefore, to give no further heed to such unworthy quibbles. Protestantism is no more free from error than any other human system of interpret- ing the revealed mind of God. But it is not either in its origin, or in its essence, or in its present mani- 3 34 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH festation a merely critical or destructive force. It is a protest against the errors and corruptions of Rome ; but it is a protest of the great truths of our religion, a re-enunciation of the Fatherhood of God, of the Media- torial power of Christ, of the universal operation of the Spirit, and of the validity of Christian experience, as these were apprehended by the Apostolic and Primi- tive Church. And specifically it embodies an affir- mation of the privileges and responsibilities of the individual, of the spiritual unity of the Church, and of the predominantly ethical character of our religion. These were not new principles invented in the six- teenth century. They are in the New Testament. But during the Middle Ages they had been ignored, suppressed, and almost eliminated from Christianity. It concerns you as well as us, for it concerns our com- mon loyalty to Christ, to find for them their proper place, to assign to them their due emphasis in the reli- gion of our land. This will not be done by any who fail to do justice to the Reformation, still less by any who hide their ignorance by contempt. THE UNITY " OF CATHOLICISM " As it is noted by one of the Fathers, * Christ's coat, indeed, had no seam, but the Church's vesture was of divers colours ' ; whereupon he saith, * In veste varietas sit, scissura non sit.' " LORD BACON. Ill THE "UNITY" OF CATHOLICISM You reply to my former letter that even if Protes- tantism be not essentially and historically a negative and destructive system, it is intrinsically and historic- ally a prey to disunion, that the spectacle of warring sects which it presents is in itself a disproof of its claim to stand in the line of the Divine purpose. You speak of "the dissidence of dissent " and " the welter of Pro- testant sects " ; and you seem to have still before your mind that notorious and long-exploded list of religious bodies in England, some three hundred of them, which were supposed to represent divisions of Protestantism. And you point by way of contrast to what you call the imposing unity of the Catholic Church. In both cases you fall into serious and misleading exaggeration. In the first place, you must excuse my pointing out that the unity of the Catholic Church is either a spiri- tual unity, in which case it may include all the Re- 37 38 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH formed Churches ; or it is an external unity, in which case it is the unity of a Church to which you do not belong. By remaining outside the Roman Church you deprive yourself of all share in a unity of that kind, however imposing. And at the same time you ac- knowledge, I am glad to say, that there is something higher even than external unity, something for the sake of which it is right to sacrifice even the unity which you so much admire. You deny yourself what is the desire of your heart, in order that you may be faithful to some truth which is rejected or corrupted by Rome. For this we honour you. But your posi- tion involves certain admissions. We also see some truth for the sake of which we feel bound in con- science to remain apart from you. You must admit at least the possibility that such an attitude is justified. For it is your own. You cannot rightly taunt us with unreason, or with obstinacy, or the sin of schism. We have our explanation of our attitude as you have yours. And you should not find it difficult to understand that our outward separation from you may be as much a matter of conscience with us as yours from Rome is with you. But, further, this unity of the Catholic Church which you find so imposing is a gigantic delusion. It is an external unity beneath which there is neither the bond of peace nor the unity of the Spirit. When, by THE "UNITY" OF CATHOLICISM 39 some chance we are allowed to penetrate this outward mask of unity which covers the Church of Rome, we find a veritable turmoil of divergent ideas, aims and policies, a hereditary struggle between the regulars and the seculars, between the monks and the bishops, be- tween one Order of monks and another. The truth is, the Roman Church has her sects as numerous and as well marked as the Protestant, and far more fiercely opposed to one another. The secret of her success has been that she has known how to retain under her patronage and control, to use for her own advantage, most of those movements which in the circle of the Reformed Churches have led to the formation of new communities. The orders and congregations of the Roman Church correspond to the " sects of Protestant- ism." A movement like that headed by John Wesley last century, which by the English Church was super- ciliously cast out, would by the Roman Church have been taken hold of, manipulated, and appropriated to her own advantage. She has always known how to combine rigidity of organization witrl" elasticity of principle. These Orders all acknowledge the authority of the Pope ; they all labour for what they conceive to be the glory of the Church. But, at the same time, each Order looks back to its own founder, and forward to its own success, cultivates its own type of piety, con- secrates its own methods of activity, and embodies a 40 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH distinct religious idea. 1 Thus many divergent tendencies of thought and practice co-exist within the same pale ; and there is no reason why they should not be knit in a true unity. But that is not the state of the case. It is well known that the most influential of the Roman Orders struggle with one another for the mastery with a fierceness which has now, at any rate, no parallel among the Protestants, and condescend sometimes to methods of securing their ends against which the Chris- tian conscience protests. We have a recent illustration in the Biography of Cardinal Manning. Even so ex- tremely candid a biographer as Mr. Purcell did not dare to publish the history of Manning's struggle with the Jesuits ; but from the material which he did give to *^VA i **i >rj ^*" ' the world we can form a picture of the inner life of the Roman hierarchy which is neither beautiful nor edify- 1 The correspondence between various " Protestant " types and different "Orders" within the Roman Church have been indicated by Mr. A. V. G. Allen (Christian Institutions, p. 273). He finds the parallel to the Luthe- ran CTiurch in the Augustinian Order, to the " Reformed " in the Dominicans, to the Wesleyan Methodists in the Franciscans, and to the Congregationalists in the Benedic- tines.^ The intellectual and spiritual tendencies, which in the one case have embodied themselves in distinct Churches, in the other have taken shape in as many distinct organiza- tions, round which the Roman Church puts a ring fence of external unity. THE "UNITY" OF CATHOLICISM 41 ing. In France we see the bishops tyrannizing over the parish clergy, while helpless against the monastic Orders. Rome remains to this day what it has been for a thousand years, the hot-bed of intrigue, where plot is met by counter-plot, and money on one scale outweighs justice in the other. And when an un- usually unjust decision has been given, the Pope cynically remarks, "It is a coup cCttat of Almighty God." What really gives the impression of unity to this extraordinary collection of warring sects is the formal acknowledgment by all of one Head, the uniformity of attitude adopted by all to those who are outside, and, more especially, the steadiness of what may be called the Foreign Policy of Rome. This it owes to the fact that it is an autocracy. Like Russia in the political world, Rome pursues a clear and definite policy from generation to generation. All subordinate aims and fractional ambitions are concentrated through the Curia on one end, and that a material one, the advancement of the political power of the Papacy. The Reformed Churches, on the other hand, corre- spond in their organization to England, with her democratic constitution, her representative govern- ment, and her apparent lack of continuity in foreign policy. But as in the history of our Empire we see the working out of purposes which are less material 42 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH than moral, and find the basis of our common life in a unity of spirit, of sentiment and of tradition, rather than in anything formal or external, so the Reformed Churches, for all their superficial differences of type and organization, are truly held together by a common allegiance arui a common spiritual aim. For, just as you mistake and exaggerate the unity of the Catholic Church, so you absurdly misrepresent the dissidence of Dissent. You exaggerate the depth, and you exaggerate the number, of divisions in Pro- testantism. There is no such cleavage between any two bodies of Evangelical Christians outside the Church of England as that which divides the Church of England itself. And, while their unity is much more real than you imagine, their number is much fewer than you assert. As a matter of fact, the great body of Evangelical Christians who are outside the borders of the Established Church in this country is subdivided into only four great groups, or, if you will reckon minor divisions of Methodism, into seven ; and the attempt to represent these as radically antagonistic, and actually hostile to one another, is as untrue to the facts of the situation as the attempt to exaggerate their number. It is true they differ. Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Presby- terians they differ in constitution and form of govern- ment ; they differ in the emphasis which they respec- THE "UNITY" OF CATHOLICISM 43 tively put upon particular truths and doctrines ; they may differ slightly in the type of piety which they severally cultivate and produce ; but the very character of these differences shows how large an area of Chris- tian doctrine these branches of the Reformed Church hold in common. They are absolutely at one in their acceptance of the great verities of our religion the Being and Fatherhood of God, the Divinity of our Blessed Lord, the Personality of the Holy Spirit, the Redeeming Work of Christ, the hope of ever- lasting life. They are also at one in the Gospel which they preach, as to the human need and sin which it presupposes, the Divine remedy and sufficient grace which it sets forth, and the duty of all men to believe. They agree in recognising the obligation and value of the Sacraments. Some assign more meaning to these than do others, but even here there is a minimum upon which all are at one. There may have been a time in fact, there was a time when the spiritual bond which unites these communities was less clearly recognised than it now is, when each of these churches laid more stress on that which differentiates it from the others than on that which unites it to them all. But that time has passed. It would not be true to say that any of them has surrendered its special testimony ; but while each has learned to respect the testimony of the others, all 44 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH have come to lay yet greater emphasis on that which they hold in common, and that is the faith of the Reformed Church of Christ. The truth is that we have been growing towards one another ; whereas you have been growing apart. We can exchange pulpits, we can worship in one another's Churches, we can gather round the same Communion Table ; whereas you do all you can to distinguish yourselves, not only from other "com- munities" of Christians, but even from a section or sections of your own Church. You are taught in different training schools, you speak a different ecclesi- astical dialect, you inveigh in pulpit and in Press against the doctrines taught and the worship performed by your brethren, you must needs have for almost every form of Christian activity duplicate Societies, which compete with one another for the support of every parish. In half the Churches of the land you would as little think of communicating as in ours. It passes my comprehension how you can for very shame vaunt the " unity " of your Church. You have cut yourselves off from every great Church in Christen- dom : first, from the Roman Church, then from the great Lutheran Church, from the Reformed Churches of the Continent, and finally from the other Churches of Christ in your own land. When I go abroad, I am welcomed by, and at home with, any Reformed THE " UNITY " OF CATHOLICISM 45 Church I come across. You find no such fellowship, for the only Church where you seek it regards you as a heretic and a schismatic. And at home you belong to a Church which, so far from being one, is only held together by a legal and external bond. If you will reflect on these things, you will say less about our " divisions," and a good deal less about the " unity of the great Catholic Church." I have been discussing " unity " on the basis of the conception which you cherish and insist on. But I should like to recall to you that other conception by which we assert our unity among ourselves. For it is a conception which allows me to rejoice in a true unity between you and me. I am going to traverse a great many of the positions you take up, to deny, and I hope show good cause for denying, many things which to you seem certain. But I should not like to forget that, for all that, there is between us also a great deal of common ground, and that on matters which lie at the very heart of our religion. Touching all these great truths which I have already recapitu- lated, wherein the Reformed Churches are at one amongst themselves, they are also at one with you. Neither of us does, or can, charge the other with heresy. We thankfully acknowledge that we have with you "one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one 46 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH God and Father of all." And I wish, in all that follows, to keep steadily in mind that the things about which we differ are not the fundamentals of our faith. In so doing I seek to give effect to the com- mand involved in the prayer of our Lord, " that they all may be one." And I would ask you in the same great Name to follow the same course. For it is with pain that we observe that many who write and speak for your party rather minimize, obliterate, or practically deny the common ground between us. Their object seems to be to emphasize differences, to erect walls of partition, to invent new names for old things which we hold in common, and turn them into Shibboleths of division. I wish you would consider what this means. To me it appears nothing else than the spirit of schism. WHAT IS THE SCRIPTURAL MEAN- ING OF THE GOSPEL " ? 47 " A religion that is a true religion must consist of ideas and facts both ; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be a mere philsophy ; nor of facts alone without ideas of which these facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded, for then it would be a mere history." COLERIDGE. IV WHAT IS THE SCRIPTURAL MEANING OF "THE GOSPEL"? You ask me whether I have read that well-known book of Sadler's, which first convinced you of " the falsity and unscripturalness of the Protestant position." Yes, I have read it and been familiar with it for some years. I recognise many things in it which might impress you ; but had you more closely studied theo- logy, or even had you taken the trouble to examine Sadler's book in the light of the Scriptures to which it appeals, you would never have been carried away by it. I recognise the writer's earnestness, his con- troversial skill, his plausibility ; but his earnestness is forensic rather than religious ; his skill lies in his select- ing a class of facts when he ought to deal with all, and his plausibility is due to a shallow mind, which ignores rather than overcomes the arguments of his opponents. But as you think the book an authorita- tive statement of your case, I am quite willing to discuss it with you, and to show you where, as it seems to me, its fallacies lie. 4 SO EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH The first chapter is an excellent illustration of the method of the book ; and if we go into it somewhat fully, we shall be able to deal more rapidly with what remains. In raising in his first chapter the question, " What is the Scriptural meaning of the term * the Gospel ' ? " Mr. Sadler aims a blow at the very heart of the Pro- testant position. For if we have not a "Gospel" to preach, or if our Gospel is not a Scriptural one, then the justification for our existence is gone. The sum of his contention is briefly this. " The Prayer Book is Scriptural on the subject of all others of the greatest moment, which is the exhibition of the Gospel under the form in which it is presented to us in Scripture," because in the repetition of the Creed, the Litany, and the Te Deum, and specially in the observance of the " Church Year," it secures the regular presentation of the facts of our Lord's Life, Passion, and Resurrection. Those Protestant communities, on the other hand, which do not use the Prayer Book are not Scriptural, because they do not secure the same presentation of the facts, neither is the Gospel they profess and preach itself " Scriptural," because either it adds to the facts doc- trines, or, as is actually suggested, substitutes doctrines for the facts. I will not enlarge upon the amazement with which WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? 51 one cannot but regard statements and insinuations such as these, but simply point out that 1 . It is not true that the word " Gospel " in the New Testament is applied exclusively to the announce- ment of certain events occurring at a particular time in the history of the world. 2. The " Gospel " in the New Testament stands for the facts and something more some interpretation of the facts, some theory in which the facts cohere. 3. There is no Protestant evangelical community where the facts, or any of them, are habitually ignored, still less where we find an " exclusive contemplation of the doctrines apart from the facts." 4. The Prayer Book, which secures the presenta- tion of the facts, does nothing to secure the due and proper interpretation or application of the facts, which, according to Scripture, is an equally important element in the Gospel. The passages which Mr. Sadler quotes and relies upon are the following : " The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (St. Mark i. i). " Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have re- ceived, and wherein ye stand ; by which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered 52 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scrip- tures ; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the scriptures " (i Cor. xv. 1-4). " The gospel of God (which He had promised afore by His prophets in the holy scriptures), concerning His Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh ; and de- clared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead" (Rom. i. 14). 11 Having therefore obtained help of God, I con- tinue unto this day witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come : that Christ should suffer, and that He should be the first that should rise from the dead, and should shew light unto the people, and to the Gentiles " (Acts xxvi. 22, 23). " Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was raised from the dead according to my gospel " (2 Tim. ii. 8). On these passages Mr. Sadler comments thus : " The great work of the Church of Christ is to set forth the Gospel of her Lord. If He has committed His truth to our keeping, it is for us to see that we retain that truth in its fulness, and that we transmit it WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? 53 unimpaired. It is plain also that if God has set forth the Gospel in some particular form, we must adhere to that form, and not substitute for it any other which may seem to the eye of man more practical or more spiritual." So far nothing could be more true or obvious. But the writer proceeds to assert, on the ground of these same passages, that the one authorized form of " the Gospel " is the presentation of the facts, for " the word ' Gospel ' in the New Testament is applied exclusively to the announcement of certain events occurring at a particular time in the history of the world the Incarnation, Baptism, Ministry, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus." Notice the word " ex- clusively." What does he mean to exclude ? He means to exclude the Protestant conception of the Gospel as containing a " theory of salvation," an ex- planation of the purpose of God which was wrought out through these events, and of the way in which the grace lying within these events is to be obtained by man. He does not deny that the New Testament contains information, revelation on these and kindred points, but what he strenuously contends is that such matters form no part of " the Scripture Gospel." His object is to bring all such explanation down to a lower level than that on which all Christians agree to place " the Gospel," and so he devotes many pages to proving that " Scripture never brings before us the 54 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH Gospel of Christ except as the record of certain facts respecting Him." It follows that the Church fulfils her function of preaching the Gospel, not by the pro- clamation and exposition of man's need, God's grace, and man's opportunity as set forth in these great facts, but by the mere presentation of the facts to the mind of man whether by ear or by eye. It follows also that those who preach not only the facts but some interpretation of them, some theory arising out of them, though what they preach may indeed be Scrip- tural, are not preaching the " Scriptural Gospel." And so we get an undoubtedly clever, specious, and plausible justification of Ritualism all the more plausible because it purports to be based upon Scripture. And if a reader choose to shut his eyes to what else Scripture has to say upon the subject, or if he be im- perfectly acquainted with Scripture as a whole, he may easily be led into serious error. But, as a matter of fact, the passages which Mr. Sadler quotes neither prove his point nor do they exhaust the evidence. That St. Mark's Gospel is pointedly entitled, " The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ," and that " consequently we have the Holy Spirit's testimony to the fact that what St. Mark wrote was the Gospel," does not carry him far. For even inspired men used words in the sense in which they were understood by WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? 55 others, and by the time St. Mark's Gospel was written the word Gospel " had acquired a secondary meaning, namely, ' the record of the acts and sayings of Christ.' ' If the word here bore the meaning Mr. Sadler would assign to it, it is surely very remarkable that this parti- cular Gospel does not announce either the Birth or the Temptation of our Lord. But that it is not the meaning here a glance at any good commentary will show. The phrase is either " the title of the section " (Gould), and not of the whole document, or it marks the transition from the usage of the word within the Gospels to its later use as a name for the biographies of Christ (Holtzmann). As to the passages cited from St. Paul, you will see, if you examine them, that they have this remarkable characteristic in common no one of them enumerates all the facts. None of them refers at all to the Bap- tism or to the Temptation or to other facts which Mr. Sadler insists on. But not even the three funda- mental facts the Birth, Death, and Resurrection are combined in any of these passages in which St. Paul describes his " Gospel." One is silent about the Incarnation, another about the Passion. No one will suppose that St. Paul's Gospel, or any Gospel worth the name, would omit either of these facts. It follows, therefore, that the Apostle cannot be said to give a complete account of his Gospel in any of these 56 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH passages ; and if he omitted some of the facts, his complete Gospel may have contained also some theory of the facts to which he makes no reference either ; and we shall see that it did so. Arguments are drawn again from the preaching of the Apostles as recorded in the Book of Acts. Now it is quite true that the burden of their preaching was the witness they bore to the fact that Jesus had risen from the dead ; they referred also to the death of Christ, but said little or nothing about His birth, and, so far as we are told, nothing at all about His minis- try. The reason is plain : the Apostles were preach- ing to Jews, whose conscience had been trained for generations in the elementary facts regarding man's need of righteousness and the conditions of approach to God. They preached very much as John the Baptist preached ; only instead of a Messiah to come, they pointed to a Messiah who had come. They had to show how the apparent destruction which had overtaken Him through death had only led to the full manifestation of His glory through the Resurrection. But even allowing for the comparatively narrow scope of their preaching, thus dictated by their cir- cumstances, and the absence of necessity for preaching to Jews a Gospel as fully developed as was required by the Gentiles, it is going much too far to say that the outlines of the Apostolic discourses are such as WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? 57 " could not possibly be filled up with what is now called a Gospel sermon." The aim of every sermon recorded in the Acts was to produce repentance ; the purpose of God in raising Jesus was to bless men " in turning away every one of you from his iniquities " ; Christ is " exalted " " for to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins " ; and the climax to which St. Paul's great sermon at Antioch moves is the an- nouncement " through this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins : and by him all that believe are justified from all things." In the face of utterances such as these it is vain to appeal to the Apostolic preaching for proof that the " Gospel " as presented in Scripture consists of the facts and the facts alone. So far, therefore, the evidence on this point adduced by Mr. Sadler furnishes no a priori reason for dismissing from our Gospel any theory, inference or scheme of salvation simply because it is more than the facts. But we can go further, and show that some theory of the facts is both necessary, and actually attested by Scripture as belonging to the " Gospel." It is obvious that the facts must be put into some re- lation to one another before they can be a narrative at all ; and they must be put into some relation to human life and history before they can have any in- $8 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH fluence on human thinking or on human conduct. Both that it may be comprehensible and that it may be effective the Gospel must consist of the facts and more. And this is felt by Mr. Sadler himself when he comes to describe the Apostolic preaching. He cannot describe it in terms of the events alone, but in terms of the principles which the events reveal : " the Gospel of the primitive Church was the proclamation of God's love to a sinful world as set forth in the Death, Burial and Resurrection of Jesus." Precisely, but this is surely just the nucleus of a " Gospel sermon " of the very kind which Mr. Sadler so dis- parages. But some unifying conception of the meaning or the events is not only necessary, it was plainly present in the primitive Gospel. For proof we need not go beyond St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians. What moved the Apostle to write that letter was a serious and insidious attack on his " Gospel." His own authority as an Apostle had also been impugned, but even that concerned him chiefly because of its indirect result the rejection of his Gospel, and the substitution of another. He " marvels that the Galatians have been so quickly transferred to another Gospel." He de- nounces in the most emphatic manner any one whatever who should preach a different Gospel from his own. Now wherein did this new Gospel differ WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? 59 from the old one which St. Paul and his companions had preached to the Galatians at the first ? Not in regard to the facts. No one suggests that the other Apostles, St. James or St. Peter, either preached or countenanced a Gospel which omitted any one of the fundamental facts of our Lord's ministry. Equally with St. Paul they too preached the Birth, Baptism, Death and Resurrection. As far as the facts are con- cerned the Gospel of St. Paul and the Gospel of St. James were identical. The difference, therefore, must be found in something outside the facts. The same conclusion must be drawn from St. Paul's statement that he communicated to those at Jerusalem the Gospel which he preached. Such a course would have had no meaning, had not the Apostle understood by " the Gospel " something over and above the events of our Lord's life and death. In fact a consideration of this Epistle shows clearly that the very quality and vital characteristic of St. Paul's Gospel which he was so anxious to maintain lay in its being a plan of salvation differing in essential principle from the plan of the old covenant. His " Gospel " was an exposition of God's relation to men in the light of the facts of Redemption. These facts are projections on the plane of history of eternal realities and relationships. They are events through which and under which we are to discern the char- 60 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH acter and the will of God. And, whether as in- dividuals or as the Church of Christ, men are called upon to make known the will of God as thus revealed, recognising that will as the contents of the Divine Gospel. If Christ was born into the world as the Incarnate Word of God, it was because " God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son." If His name was called Jesus, it was because " He came to save His people from their sins." If He died, it was for our justification. If He died for our justification, it was because men were unjust and sinners in the sight of God. If He rose again, it was for our sanctification, and because without holiness no man can see the Lord. Now put these Scriptural inferences from the facts together (and they are of the very simplest and most obvious) ; arrange them in the order of human experience, and you get a theory of salvation, no portion of which can be left out without mutilating and destroying the Gospel. We see thus, from the usage of the word, from the Apostolic preaching and from the nature of the case, that it is not true to say that the Scriptural " Gospel " is constituted by the " leading events " to the " utter exclusion of any more doctrinal or abstract form of Divine truth." THE PRAYER-BOOK SERVICE AND THE CHURCH YEAR " Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you, lest by any means I have bestowed labour upon you in vain." ST. PAUL. V THE PRAYER-BOOK SERVICE AND THE CHURCH YEAR THE purpose which Mr. Sadler has in view is to establish the exclusive validity of the Prayer Book as a Scriptural form of worship. It is not merely the superiority of the Prayer Book that he is concerned to maintain, but the actual impropriety of any other form of worship or method of setting forth the Gospel. He writes in his usual sweeping style : " I do not merely say that it is Scriptural to fasten these events on these days, and to associate as far as possible the day with the deed ; I go much further, and say that no form of public prayer or liturgy, or any directory of public worship, or any mode of con- ducting public worship without form or liturgy, can be accounted Scriptural unless it similarly recognises these days and seasons, for no other way is now possible of setting forth in the public services of the Church that historical aspect of the Gospel which, as we have seen, is the only one contained in Scripture." It is plain, however, that if that historical aspect of 63 64 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH the Gospel be not the " only one contained in Scrip- ture," this claim falls to the ground, and with it the summary dismissal of every other form or method of public worship. The reiteration of the facts alone is not necessarily Scriptural, for, however important, it does not exhaust the Church's duty in proclaiming the Gospel. She must also have and proclaim some coherent and effective message drawn from the events. And the nature of the message, its correspondence with the truth, the aptness of its form to the needs of men, is as important as the presentation of the facts them- selves. There is even less ground for the contemptuous dismissal of Protestant worship and Puritan preaching. Certain reasons for this dismissal, which throughout this chapter are insinuated rather than stated, are wholly without foundation. It is simply not true, as is suggested more than once, that Protestants or Puritans substitute anything whatever for the facts of Redemption. They pro- claim, set forth and rejoice in the facts, and the same facts, as truly as you do. If they add to the mere presentation of the facts an interpretation and applica- tion of them, they do not thereby disown or disparage these facts. Depending on the Holy Spirit, who leads men into all truth, and guided by the whole Word of PRAYER-BOOK SERVICE AND CHURCH YEAR 65 God, they set forth a full Gospel, doing justice to the entire revelation of God in Christ as the Redeemer of His people. It is still less true that the " Protestant sects flung to the winds the great outward facts of Redemp- tion " when they abandoned the celebration of Easter and Christmas Day. The Reformation would never have triumphed as it did, it would never have established a permanent hold on one half of Europe, if it had not sprung from an intense quickening of the realization of these very facts and their meaning. The leaders of the Reformation taught men to give these facts higher honour by giving them a new place in their lives. That they ceased in a large measure and for a long period to attach the commemoration jpf these events to particular days was a necessity of their situation. They shrank, and not without reason, from the mass of superstitious observances and ceremonies which had accumulated round the great festivals of the Church. These overgrowths did not so much adorn as obscure and pervert the message of the day. Many of them were actually pagan in their origin and association. If these great festivals fell into desuetude, it was because they were felt by the quickened conscience of the Church to be centres of danger, while at the same time not really necessary for Christian worship or for Christian life. 5 66 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH Neither was this attitude of the Reformed Churches without full warrant in Scripture. Mr. Sadler says with curious forgetfulness : " So that it is as strictly in accordance with Scripture to keep Christmas, Epi- phany and Good Friday, though there is not one word in Scripture respecting the keeping of these days." He forgets that there are some very strong utterances in the New Testament against the keeping of days at all. It is one count in St. Paul's earnest remonstrance with the Galatians that they "observe days and months and seasons and years" having substituted such observance for the true knowledge of God. The same Apostle, writing to the Colossians, warns them to resist the encroachments of the false teachers who pursued the same policy, ignoring the fact that the handwriting of ordinances "had been blotted out," and imposing the observance of annual, monthly or weekly festivals. The Scriptural evidence on this point is, in fact, so far from lending support to the upholders of a Church Year that they would be wiser not to refer to it. If such observances are not pro- hibited, they are certainly not encouraged in the New Testament ; and any attempt to enforce them as binding on the Christian conscience, or on the Christian Church, is expressly barred by inspired authority. To make the observance of the Church Year a PRAYER-BOOK SERVICE AND CHURCH YEAR 67 criterion of a Church's faithfulness to Scripture is little short of ridiculous. There is no evidence of the keeping of the Christ- mas festival prior to the year 360 A.D. The Church of the first three centuries observed but three annual festivals, Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost. What the primitive martyr and missionary Church of these centuries did without, cannot be binding or necessary for the Church of to-day. The observance of the Church Year is like the use of a liturgy, a matter within the competence of each branch of the Church to settle upon grounds of expediency alone. On these grounds of expediency a great deal can be said for the arrangement, so long as it is duly subordinated to more important considerations. But for the purpose which is claimed for it by Mr. Sadler, the purpose, namely, of continuously presenting the events of our Lord's Life and Death, your Prayer- Book arrangement is curiously insufficient. It crowds into the first six months of each year the commemora- tion of all the great events in our Lord's history, and leaves an entire half of every year during which there is no special provision for the commemoration of any of these events. Were I to argue as Mr. Sadler has done in regard to the "Protestant sects," from the defecdof obligation to defect of practice, I might assert^that for half the year the Church of England 68 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH neglects the presentation of the great facts of Redemp- tion. It will not be an effective reply to point to the Creed and the Litany as providing for the pre- sentation of these facts even during this long annual lacuna. For the same end is achieved in the public worship of the Nonconformist Churches by the unfail- ing commemoration of the same facts in the Prayers, and in some cases by the recitation of the same Creed. Your Church Year is defective in the very thing which is claimed for it. It is only half the year which " in its silent course preaches the Gospel " (as it is defined by Mr. Sadler) ; for the rest of the period it is literally silent. But at the best this method only secures in a mechanical way what is obtained among us without any such arrangement. To argue from the fact that we have no liturgy, no compulsory arrangement of the Church Year, to the assertion that we fail to present the facts or even to present them with fulness and regularity, is surely a little childish. Even less than that acquaintance with an alien system which is incumbent on any one who offers to criticise it would suffice to assure you that no charge could be more groundless. Certainly the reproach which has been most commonly urged against the Protestant Churches has been the exact converse of this, namely, that they tend to PRAYER-BOOK SERVICE AND CHURCH YEAR 69 dwell too exclusively upon the central facts and truths of the Gospel to the neglect of other matters, such as the Church and the Sacraments and even the ethical side of Christianity. The truth is that Mr. Sadler seems to have been entirely without material for his criticism of the " Protestant Gospel." What he is really attacking is what he supposes to be the burden of Protestant preaching. And for the character of that preaching he appeals to the Westminster Confession and Calvin's Institutes documents in which Chris- tianity is expounded as a theology not as a Gospel. Neither of these great monuments of Reformed learning offers a definition of the Gospel ; and no " Gospel sermon " that is preached, nowadays at any rate, is ever constructed on the lines of these dogmatic treatises. We believe that they are unsurpassed as expositions of the Christian Faith ; but we find our Gospel in the New Testament, and would no more think of preach- ing them than you would think of preaching Athana- sius' Against the Arians, or Anselm's Cur Deus Homo. But I go further, and point out that while your system does secure, though only partially, the succes- sive presentation of the great facts of Redemption, it does nothing to secure their proper interpretation or application to the consciences of men. What strikes us so painfully is the failure of this system to produce 7O EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH a religious nation. For three centuries you have had an unequalled opportunity. Till lately your position as the authorized teachers of religion in England was practically unchallenged. Your system has been tried under the most favourable conditions. And the result is seen in that condition of religious life in England which we all deplore whole sections of society both ignorant and indifferent alike to the truth and to the power of religion. These people and their forefathers have been under the undivided care of your ministry for generations. Half the population of our great towns has been drawn from villages where this Anglican " gospel *' has been before them from their cradles. And look at the result ! We cannot but trace it in part at least to the working of this theory of the Gospel which contents itself with the presenta- tion of the facts, but, having no secured interpretation of them, fails either to reach the intellect or to touch the conscience. I judge by the people I have known who are the direct products of the system, by the sermons which we see reported in religious newspapers, and by the collections of sermons for the Christian Year of which so many are published ; and I cannot escape the con- clusion that, whatever else the system may accomplish, it does not secure the central purpose of the Church's existence, the faithful and persistent presentation of PRAYER-BOOK SERVICE AND CHURCH YEAR 71 Christ and His Gospel in such a way as to lead men to find in Him their Saviour and to worship Him as their Lord. You have nothing, I say, to secure this. The Homilies are obsolete. The XXXIX. Articles are practically inoperative. Even flagrant heresy touching our Lord's Divinity has recently been published and met not even with Episcopal censure ; and lesser aberrations both of defect and of excess abound un- checked. I take a piece of evidence which falls into my hand as I write. I find it in a Church newspaper which represents your party. " Then as to the subjects of the sermons in these * beautiful ' services. Are they such as St. Paul, St. Peter or the other Apostles loved to dwell upon ? Do they breathe in every line the spirit of Him Whose ministers and ambassadors they are ? Alas, no ! In- stead, the preachers are continually dwelling on the need of earthly supports and means to work out our salvation ; on the importance of the Holy Church ; on how much there is to be learnt from the lives of the Saints and the Fathers of the early Church. As often as not the name of the Author and Finisher ot our Faith is not even mentioned. No wonder then that the preachers do not touch the hearts of their hearers, and as a remedy cry out for more attractive 72 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH and more elastic services. But the earnest Christian knows that this is not what is wanted." 1 The very beauty of your Liturgy, which we all recognise and rejoice in, becomes a snare when you allow zeal and precision in its performance to take the place of the proclamation of the truth which it enshrines. Those ideas for whose presentation you take no security and which appear on good evidence to be all too commonly absent from your preaching, are not only part of the Gospel ; they are an essential part of it. As Coleridge says : " A religion that is a true religion must consist of ideas and facts both ; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be a mere philosophy ; nor of facts alone without ideas of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded, for then it would be a mere history." 1 Guardian, June 20, 1900, p. 896. BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 73 " Prius est predicate, postetius tinguete." TERTULLIAN. VI BAPTISM You believe in Baptismal Regeneration, and I grieve to think that on this point there is a deep and essen- tial difference between us. Nevertheless, let us keep in mind the common ground which there is between us even on this point. . We all ttnrrnniitx iHrrrh^ and Protestants are agreed in regarding Baptism as a Sacrament instituted by our Lord, of perpetual obligation in the Church, and to be administered to those born within the Christian community as well as to those who join it from without. On these points nothing could be clearer than the Westminster Confession, which de- clares that this "Sacrament is, by Christ's own ap- pointment, to be continued in His Church until the end of the world," and further speaks of it as " a great sin to contemn or neglect this ordinance." I hope, at least, that you are further agreed with us in holding that Baptism is only " generally necessary " to salvation ; that is to say, that " grace and salvation 75 76 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH are not so inseparably annexed unto it that no person can be regenerated or saved without it." For thus only can you dissociate yourself from the horrible Roman doctrine that unbaptized infants are shut out from heaven. This doctrine, which is so persistently ascribed to Calvin and the Calvinists, is not Calvin's, and is Rome's.^ it is one which not only outrages our tenderest affections, but also is untrue to our Lord's express teaching on the subject. And yet this doctrine that the unbaptized, whether infant or adult, are lost, is only a logical inference from the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration. At this point I suppose we must part company. Without having actually drawn the inference to which I have just referred, you hold that there is such a con- nection between the outward act of Baptism and a certain inward change as to make it the sole instru- ment of obtaining salvation, having in every case for its result " regeneration." Now whatever you may mean by " regeneration," you mean, as we do, a change the most momentous that can take place in any human being ; you mean all that we ascribe to conversion, a change so momentous as to reverse a man's destiny for all eternity. It is not merely a legal change affecting man's status before God, such as by a fiat of Divine will might be attached to any condition, but a moral change, by which " we are BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 77 made new creatures in Christ." * It is independent of every other condition save this external one of Baptism. Repentance, Faith, Conversion, Obedience, whatever their significance, play no necessary part in this transformation. Whatever is secured by Baptism is secured without any or without all of them. You may think I am exaggerating the implications of this doctrine ; but look at the terms in which the matter was expounded by J. H. Newman while he was still an Anglican. " The Sacraments are the immediate, faith is the secondary, subordinate, or representative instrument of justification." " Faith being the appointed representative of Baptism derives its authority and virtue from that which it represents. It is justifying because of Baptism : it is the faith of the baptized, of the regenerate, that is, of the justified. Justifying faith does not precede justification, but justification precedes faith and makes it justifying. And here lies the cardinal mistake of the views on the subject which are now in esteem. They make faith the sole instrument, not only after Baptism, but before ; whereas Baptism is the primary instrument, and makes faith to be what it is and otherwise is > 2 not. 1 Council of Trent, sess. xiv. cap. 2. 8 J. H. Newman, Lectures on Justification, p. 257. 78 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH Or again, in a modern Anglican handbook I find the following : " The effect of Baptism is threefold : " I. It remits all sin, original and actual. " 2. It bestows sanctifying grace, and endues the soul with the heavenly virtues of faith, hope, and charity. " 3. It makes the recipient a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven." l Now let us be perfectly clear on the matter. The distinction, though it is of far-reaching importance, is quite a" narrow one. " Regeneration comes through Faith and Baptism ; and of the two, Faith is the absolutely essential con- dition." That is Scriptural and Protestant. " Regeneration comes by Baptism alone." That is " Catholic," and not Scriptural. Now I confess that this conception of Baptism is utterly repugnant to a Protestant. It seems to empty Christianity of its moral and spiritual contents by making its highest blessings dependent neither on a moral act nor on a spiritual relationship, but on an external rite in which the recipient may be wholly passive, unconscious, or even indifferent. It brings 1 Staley, The CatboRc Religion, p. 243. BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 79 our religion down to the level of magic. Alike by what it asserts the efficacy of the external rite, and by what it denies the essential character of Repentance land Faith, it seems to stand in flagrant contradiction to the mind and teaching of Christ. Still, I have tried to find how wise and good men, believing themselves to be guided by the New Testa- ment, have come to hold this amazing view of Baptism. I cannot say I have got much help from Mr. Sadler. He seems to write with very slight acquaintance with the controversy, and with no per- ception of the difficulties of his case. In consequence he leaves many points obscure, and indeed in one paragraph he gives his case away. I refer to his com- ment on the passage in I Peter : " The assertion * Baptism doth now save,' taken in connection with the limiting clause, 'not the putting away of the filthiness of the flesh, but the answer of a good con- science towards God,' means of course that Baptism saves only when received in repentance and faith ; for no man can give the answer of a good conscience toward God except he repents and believes." Re- generation, which comes through Baptism conditioned by faith and repentance, is not " Baptismal Regenera- tion." Even if, as he adds, it is in, and not before, Baptism that these conditions are to be fulfilled, the introduction of these subjective conditions robs the 80 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH doctrine of its sole attraction, the certainty of the result. Mr. Sadler bases this doctrine upon twelve passages of Scripture, 1 from which he deduces the following conclusions : " I. In about twelve places in Scripture Christ or His apostles connect Salvation with Baptism." (But the question is, What is the nature of this connection ? Is Baptism the cause, by itself the sufficient instrument, of Salvation ?) " II. The Christians of the Apostolic Churches are always addressed as having been brought into a state of Salvation or Regeneration at their Baptism." (But even if this were universally true and it is not so " at their Baptism " is not equivalent to " by their Baptism," and that is what he requires to show.) " III. This state of Salvation or Regeneration does not ensure the final salvation of those brought into it. On the contrary, the members of these Churches are always supposed to be in danger of falling into sin and liable to be cast away." (Scripture and Reformed theology alike recognise the possibility that members of the Church, even 1 John iii. 3-5 ; Mark xvi. 1 6 ; Acts ii. 38, 39, xxii. 16 ; Rom. vi. 1-4 ; I Cor. x. l-io, xii. 12-27 5 Gal. iii. 27 ; Eph. v. 25, 26 ; Col. ii. 12 ; Titus iii. 5 ; I Peter iii. 21. BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 8 1 members of the Church invisible, may " fall into grievous sin " ; but, according to the same authorities, only those who are not truly re- generate, and therefore not truly members of the invisible Church, are "liable to be cast away.") "IV. Those who thus fall away are always assumed to fall from grace. They are never for a moment supposed to fall into sin because God has withheld grace from them." (Certainly ; but this does not touch the question how they found " access into this grace wherein they stand." The " modern Evangelical," who "addresses the sinner as one who sins because God has withheld grace from him," is a mere imagination of the writer's brain.) " V. In no case are baptized Christians called upon to become regenerate. They are called to repent, to turn to God, to cleanse their hands, to purify their hearts ; never to become regenerate." (No ; because on the theory of Scripture and the Reformed Churches they have believed before Baptism, and are by faith regenerate. They are urged, however, to "make their calling and election sure.") It is plain that of these five points the first two are 6 82 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH the ones of fundamental importance. The others are illustrative of the position which these, and especially the first, are to establish. Mr. Sadler appeals to Scripture for proof of the assertion that these persons, after Baptism, " are now regenerate." If you will now examine those passages, bearing in mind what it is they are quoted to prove, namely, that Baptism regenerates, you must admit that neither singly nor collectively do they furnish the required proof. In the first place, what is asserted is that in these passages " Christ or His Apostles connect Salvation or Regeneration with Baptism." Admitting though it is by no means certain in regard to all of them that all of these passages do refer to Baptism, we may classify them according to the grace with which they appear to connect the rite. Two (John iii. 3-5 ; Titus iii. 5) connect Re- generation (and renewal) with water and the Holy Spirit. I will deal with these later. Three (Acts ii. 38, xxii. 16 ; Eph. v. 26) connect Baptism with the remission of sins. The first of these passages is the only one in which there is even a semblance of a causal connection between Baptism and a specific grace, " the remission of sins." But the summons to be baptized is plainly connected with, and dependent on, the summons to BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 83 " repent." The remission of sins is not represented as originating in Baptism, but in the repentance which precedes it. So that, as indeed Mr. Sadler himself frankly acknowledges, " Remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Ghost are made to depend upon repentance joined with Baptism." A further con- dition is probably to be inferred from the unusual phrase, " be baptized upon the name of Jesus Christ," literally, " on the ground of the Name," * so that this Name represented the contents of the confession on the ground of which they were baptized. From the second passage in the Acts (" Arise and be baptized and wash away thy sins ") it might be inferred that Baptism is the means " in the use of which " God " formally imparts " the washing away of sin. That I have no desire to deny. But who will maintain that not until Ananias had baptized him, three days after the great experience on the way to Damascus, did Paul receive forgiveness of sin ? He had acknowledged Christ as " Lord " ; he had made full submission and had " not been disobedient to the heavenly vision " ; and he had received his Commission, " I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in which I 1 Holtzmann, in the Handcommcntar, ad lac. 84 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH will appear unto thee." St. Paul described the con- tents of that experience as God revealing His Son in him. However important his Baptism was as the formal declaration of what had happened, who dare say that upon his Baptism depended St. Paul's partici- pation in the saving grace of Christ ? In the third passage of this group (Eph. v. 26) our Lord is said to cleanse and sanctify the Church " with the washing of water by the word." Here, what- ever be the meaning of the much-discussed phrase, " by the word," the cleansing is evidently ascribed to something else besides the mere rite of Baptism. This may be taken with many good commentators to refer to " the Gospel or the preached word taught prelimi- nary to baptism," or it may be otherwise interpreted ; but we cannot ascribe to " the word " any subordinate function in the cleansing of the Church in face of our Lord's pregnant saying : " Now ye are clean through the word that I have spoken unto you." In no one of these passages, therefore, is Baptism connected with the remission or washing away of sin as the sole or the primary cause. Three other passages appear to " connect " Baptism with "Salvation." The first is Mark xvi. 16 ("He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved : but he that believeth not shall be damned "). But it would be hard to put Scripture to stranger use than to make BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 85 this text support Baptismal Regeneration. For, in the first place, it clearly makes Faith the antecedent of Baptism ; and, in the second place, we have in the latter clause the pointed omission of all reference to Baptism, which is surely very significant. The utmost that could be made of the first clause, even if it stood alone, would be that Baptism is as necessary to salvation as faith ; but taken in conjunction with the second clause, it loses even this force. " Had it been followed up by the declaration, * He that be- lieveth not and is not baptized shall be damned,' the Popish doctrine might have been regarded as estab- lished. But when we find that our Saviour, in so very marked and pointed a manner, dropped all reference to baptism in stating the converse of His first declaration, and connected condemnation only with the want of faith, the conviction is forced upon us that He did so for the express purpose of indicating that He did not intend to teach that there was an invariable connection between Salvation and Baptism, though there certainly was between salvation and faith. And He was careful to say nothing that might lead men to believe that the want of Baptism excluded men from the kingdom of heaven." * In fact, the authoritative statement of which you are in search to 1 Cunningham, Historical Theology, ii. 138. 86 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH establish Baptismal Regeneration is not this, but rather, " He that is baptized shall be saved ; he that is not baptized shall be damned." That, however, you cannot find. In the second passage of this group (Titus iii. 5), though Baptism is referred to, it is not specified as the single cause of Regeneration. In this case the subjec- tive condition, faith, is passed over, but a second objective condition is emphasized, the operation of the Holy Ghost. It would take too long to go minutely into the exegesis of the text, which is far from easy. But the choice lies between regarding " the laver of regeneration" and the "renewing of the Holy Ghost" as co-ordinate clauses and co-ordinate ideas, and re- garding " regeneration and renewal " as together the result of the operation of the Spirit and " regeneration and renewal of (i.e. by) the Spirit " as connected in some way not here defined with the laver of Baptism. In the first case you have a laver of Regeneration whose saving efficacy is incomplete without the " re- newing of the Holy Ghost." As Dean Alford says : " Let us take care that we know and bear in mind what ' Baptism ' means ; not the mere ecclesiastical act, not the mere fact of reception by that act among God's professing people, but that completed by the Divine act, manifested by the operation of the Holy Ghost in the heart and through the life." BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 87 In the second case, all that is established is some connection between Baptism and salvation, whereas the whole question at issue is, " What is the nature of that connection ? " What that connection is Mr. Sadler " does not stop to inquire." And yet his thesis is that the connection is an invariable one, that it is, in fact, a causal one. If this passage does not help him to prove that, it does not help him at all. In the third passage (i Peter iii. 22) we are told " the like figure whereunto, even Baptism, doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience towards God) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Here, plainly, the value of the external act is minimized, if not denied, and attention is firmly directed to the "answer of a good conscience," or, rather, to the " seeking after God on the part of a good conscience," the inward attitude of the recipient, as that which gives Baptism its significance and, indeed, its validity. Two more passages refer to Baptism as representing a mystical burial with Christ. " Therefore we are buried with Him by Baptism into death " (Rom. vi. 4). " Buried with Him in Baptism, wherein also ye are risen with Him through faith of the operation of God, who hath raised Him from the dead " (Col. ii. 12). This is, of course, a metaphorical interpretation of the actual experience of Baptism by immersion ; and no 88 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH one will deny the beauty of the picture or its legiti- macy as an interpretation of Christian experience. But it depends for its validity on the mystical union between Christ and whom ? Surely between Christ and the believer, the man who had been led by his faith to obey Christ's command to be baptized, and by the same faith was already before Baptism united to his Lord. The meaning of such passages can only be understood in view of what was the normal procedure leading up to Baptism. Now that undoubtedly was preaching leading to repentance and faith, then to confession of Jesus as the Lord, and then to Baptism. What took place outwardly, symbolically, I might say pictorially, in Baptism had in all these cases taken place internally and spiritually before the rite of Bap- tism was administered. The use which St. Paul makes of it in these passages only serves to show what intense symbolic meaning attached to the rite as then administered. It set forth with singular vividness the death to sin and resurrection to righteousness which were involved in the regeneration of the Holy Ghost. But that had taken place already. The same considerations must be kept in view in interpreting two other passages, " By one spirit we are all baptized into one body " (i Cor. xii. 13) ; "As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ " (Gal. iii. 27). If, as we are quite pre- BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 89 pared to admit, Baptism is the normal consummation and the appointed seal of conversion, it was only natu- ral that New Testament writers should ascribe to the public and consummating rite anything that properly belongs to the whole process, or properly arises out of it. But what you seek to do is to take a portion of that whole (and that the external and least important part) and make it stand for the entire process. Whether or not infants were baptized in the period covered by the New Testament, it is certain that the Apostles in their references to Baptism were guided by the normal case of adult Baptism, in which those who were " baptized into Christ " had first confessed Him as Lord, repenting of their sins. There remains the famous passage John iii. 3-5, to which Mr. Sadler devotes a minute examination. I fear an equally minute examination of his inferences from it would only be wearisome ; many of the things he states are true ; some are obvious ; and he has a way of stating obvious and admitted truths as if they were recognised and secured only by those in whose name he speaks. For instance, his conclusion, that " a supernatural birth " is required for entrance into the Church, is simply a commonplace of Reformed theology ; only we should trace it not to baptism alone but to the operation of the Spirit which in all normal cases is sealed by Baptism. We should also 90 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH agree that our Lord here alludes to some deep mystery, "deeper (I should not say 'far deeper') than any which attaches to the ordinary working of the Spirit on the heart in convincing it of sin or of the need of Christ's righteousness." For there can be no deeper mystery than the creation of life, the bringing to birth of " a new creature " ; and it is no less than this that we all ascribe to the working of the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, Protestants do not say, as Mr. Sadler suggests they do, that to be " born again " is synony- mous with " conversion " or " repentance," or even with " a new heart." We say that these are elements in the process of regeneration which even in its most instantaneous form is capable of analysis into these and other elements, but is best described as a whole by this name of Regeneration. With regard to this passage it has been maintained by many Protestant scholars of high repute, including John Calvin, that in John iii. 35 our Lord is not referring to Baptism at all. And although, on the other hand, many other good scholars think that this negative assertion cannot be maintained, it is equally difficult to prove with certainty that the water of which our Lord speaks was intended by Him to de- scribe the outward ordinance of Baptism. But even supposing this were certain, what does the passage prove ? It proves the necessity of Baptism BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 91 with water and the Spirit. It does not prove what you assert, that every Baptism with water is a Baptism with the Spirit also. The necessity it describes may be absolute, or it may be relative. It may be absolute as regards one element, the Spirit, and relative as regards the water. And this was, in fact, the inter- pretation put upon the words by the Church of the first centuries, when it was held universally that a catechumen who was martyred before Baptism was a member of Christ, i.e. by the Baptism of the Spirit, and held by some that even without martyrdom the will to suffer validly supplied the want of Baptism by water. 1 The true meaning of this passage will be best under- stood when we take in connection with it the preach- ing of John the Baptist and his proclamation con- cerning Jesus. " I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance ; but He that cometh after me is mightier than I : ... He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire." Jesus gathers up into the conditions of entrance into His kingdom the one laid down by His forerunner, while His own sacrifice was to secure the fulfilment of that further condition which the Baptist foresaw but could not provide. He lays down as the condition of Regenera- 1 So St. Ambrose. See Plummer in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, ii. 244. 92 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH tion, and so of entrance into His kingdom, an experi- ence which is single but not simple ; it is capable of analysis into two parts. On the one hand it has its human side, corresponding to the Baptism of John following on repentance. On the other hand it has now its Divine side, in which the response of faith to the message of the Gospel is followed by the Spirit- baptism creating new life, a new heart, a new creature. There were cases in which the two parts of this experience were separated. The centurion, Cornelius, for example, received first the Baptism of the Spirit, and then, after an interval, the Baptism of water, the Apostle Peter justifying his Baptism by an appeal to this very utterance of the Baptist. Such cases are important as showing that there is not an invariable relation between the different elements of Baptism ; but if our Lord does refer to Baptism in this text, He teaches us that normally the two parts of the experi- ence coincide, man's repentance and God's grace, man's faith and the Regeneration of the Spirit ; and also that normally the outward expression of repentance and obedience in baptism coincides with the consum- mation of the Spirit's operation in regeneration. Our examination of the passages of Scripture on which Mr. Sadler relies leads to the following results : There are a number of passages in the New Testa- BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 93 ment in which a connection is referred to between Baptism on the one hand, and salvation, or remission of sins, or Regeneration, on the other. But in no one of these passages does Baptism stand alone. It is always conjoined with some other term ; we find water and Spirit, faith and Baptism, repent- ance and Baptism, Baptism and the seeking of a good conscience, " the washing of water by the word." Whatever, therefore, may be by you ascribed to Baptism, on the ground of Scripture, is by Scripture ascribed to Baptism and something else. Unless you have some means of securing or guaranteeing the ful- filment of both conditions, you have no assurance that any of the results will follow which in Scripture are assigned to Baptism and another factor. In other words, the evidence you produce from Scripture does not prove Regeneration through the opus operatum of Baptism. But I must remind you that the Scriptural evidence regarding Baptismal Regeneration is not exhausted when we have examined that which bears directly upon Baptism. We have still to look at what Scripture may have to say about Regeneration. And here you will find a number of passages to be reckoned with which the writers on your side too persistently ignore. I refer to several striking passages where Regeneration is described, and the instrument which effects it is 94 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH specified, and yet there is no mention whatever or Baptism. Consider, for example, John i. 12, 13 : "As many as received Him to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believed on His name : which were not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." You will not deny that " Regeneration " and this " power to become the sons of God " describe the same experience of saving grace. To whom then is it granted ? Not to them who accept Baptism, but to " them that believe on His name." On what ground are they received into the new sonship ? Emphatically not on the ground of anything which they or others may will or do. All human agency is excluded, even that of a baptizer. They are born " not of the will of man, but of God." With this clear statement your doctrine seems to stand in direct contradiction. When a priest baptizes an unconscious infant of parents who are, it may be, notoriously indifferent to religion, and then pronounces " this child regenerate," is it not conspicuously the will of man and that alone which comes into play ? Or if he claims that his will to baptize involves God's will to regenerate, have you not replaced the religion of Christ by magic ? Again, the New Testament does in more than one place specify the outward efficient cause or instrument BAPTISMAL REGENERATION 95 of Regeneration ; and it is not Baptism. It is the Word of God. "Born again," says St. Peter (i Peter i. 23) "not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible by the Word of God." St. Paul traced the same change in his con- verts to the preaching of the Gospel : " In Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel " (i Cor. iv. 15). And St. James says still more em- phatically : " Of His own will begat He us with the word of truth." If there is anything in these passages more remark- able than the plainness with which they set forth the Word of God as the instrument of Regeneration, it is their silence respecting Baptism. How do you explain this silence ? If Baptism were so all-essential to sal- vation as you assert, how comes it that in so many passages where salvation is described all reference to Baptism is omitted ? Your account of Baptism is not Scriptural because it takes no account of passages such as these, while the passages you rely on fail to prove your case. THE MEANING OF BAPTISM 97 " In the old dispensation union with Israel was the con- dition of life : in the new, union with Christ." WESTCOTT. " The water can do no more than common water. The words can do no more than common words. But the whole Baptism, water and words together, is what Christ Himself appointed as the way of entrance into the kingdom of God. God by it formally acknowledges the child as His own, gives him by it a right and title to enter on all the benefits which belong to His children. Henceforth the child, as he grows up, may look back to his baptism and take comfort from it in knowing that he is no stranger to Almighty God in heaven above." HORT. VII THE MEANING OF BAPTISM You ask and it is a very pertinent question how then, if Baptismal Regeneration cannot be proved out of Scripture, and if the silence of Scripture in many places is so eloquent against it, how comes it that the doctrine has been held by so large a section of the Christian Church, and over so long a period ? The answer is both interesting in itself and will throw further light on this whole matter. But I must first point out that your teachers exag- gerate if they speak of the testimony even of the Fathers as universally in favour of this theory. When Archbishop Cranmer said : " All that be washed with water be not washed with the Holy Ghost," he was practically quoting Origen, who says, " Not all who are bathed in water are forthwith bathed in the Holy Spirit." Theodoret was no better than a ' Protestant ' when he said, " Grace sometimes precedes the Sacra- ment, sometimes follows it, and sometimes does not 99 100 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH even follow it." And Augustine is even more em- phatic. " Outward Baptism may be administered where inward conversion of the heart is wanting ; and, on the other hand, inward conversion of the heart may exist, where outward Baptism has never been received." And once more, the same Father, in his Com- mentary on Psalm Ixxvii., expressly guards against the theory of an invariable connection between the Sacra- ment and the grace it signifies. " All drank the same spiritual drink, but not with all was God well pleased ; and when the Sacraments were all common, the grace was not common to all which constitutes the virtue of the Sacraments. So also now . . . the laver of Regeneration is common to all who are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ; but the grace itself, of which they are Sacra- ments, and by which the members of the body or Christ are regenerated with their Head, is not common to all." Quotations like these might be multiplied almost indefinitely, but I must not forget that your appeal is to Scripture, and you want to know how those who also made this appeal came to be led into this theory. The explanation is a very simple one. It is found in the increasing prevalence, after the middle of the second century, of infant Baptism. In New Testa- THE MEANING OF BAPTISM IOI ment times Baptism, as most commonly administered, was the Baptism of adults. Infant Baptism was by comparison rare. Thus the Baptism which New Testament writers have in view is that form of it which in their experience was the common one, the Baptism of grown men and women. Any explanation these writers may give of the rite, its significance or value, is given with adult Baptism alone in view. In all such cases it was possible to presuppose some knowledge of the Gospel, repentance and faith ; and, in fact, these things are always presupposed. And this is to be borne in mind in interpreting all refer- ences to Baptism in the Epistles. The normal case of admission to the Church of the first century was that of a grown man " converted " through the preaching of the Apostles. That this was so is plain both from the nature of the case and from the evidence of the Acts. When the Ethiopian eunuch, to whom Philip had preached Jesus, asked, " What doth hinder me to be baptized ? " the Evangelist replied, " If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest " ; and on the ground of the confession, " I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God," he was baptized. And so, in general, we are told of the three thousand who responded to St. Peter's summons to repentance, that " they who gladly received his word were baptized " ; and concern- 102 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH ing the Corinthians, that " many hearing believed, and were baptized." This being the normal case at the time, it is natural that the New Testament writers should state their doctrine of Baptism in terms corresponding to the Baptism of adults ; that is to say, on the assumption that those who received it were already qualified by repentance and faith. And it is important to bear in mind that the writers and confessions of the Reforma- tion period also commonly proceed on the same assumption. It is adult Baptism that they have in view. But in the course of the second century the Baptism of infants, not unknown within the New Testament, became increasingly common. The Christian Family began to assert its reality as a unit in God's dealing with men alongside the individual. The baptism of adult converts became more rare within the area that had been Christianized. The cases were reversed. The Baptism of infants became the common and the normal thing. Now, this change rendered inevitable some modifi- cation of the theory of Baptism. That assumption of repentance and faith in the recipient which had been universal in the case of adults was not possible in the case of infants. And yet the Church felt that there was a positive blessing in the Sacrament which be- longed even to infant children of believers, and must THE MEANING OF BAPTISM IO3 not be withheld from them. The practice is one capable of abundant justification from Scripture. Un- fortunately the theory by which it came to be justi- fied, the theory of Baptismal Regeneration, is, as we have seen, neither Scriptural nor true. The time was not propitious for the development of a theory of Bap- tism which should bring the practice of baptizing infants into harmony with the whole teaching of God's Word. The Apostles had passed away. The Church was occupied with other questions of a more pressing kind. There was much to predispose men towards a theory which cut the knot. It was easy. It was at least congenial to certain ideas which were widely current outside the Christian Church. It harmonized with the growing inclination to ascribe supernatural powers to a certain class of men, and supernatural efficacy to certain rites and actions. The mistake made by certain influential teachers or the early Catholic Church, and now repeated by that school in the English Church to which you belong, consists in combining in the Baptism of infants two elements which can only be properly combined in the Baptism of adults the rite of initiation and the seal of Regeneration. As a rite of initiation Baptism looks forward to the future. It signifies the reception of the baptized into a certain community in the case of Christian Bap- 104 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH tism, the community of the visible Church. It is on man's side a claim, and on God's side a solemn grant- ing of the claim, that he shall stand under the covenant of grace. Now when the early Church extended the privi- lege of Baptism to infants, it had good grounds for what it did in so far as Baptism conferred this public initiation. It acted on the guiding analogy of circum- cision, the Old Testament rite of initiation. If Jewish children were by birth partakers of the benefits of the former covenant, Christian children must be no less really partakers of the benefits of the New one. And if their part in that covenant was sealed to the one class by the rite of circumcision, who could forbid that to the other it should be sealed by Baptism ? The Apostle declares that the children even of one believ- ing parent are " holy," that is, under the covenant of Divine grace in Jesus Christ. They were by birth members of the household of faith, and the Church by baptizing them sealed and signified this spiritual fact in an outward and visible way. In this manner the Church does full justice to that " great Church principle," the principle of solidarity which Mr. Sadler expounds in his chapter on " The Visible Church." Unfortunately he states the prin- ciple in a one-sided way, and makes such an applica- tion of it as leads him into error. THE MEANING OF BAPTISM IO5 It is perfectly true that through a great part of the Old Testament we see God dealing with men as a body, as a family, a tribe, a nation, that " God saves men not only by making them personally and individ- ually religious, but by joining them together in a Church or community." But you must not forget, as Mr. Sadler tends to do, the "not only." It is per- fectly true that the Israelite entered at birth upon the inheritance of God's favour, God's covenant, which belonged to his nation ; that his crowning duty was to keep himself in fellowship with his people by fulfilling the conditions of the covenant, his worst punishment to be "cut off." For many generations God was recognised as dealing with the individual mainly through the community. To this principle the Church, as we have seen, does full justice in infant Baptism. But we must not forget that this represents only one side of even the Old Testament teaching regard- ing God's way of dealing with men, that He does deal with them also as individuals, and that they are conscious of their responsibility direct to Him and independently of the community. This is seen in the patriarchal stories, and especially in the whole history of Abraham. It is seen also even in the period when the " Church principle " was most dominant, in the utterances of prophets and psalmists. Even when we have allowed for a number of possible cases in 106 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH which the Psalmist speaks for the community, there remain countless others in which he can only be speaking for himself and of himself to God. " Let them speak in the name of the community as often as they will, from their very depths there bubbles up a vigorous spring of individual piety, of a blissful inter- course of the individual soul with God." l But it is especially towards the end of the Old Testament revelation that we see this " Church prin- ciple " countered by the converse principle of indi- vidualism. We see it in Isaiah's doctrine of the " remnant," the germ of the later doctrine of the Church invisible ; but especially in the experience and the message of Jeremiah. In this great prophet the individual consciousness of direct relation to God reaches its full development, and his successor Ezekiel establishes the charter of individualism when he sets aside the old proverb, " The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge," and substitutes for the principle of corporate responsibility its complement, " All souls are mine. The soul that sinneth, it shall die." Thus the Old Testament shows us not one but two principles of Divine dealing with men, and it shows them apparently at issue with one another. It is, in 1 Budde, The Religion of Israel to the Exile, p. 198. THE MEANING OF BAPTISM IO? fact, the same two principles which are at issue in the present controversy. Extreme Catholicism over- emphasizes the one, extreme Protestantism over- emphasizes the other. While we deny neither, you practically ignore one. But we shall only hold the truth by grasping both, for both are harmonized in the revealed mind and Word of God. The Church of* the West was guided by a true in- sight when it not only distinguished Baptism from Confirmation, but put an increasing interval between the two rites. And your Church of to-day seems to me to be singularly misled when it overlooks the two stages of Christian privilege so clearly set forth in its Liturgy, and crushes into the moment of Baptism what is so completely provided for in the double ordinance of Baptism and Confirmation, with the interval of in- struction which separates them. For while Baptism signifies the admission of a child to the visible Church of Christ, and secures to it its birthright in the Christian community, which belongs to it on the ground of the faith of its parents, Confir- mation, or whatever other ordinance of admission to the privileges of mature membership may take its place, comes as a seal of its own personal faith in Christ, and therefore of the Regeneration accomplished by the Holy Spirit. There cannot be any facts regarding a child born into IO8 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH a Christian family of more transcending importance than these, that it is born into a world for which Christ has died, and into the circle of those who themselves look to Christ as their Saviour. The " promise " is not only to themselves, but " to their children." And in the Sacrament God meets these children at the very threshold of their life with a solemn seal of these pro- mises, an assurance that the things claimed for them by the faith of their parents are really theirs, to be continuously appropriated with the growth of their growth and the development of their consciousness. " The efficacy of Baptism is not tied to that moment of time wherein it is administered." That is the great principle laid down by the Reformation confessions, and held by Protestants. Its effects, or the effects of that which it symbolizes (it is not possible for us to distinguish these), are seen in the continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, enlightening and cleansing, quick- ening the apprehension of God, convincing of the need of salvation and a Saviour, eliciting faith, confirming it with corresponding grace, until the child, come to maturity, and regenerate by a moral not a magical process, enters on the full possession of his inheri- tance in Christ. Of this Confirmation or some corre- sponding ceremony may be the symbol. A child who has been baptized and taught the meaning of Baptism can fall out of the covenant relation THE MEANING OF BAPTISM with God only by his own act and will. He has not to be exhorted to enter that relation, but to abide in it. But he cannot abide in it on the ground of his Baptism without, sooner or later, desiring to make it his by per- sonal faith. When thus he turns with conscious faith to Christ, the grace which has been his since Baptism finds its consummation in Regeneration and renewal. Thus, while Baptism signs and seals " the benefits of the new covenant," it does also apply them, in the sense that Baptism marks the point where their appli- cation begins, an application which, when accompanied by appropriation on the human side, issues in Regene- ration. This is the grace of Baptism when it is not preceded by repentance and personal faith. But to say that Baptism regenerates is true neither to Scripture nor to experience. THE LORD'S SUPPER " Nam ego ipse, quoties hac de re sermo est, ubi omnia dicere conatus sum, parum adhuc mihi pro ejus dignitate dixisse videor." CALVIN. VIII THE LORD'S SUPPER OUR Blessed Lord, on the night before His death, gathered His disciples round Him at supper, and, hav- ing taken bread and blessed it, He brake it and gave it to them, saying, " Take, eat ; this is My body." Then He did likewise with a cup of wine, saying, "This is the new covenant, in My blood." This simple ceremony He commanded them to repeat : " This do in remembrance of Me." And this com- mandment has been so generally obeyed that there is no other feature of Christianity which so nearly fulfils the condition that it is observed " everywhere, always and by all " believers. This practice of meeting together to eat bread and drink wine in commemoration of our Saviour has been in all ages the most distinctive and the most nearly universal mark of the Catholic Church. It is hallowed for each of us by countless individual associations, and for us all by the accumulated experience of earlier generations, who have found in this observance a gate- 113 g 114 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH way into the unseen, a means of ineffable communion with their Lord. It is hallowed further by that dis- course which after its first institution He pronounced, expounding with matchless tenderness the relations of the disciples to Himself and to one another. In that discourse He specially insisted on the unity of the disciples as the fruit of their union with Him, and the evidence by which they would impress and convert an unbelieving world. He pointed to the secret of this unity, and the method of their victory in the commandment that " they should love one another." It is the bitterest irony of Christian history, and must be to every true Christian a cause of profound sorrow that this rite, intended and calculated to be both a mark and a means of unity, has been, and still is, the very centre of controversy and a symbol of dissension. I earnestly wish it were possible to leave this subject out of our discussion. But it is just here that the different conceptions of religion, of man's relation to God, which distinguish the mffffi&r from the Protestant system, appear in sharpest contrast ; and it is here that we have the best opportunity of estimating their respective claims on the principle, " By their fruits ye shall know them." As the doctrines and practices which gathered round the Mass were the most pernicious of the mediaeval corruptions of Christianity, so the recovery of the Lord's Supper in its simplicity, its fulness and all THE LORD'S SUPPER 115 the spiritual depth of its meaning was the greatest outward achievement of the Reformation. The Lord's Supper, as then restored, has now to be defended as the most precious outward privilege of the Reformed Church. And in its defence it may be necessary to say hard things (but I hope not bitter things) of the opposing doctrines which threaten its purity. But, here again, let us begin by recognising those things whereon we are agreed. As touching the Lord's Supper, we are all agreed in holding it to be a Sacrament, and of perpetual obliga- tion in the Church. We agree in holding that the due use and the due administration of this Sacrament form one of the marks of the true Catholic Church. Also, that it cannot be neglected by the individual, except with grievous loss and danger. We agree, further, in confining participation in this Sacrament to adult members of the Church, those who have made profession of their faith in Christ ; in admitting women as well as men to be partakers ; in requiring that the Sacrament shall be administered by a duly appointed minister. And, as touching the meaning of the ordinance, we are agreed in recognising it as a solemn commemora- tion of our Lord's death and passion, as a symbol of the intimate union of all those who believe in Him, Il6 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH and as a peculiarly impressive acknowledgment of their engagement to be His. I have been careful not to overstate the signifi- cance assigned to the Lord's Supper by all Protestant Churches, for I wish really to find the ground that is common to all ; and there are some, to whom I would not like to deny the title of Evangelical Protestant, who might not go farther. As a matter of fact most Evangelical Protestants do go considerably farther in the significance they attach to the Sacrament, and would agree with you in recog- nising the deeper mystery of Christ's self-communica- tion to His disciples through the Supper His real spiritual presence in the Sacrament. But, I ask myself, what right have you or I to deny our fellowship, or the full standing of members of Christ and of His Church, to men or to Churches on the ground that they do not find in this Sacrament all the significance or grace that we find. If they are cautious, if they are shy, if they are inclined to make less of the Sacrament than we think there is Scripture warrant for doing, their caution is justified and ex- plained by the proved dangers of the other extreme. Only one who was ignorant of history or indifferent to the moral side of Christianity could fail to sympathize with those who, in shrinking back from error on this subject, have shrunk back too far within the frontiers THE LORD'S SUPPER 117 of truth. Of what can we accuse even those who regard the Sacrament as " merely a memorial " that in itself should disqualify them as members of the Catholic Church ? They are obedient to our Lord's command. They observe the ordinance of breaking bread and drinking wine "in remembrance" of Him. They hold themselves pledged thereby to a life of de- pendence on His grace and obedience to His word. Granting that their apprehension of the Sacrament falls short of all its possible significance, is that any sufficient reason for treating them as outside the household of faith ? We cannot say that their view is false. It is part of our own. We cannot say it is not Scriptural. It depends on a too literal interpreta- tion of some of our Lord's language, as transubstantia- tion depends on a too literal interpretation of others of His words. Can we un-Church them for that ? It is not for their sakes I plead who hold less, but for our own who hold more, lest we fall into the sin of schism by separating ourselves, even in sympathy, from those who are not separated from Christ, by erecting into a difference in kind what is only a difference in degree. I am convinced that we shall approach this subject in harmony with the spirit of our Lord only if we determine to see in the humble and reverent observance of the Lord's Supper with the intention of Il8 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH " showing forth His death " the common demonstra- tive action of the Universal Church, not so much differentiating those who on other essentials are agreed as uniting those who otherwise, on non-essentials, may differ. Having said this much, I am prepared to agree with Mr. Sadler, and with you, I hope, on two points of great importance, namely in his emphatic repudiation of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and in his earnest con- tention that the Lord's Supper is something more than " a mere figure," that in it there is in fact conferred a positive spiritual grace and benefit. If, therefore, you follow Mr. Sadler, you definitely exclude two of the four possible ways of explaining our Lord's words and the nature of the Sacrament. You exclude one, the Socinian view, on the ground that it is defective ; the other, the theory of transub- stantiation, on the ground of excess. Let us keep in mind the four possible interpreta- tions which are clearly distinguishable from one another. They are these : i. The Words of Institution are wholly figurative and have no connection with the discourse in John vi., in which Christ offers Himself as the Bread from heaven, the necessary food of man. The elements are mere or " naked " signs. The purpose of the rite is merely to commemorate THE LORD'S SUPPER the passion of our Lord, " to show rorth His death until He come." It may serve also, though this does not appear in the dogmatic statements of the doctrine, to display the unity of believers with one another and to proclaim their allegiance to Christ. This is commonly called the Zwinglian view. But the title is inaccurate. The correct name for it is Socinian. 1 1 I wish you would persuade your friends, were it only for the sake of English scholarship, to drop the absurd practice of calling this theory by the name ofZwingli. The passages in his works where he seems to adopt a theory of " mere commemoration " owe this appearance to the fact that he is earnestly contending against the Tridentine doctrine of the Mass. As he says : " If I have called this a commemoration, I have done so in order to controvert the opinion of those who make of it a sacrifice." On the other hand, when he came to deal with the other extreme, or when he was stating his own full doctrine, his language was far removed from " Zwinglianism." In his exposition of the Eighteenth Article he says : " Here let simple readers understand that we do not here discuss the question whether the Body and Blood of Christ are eaten and drunk (for of that no Christian has any doubt)." In the prayer which he wrote for the new Directory these phrases occur : " In like manner we believe that He has offered Himself as food for the soul under the forms of bread and wine, in order that the contemplation of His Godhead may never be destroyed. . . . Grant that we also, when we eat His flesh and drink His blood . . ." And in his Confession addressed to King Francis : " We believe that Christ is I2O EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH 2. The words are figurative, but figurative of a real and necessary element in Christian experience, namely, the feeding of the soul upon Christ. The rite and the discourse in John vi. mutually illustrate one another. The elements being duly set apart with thanks- giving and with prayer to the Holy Spirit, represent to the Church, that is to the community of believers, the body and blood of Christ. They are received as such by those who believe, and for them they have the virtue or effect which our Lord connects with His " flesh " and His " blood." The purpose of the rite is : (a) To commemorate our Lord's death, showing it forth to ourselves and to the world. (b) To receive from Christ a communication of Himself so full and so complete that it can be described as a feeding on His flesh. (f) To seal in the most solemn way the unity of the truly present in the Lord's Supper ; yea, that there is no communion without such presence. . . . We believe that the true body of Christ is eaten in the Communion, not in a gross and carnal manner, but in a spiritual and sacramental manner, by the religious believing and pious heart." Weigh these passages and say whether it is right to pin the name of Zwingli to the theory of mere com- memoration. See Expositor, 1901, p. 161 ff. THE LORD'S SUPPER 121 Church as a Family of God, partaking of one heavenly food. This is the doctrine of the Protestant Confessions (apart from those of the Lutheran Church, which, however, only differ from this by excess). It is, as I believe, the doctrine of the Church of England ex- pressed alike in its formularies and by its great divines. It is loosely and somewhat mischievously described as Receptionism or Virtualism. 3. The Words of Institution are to be taken literally. Being pronounced over the elements by a duly (i.e. episcopally) ordained priest, they have the effect of causing the bread and wine to " become " the body and blood of Christ, not only in a sacra- mental sense and to those who by faith partake, but " objectively," that is apart from any participation and apart from any qualification in those who may partake. At the same time the elements do not cease to be bread and wine. The purpose of the rite is to commemorate the death of Christ " before man and God," but with special and almost exclusive emphasis on the com- memoration before God, in such a way as to plead the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross. Beside this the purpose of communion tends to fall into the background, but it is not lost sight of. For 122 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH the consecrated Bread conveys to the recipient heavenly food of such ineffable value that, according to some, it secures his salvation, and without it salvation is precarious, if not impossible. This view may be described as the Anglo-Catholic one. Many who do not hold it themselves do never- theless claim tolerance for it within the Church of England. It is difficult to define, partly because it has never been put forth with authority, and partly because in certain individuals it shades off into transubstantiation. 4. The words are to be taken with absolute literal- ness. Being pronounced by a duly ordained (i.e. Roman)^pnest, they have the effect of transforming the elements into the veritable body and blood of Christ. They cease to be bread and wine. Each element by itself becomes the whole Christ (and thus it is sufficient to communicate the laity in one element alone). The rite " confers the grace of the Sacrament on all those who do not put an obstacle in the way " ; and as neither unconsciousness nor indifference is technically an obstacle, the grace of the Sacrament is practically conveyed, as the Council of Trent declared it to be, " ex opere operato," that is by the mere per- formance of the rite. The conception of the Sacrament as a Communion THE LORD'S SUPPER 123 falls still more into the background. The faithful are not expected to communicate more than a few times in the year. The " Mass " is, above all, a sacrifice, not merely commemorative, but propitiatory. " In the Mass there is offered to God a true, proper and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead." l This is properly called the theory of transubstan- tiation. The first and the last of these theories are, as I have said, emphatically rejected by Mr. Sadler, as, until quite lately, both alike have been rejected, even with vehemence, by all who claimed to speak for the Church of England. But there can be no doubt that a tendency has manifested itself of late within the Church of Eng- land at least to coquet with the doctrine of transub- stantiation, which has been so unanimously rejected by all the great English Fathers and divines. It may be useful, therefore, to recall the grounds on which Protestants of all shades and schools have rejected this doctrine of transubstantiation. 1 Thus the Creed of Pope Pius IV. ; and to the same effect the Canons of the Council of Trent, sess. xxii. cap. 2, " If any man shall say that in the Mass there is not offered to God a true and proper sacrifice, or that what is offered is nothing else than Christ given to be eaten, let him be anathema." w v 124 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH The most serious objection to it is that it cannot % proved. This doctrine, which makes the most * 0" v A*tremendous claim on human credence, asserting that \ V man can make God ; that a priest can at his will and * pleasure repeat the miracle of the Incarnation ; that in defiance of all the testimony of sight, taste, and touch bread is not bread, but the living Christ this amazing doctrine, against which all reason and ex- perience protest, not only cannot be demonstrated, but cannot even be made probable by any evidence from Scripture, by any appeal to faith. Those who maintain this doctrine do of course bring forward other collateral evidence ; but all other so-called evidence that may be adduced is entirely subordinate to the one central proof which they pro- fess to find in our Lord's words, "This is My body." The doctrine of transubstantiation rests on the asser- tion that when Jesus used these words in reference to the bread He held in His hand, He meant, and the Apostles understood Him to mean, that actually and literally the bread was His body. Those who deny that this meaning is either neces- sary or possible are overwhelmed with contumely as disloyal to their Master, as denying that He " meant what He said," as " setting themselves up to be more spiritual than He ! " Not only by Romanists defending transubstantia- THE LORD'S SUPPER 125 tion, but by Anglo-Catholics urging their hybrid theory, we are addressed as wilfully and culpably blind to the only possible meaning of the words. Now I ask you, is this reasonable ? Is not this a case of abuse substituted for argument ? Is not another interpretation of our Lord's words possible, probable, nay, certain ? Possible^ because consistent with a habit of speech as widespread as human language, the habit of connect- ing by the copula " is " two things which are not identical, but related, in some respect similar. When we say " the child is father of the man," do we talk nonsense, or do we use language which all thoughtful men recognise to be sensible, true, and " figurative " ? When a dying Mousquetaire touches the bandage on his brow and says, " C'est mon panache," does any one object that he is not speaking the truth ? If we explain to a child the meaning of the words, could we be rightly accused of " explaining them away " ? But another interpretation of " is " becomes not only possible but probable in view of the fact that, even more than in other languages and literature, this habit prevails in the language and literature or the Jews. To take only two illustrations. In Exodus xii. 1 1 we have, " Thus shall ye eat it (the lamb) . . . It is the Lord's Passover " ; where the lamb plainly not " is," but " represents," or " suggests," or 126 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH in some intimate way is connected with, the Lord's Passover. Again, when St. Paul says (Gal. iv. 25), " This Hagar is Mount Sinai," he plainly uses in a figurative sense the very word e'oTtV, which we are told can only express identity. But the probability is greatly increased by the fact that, more than any other teacher whose words have come down to us, Jesus made use of this manner of conveying truth, and particularly truth about Himself. The Evangelist expressly drew attention to this feature in His teaching, " Without a parable spake He not unto them." And this was His method not only in those cases where we are distinctly told that " He spake a parable unto them," but in many other cases where there is no such sign-post of a metaphor. We speak of the " Parable of the Prodigal Son," of the " Parable of the Unjust Steward," and of many other like them, where there is not a word in the text to show that they were parables. That is to say, we exercise our own judgment in deciding in which pas- sages our Lord is to be understood as speaking " figur- atively " and when He is to be taken literally. Is it not rather ridiculous then, as well as flagrantly unfair, to charge us with "Protestant Jesuitry and casuistry and shuffling and twisting and unreality," l simply because in this case also we exercise the judg- 1 Knox Little, Sacerdotalism, p. 170. THE LORD'S SUPPER 127 ment which in the other cases is exercised by all, because we maintain that here also our Lord used this habitual manner of speech, and meant not literally " This is," but " This represents My body " ? I have shown that there is no a priori objection to such an understanding of His words : and there are several weighty reasons in its favour. The first is that not only in His habit of teaching by parable, but in many striking expressions setting forth His relation to men, Jesus had prepared His Apostles for a figurative meaning in His words. Familiar examples at once occur to us : "I am the Vine, ye are the branches " ; "I am the Door " ; "I am the Good Shepherd." Now the importance of such expressions lies not in their being exact parallels to "This is My body" (though they are certainly very close), but in this, that they show the constant habit of our Lord's speech. In all these cases the relation expressed by what is a direct statement is not, after all, one of surface or objective identity, but one of inward moral or spiritual correspondence. Their true meaning is grasped only when we understand " am " by " represent " ; and absolutely no reason can be shown why in the crucial Words of Institution also we should not understand " is " by " represents." The second is that this is the only possible meaning which could be attached to the words by the Apostles. 128 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH They saw Jesus before their eyes, their Master, living Man and Friend. When, holding bread in His hand, He said, " Take, eat, this is My body," what else could they understand, familiar with His mode of speech, His actual physical form meeting their gaze what else could they understand but " This represents My body " ? The third objection to a literal interpretation of the words arises from the strange variation of our Lord's language when He comes to the cup. There is, of course, notable variation between the reports we have received of His words at this stage. In St. Matthew and St. Mark we have concerning the cup, " This is My blood of the New Covenant " ; in St. Luke and St. Paul, " This is the New Covenant in My blood." Now the difference between these reports is of comparatively little importance, if our Lord's language was figurative. The cup could represent either the New Covenant or the blood of the New Covenant, or it could represent both ; but it cannot be both. If you insist on taking our Lord's words literally, you must decide which of the two things the cup or the wine is the covenant or the blood ; and you must have some reason for your decision. 1 But when you have settled this difficulty, 1 Mr. Sadler sees this difficulty afar off, and avoids it by THE LORD'S SUPPER 129 which is a serious one for all who insist on a literal interpretation, I want to know what it is which is the blood (or the covenant). According to our Lord's words it must be the " cup." He never mentions the wine. If you reply, " But He meant the wine," you give your case away, which depends "not on what He meant, but on what He said." If you will be literal, you must be literal to the end. If Jesus meant to identify the wine with His blood, and if the identification were of such supreme impor- tance for the salvation of men as you would make it, why did He change the form of His announcement, why did He not say simply, " This is My blood " ? As a matter of fact, neither the Jjffirmrnsj: nor the Anglo-Catholic takes the words about the cup with absolute literalness. And if you depart by a hair's- breadth from the literal interpretation in one case, you cannot insist upon it as the only possible or right in- terpretation in the other. It seems, therefore, that some interpretation of our Lord's words other than a literal one is possible, nay, is probable with a probability that approaches certainty. But if any other than a literal interpretation be even saying (p. 141) that two of the writers "give the sense rather than the exact words of Christ respecting the cup." I do not know what right he has to make such an assertion. Is he also among the higher critics ? 9 130 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH possible, the case for transubstantiation falls to the ground. And in so far as the " Anglo-Catholic " theory also depends on the vehement assertion that our Lord's words must be taken " literally," it also is without proof from Scripture. I need not remind you that the theory of transub- stantiation was unknown until the eleventh century ; that it met with determined opposition from great doctors of the RU'HfiiriCnurch , from philosophers and theologians of the highest rank ; that it was only forced upon the mediaeval Church by physical force and persecution. ^ c^ It is contradicted by the words of Scripture, where, after consecration, the wine is described as " the fruit of the vine," the bread as " this bread." It not only j finds no place in the Fathers of the early Church, but is utterly excluded by their doctrine. It is so far from being tolerated by the great English divines that it for most of them forms the commonest object of attack. The English horror of the Mass is a horror against transubstantiation due to our having once clearly seen its monstrous falsity and having once tasted of its fatal fruits. THE LORD'S SUPPER : THE FIGURATIVE VIEW 131 " We utterly condemn the vanity of those who affirm Sacraments to be nothing else than naked and bare signs." Scots Confession, 1560. " Nos dicimus auctiorem gratiam dari per sacrament! receptionem ; et quamvis actio organica sacramenti sit nobis incomprehensibilis, an ideo res ipsa neganda est ?" SAMUEL RUTHERFORD. 132 IX THE LORD'S SUPPER : THE FIGURATIVE VIEW A SHORT letter will suffice to make plain our relation, the relation of most Protestant Churches, to the first of the four possible interpretations of our Lord's words the merely " figurative view." I have said that I agree with Mr. Sadler in his repudiation of this, but I by no means agree with all the arguments he adduces, and I cannot but deplore the tone in which he and other Anglo-Catholics think fit to deal with the views of their fellow-Christians. In his vehemence against the " merely figurative," Mr. Sadler surrenders his case against transubstantia- tion. Then he falls into the blunder of nearly all the controversialists on your side, by confusing together several schools of Protestant thought, which differ widely from one another in the significance they attach to the Sacrament. He argues, not unsuccess- fully, against Socinus, and then invites his friends to 133 134 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH raise a paean over Calvin. He demolishes Unitarians, and then assumes that he has confounded Evangelical Churchmen. But even to those who do hold in its barest form the " merely figurative " view, he and you are con- spicuously unfair. For to them even a figure is a figure of something. And this bread and wine are, to many Christians who may not go further, a figure of something very sacred, so sacred that it little beseems any other Christians to mock at their procedure or at the meaning they attach to it. There is no body of Christians whatever, observing the Lord's Supper, who mean by it less than a proclaiming of Christ's death till He come. I confess I am unable to understand how men like Sadler, Knox Little, and many others can dare to sneer at a Christian observance wherein the bread broken is to His disciples a figure or emblem of the wounded body of our Lord, and the wine poured proclaims to them the shedding of His blood. If this temper is the fruit of " sacramental " doctrine, it is sadly discredited by its fruits. And yet I hold with the great majority of the Reformers, with most of the Reformed Confessions, and with the great majority of Evangelical Christians, that they who stop short at the " merely figurative " view fail to apprehend the full teaching of Scripture and all the meaning and potency of the Sacrament. THE LORD'S SUPPER: FIGURATIVE VIEW 135 They do not do justice to the whole of the symbolic actions, which include not only the breaking of the bread, but the receiving and eating of it. The com- memoration of the death is complete in the beholding of bread broken. Some further meaning is demanded for the second part of the action, some meaning con- gruous to the symbol. " Since then the elements in the sacred act exist to be partaken of, denoting conse- quently a gift to be received, and since the words, * Eat,' * Drink,' cannot mean a past or future gift, all that is left to be said is : The symbolism denotes a present gift offered to be partaken of; the elements are aliments." 1 Neither do they do justice to the consciousness of the early Church expressed by St. Paul, " The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?" (i Cor. x. 16), which posits as part of the common experience of the Church a " common par- taking " (KOivwvla) of the body of Christ, and that in the Sacrament. Further, it is not possible on this theory to account for the tremendous responsibility which, according to the same Apostle, attaches to participation in the Lord's Supper, so that " he that eateth and drinketh eateth and drinketh judgment to himself" (i Cor. xi. 29). The Sacrament is in this respect placed on a 1 Dorner, Christian Doctrine, iv. 312. 136 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH level with the Gospel or the Word of God. Like the " word " spoken by Christ, it acts as a judge. Like the Gospel, " it is a savour of life unto life," but also unto death a savour of death. This judgment power in the Sacrament involves the communication of grace as the alternative to the ratification of judgment. 1 But the upholders of this view seem to me to miss the deeper meanings of the Sacrament most of all through denying all connection of thought between the Holy Supper and the discourse in the-*etk chapter of St. John's Gospel. Do not misunderstand me. Their extreme opinion in one direction is at least excusable as a reaction from your extreme view in the other. When I read in Canon Knox Little : 2 " The earliest record that we have of our Lord's mention of the Blessed Sacrament is to be found in the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel," I see the reason of this reaction. The con- nection between the rite and the discourse is exegetic- ally an open question. That our Lord " mentions " the Blessed Sacrament in the sixth chapter of St. John is not an open question. It is simply not true. And a statement like that, made for a purpose, disqualifies its author in the eyes of all serious men. 1 Cf. Augustine, in Joann. Tract, li., " bonos vivificat, malos tnortificat." 2 Sacerdotalism, p. 161. THE LORD'S SUPPER: FIGURATIVE VIEW 137 This is not the place to go into the exegetical ques- tion, but I may say that I believe there is a connection of thought between the discourse and the rite, and it is this. In the discourse there is set forth with great fulness a profound and essential truth concerning the way in which the life of the believing soul is sustained, and the same truth is in the Sacrament set forth in act and symbol. In the discourse Jesus declares Himself to be the Bread from heaven, offered to men for the nourish- ment of their eternal life. " As a man cannot have temporal life without eat- ing bread suitable to the support of that life, so a man cannot have eternal life without eating bread suitable to the support of that eternal life." * Now the use you make of this discourse and of the teaching which is contained in it is to make it an exposition of the Supper, as if its meaning were ex- hausted in that. But will any one say that Christ, as the food of man, is communicated only through the Sacrament, that before the Sacrament was instituted these were empty words ? " It is true," says Dorner, 2 "that according to that discourse faith is able to par- take of Christ's flesh and blood, without the presence of the outward elements. But this must not be 1 Church Doc f line Bible Truth, p. 150. * System of Christian Doctrine, iv. 313. 138 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH employed to depreciate the import of the Holy Supper, but rather to enhance the import of faith, and of the Word of God, which faith grasps. Faith is already 'spiritual eating,' living communion with Christ, real participation in Him." How did our Lord intend this heavenly food to be appropriated ? He neither indicated as a means a rite about to be established, nor did He leave the means uncertain, to be recognised by the Apostles when they had the Sacrament before them. It is plain from the discourse that men were to get this nourishment by "coming to Christ." As He said elsewhere, " If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink "; or again, "Ye would not come unto Me that ye might have life," so here the secret of partaking of the bread from heaven lies in coming to Christ. And if we ask what that means, He tells us in the parallel clause, " He that cometh to Me shall never hunger : he that believeth on Me shall never thirst." If Jesus had meant this experience to find its chief, not to say its sole, realization in the Sacrament, must He not have expressed himself differently ; must He not have explained that an access apparently so universal was in fact strictly limited ? " But," you say, " is not this limitation suggested, and the Sacrament directly referred to further on, when He says, ' The bread that I will give is My THE LORD'S SUPPER: FIGURATIVE VIEW 139 flesh ' " ? No, but in thus making His idea more pre- cise Jesus affirms that it is as the incarnate Son that He offers Himself to me, as One who is partaker of our humanity. As bread and water comprise the essential wants of man, so flesh and blood represent the essential completeness of a man. When Christ offers His flesh to eat and His blood to drink, and insists on the necessity of men's accepting what is offered, He offers just Himself, His whole Self, and " Himself as the Word made Flesh." God's great gift to the world is His Son : Christ's great gift to men is Himself. Men receive this gift together with all it involves pardon, regeneration, salvation, eternal life, when they " come to " or " believe on " Christ. A union is then established between Him and those who believe of such a char- acter that His life passes into theirs. No other figure could express the closeness and reality, the indispens- ableness and the results, of this union so well as this figure of food and feeding, nourishment and assimila- tion. What food is to the body, Christ is to the spirit, and as such must be continually appropriated if the regenerate soul is to live. But because this Divine Person is presented and offered to men incarnate in human flesh, it is His " flesh " that He " gives for the life of the world." When Jesus says, " He that eateth My flesh and 140 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH drinketh My blood dwelleth in Me and I in him," He means, " He that maketh Me utterly his own, Me, who for his sake became flesh and blood, be dwelleth in Me." Now, as this union does not require to wait for the Sacrament that it may be established (for it follows upon faith), so neither does it depend upon the Sacrament even after the rite has been instituted. On the other hand one moment's consideration of the Lord's Supper shows that it does set forth in act and symbol, and that in a most impressive way, the same profound and blessed truth which is contained in the Discourse. It is in fact "a picture of the Word," and any conception of its meaning fails to do justice to the fulness of Christian experience if it overlooks the fact that the Sacrament conveys the grace which it represents. We may not agree as to how this takes place. But let us note that we agree in holding that through the Sacrament of the Supper the soul of the believer is in a special way and in a peculiar degree enabled to feed upon Christ. 1 1 See below, " The Catholic Reformed View," p. 1 69 f. THE LORD'S SUPPER: THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW Ul " A sacrifice is a thing given to God : this Sacrament was a thing given to us. Nothing therefore can be of nature more contrary than your sacrifice and Christ's Sacrament." COOPER, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER. 142 X THE LORD'S SUPPER : THE ANGLO- CATHOLIC VIEW I AM grateful to find that you recognise the sincerity of my purpose to ascertain what common ground there is between us. You are obviously surprised that there is so much. Forgive me saying that you ought not to be surprised. Even a layman interested in Church questions ought to know something about the opinions and the practices of those from whom he differs. And for those whose business it is to teach religion to be ignorant of the Protestant Confessions and the writings of the great Reformers is rather scandalous. But the greater blame must fall upon the writers of your text- books and manuals, who have been at no pains to inform themselves concerning the actual views held by different branches of the Reformed Church, or to state them accurately. 1 1 As an illustration of what I mean, I may quote one sentence from Dr. Gibson's work on the Thirty-nine Articles, a much-praised and much-used handbook : " The 143 144 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH But we come now to a line of clear separation, and you, I think, are not on the Scriptural side of it. As touching the Supper, we are agreed in dismissing the two extreme opinions, transubstantiation on the one hand, and the " merely figurative " on the other. There remain the two intermediate ones, that which I should call the Catholic Reformed (but you possibly the Receptionist), and the Anglo-Catholic. As the line of demarcation between you and the Romanist is found in your assertion of the permanence of the elements, so the division between you and the general doctrine of the Reformed Churches (among which I reckon the Church of England, as her mind is expressed in her Liturgy and her Articles) is found in your assertion of the " objectivity " of the Real Presence. Now, I confess that in the chaos of opinion on this Swiss school of Reformers in regard to the Eucharist . . . held that the Presence was merely figurative" (p. 643). The " Swiss school of Reformers " includes indeed practi- cally consists of Zwingli, Calvin and Farel. I have already shown that the statement is not true regarding Zwingli, though we may look for its repetition for many years to come among careless or ignorant people ; but Calvin ! His name must ever stand first among the " Swiss Re- formers," and such a statement can only be explained on the supposition that Dr. Gibson has never looked at what Calvin has to say upon the Supper. LORD'S SUPPER: ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 145 subject which at present prevails within your Church it is exceedingly difficult to discover what is the " Catholic teaching " for which you contend. I have tried in vain to find out what it is that you believe to be " present " after consecration. Is it the body of Christ in the bread, and the blood of Christ in the wine ? Or is it the human nature of Christ in both elements alike ? Or is it, as the Tridentine Canon strangely asserts, " the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and therefore the whole Christ," that is " contained " in one or both the elements ? You may say these questions never occurred to you. That is because you have never studied the classical literature on the subject concerning which you are so confident. These are questions which you have to face, and many others like them ; and you will not find them easy to answer. But, practically, you seem to think it sufficient to assert that after, and in consequence of, consecration Christ is present " on the altar " in the elements or "under the veils" of bread and wine. And He is there quite independently of any faith or other quali- fication in those who are to communicate. He is there, indeed, whether there are to be communicants or not. He is there, that is to say, apart from His Church. He Himself left the promise : " Where 10 146 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." But you, shall I say, have improved upon that : one man, if he be a priest, can secure the presence of the Divine Redeemer. Now, I have always thought that there could be no true Sacrament without the Church. I thought that was " Catholic teaching." But a priest is not the Church, neither are a priest and a server. " Ubi tres, ib'i ecclesia" The presence or absence of communicants at the Eucharist is not a mere question of expediency. It touches the validity of the Sacrament more vitally than almost any other question. The practice of " non- communicating attendance" not only exalts, as you see, the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist, but, when carried to the extreme of a " Mass," without any communicants at all, destroys, as you do not see, its sacramental character. Even if the Sacrament were " a feast upon a sacrifice," you make it a sacrifice without a feast. The rite is emptied of all meaning as Communion. You have absolutely no authority for calling such a ceremony a Christian rite at all. Neither can it be defended as a " Catholic " prac- tice. It finds no support in the early Church. Have you never read St. Chrysostom's passionate appeal to his people to present themselves at the Lord's Table, 1 1 Chrvsostom, Comm. in Ep. ad Epb., Horn. 3 5. LORD'S SUPPER: ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 147 his denunciation of those who were present without communicating ? " Every one who partaketh not of the mysteries standeth in impudent and shameless fashion." Do you not come under the reproach of one of your own bishops, who refers to the same passage ? " When did any of you stand at the altar as Chry- sostom did, and cry for the people to be partakers, declaring that in being present at this heavenly feast as gazers and no receivers they did run into the indignation and displeasure of God ? " * And does not your own liturgy continually testify against this practice of non-communicating attendance, with its invitation so solemn and tender addressed to the whole congregation : " Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, draw near with faith " ? You give this invitation in the name of Christ not meaning that it should be accepted, nay, prepared to refuse the Communion to any one who should accept it. But I refrain from discussing the details and the implications of this theory, partly because, as I have said, it is so difficult to ascertain what they are. It is the less necessary, inasmuch as the theory itself seems to me to be open to one general objection, which is at once unanswerable and fatal. 1 Cooper, An Amwer against the Apology of Private Mass, p. 68. 148 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH Your theory is self-contradictory. It starts from the assumption (groundless, as we have seen) that the Words of Institution are to be taken literally. Its defenders are unmeasured in their scorn of the " figurative view." In all honesty they suppose that in holding the " real objective " presence they submit their reason to the authority of their Lord. But, ere the statement of the doctrine is complete, we are told that the bread remains bread ; in other words, Christ's words are no longer to be taken literally. It is not transubstantiated. It is Christ's body because He said, " This is My body " ; but it remains bread although He said, " This is My body." Now, I wish you would show me how any rational man can hold these two propositions at the same time. You may possibly have recourse to the explanation in some form or other that the substance remains bread, but the bread receives the virtue or effect or the body. But then you have abandoned literalism. You have lost the " objective reality." You are back at " virtualism." And only Canon Knox Little can tell you how contemptible is the position you occupy. 1 The truth is, those of your party who are now 1 See Knox Little, Sacerdotalism, p. 164. LORD'S SUPPER: ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 149 gravitating towards transubstantiation do so almost automatically. They are seeking the only logical terminus at which the " Anglo-Catholic " theory can come to rest. You accuse Protestants of "juggling* with words " ; but are you not juggling with ideas ? Either Christ's body is on the altar or it is not. If it is That which is on the altar, where is the bread ? If it is not That which is there, what is the sacrifice ? This brings me to the question why you attach so much importance to the objectivity of the Presence. It may seem to you to add somewhat to the reality of the Communion, but for that it is not necessary, and the idea involves you in the new difficulty of explain- ing what occurs in the case of an admittedly unworthy participant, and in other cases familiar to the casuists which I need not specify. It is not for that small gain that you expose yourself to the difficulties of the theory. The real importance of the objectivity of the Presence is that it is necessary to the theory of a Eucharistic sacrifice. It gives you, to put it bluntly, something to sacrifice. Let us examine, therefore, this modern idea of the Eucharistic sacrifice ; for if it is neither Scriptural nor primitive, you lose nearly all your inducement to cling to the " objective Presence." The idea of the Eucharistic sacrifice grows out of the aspect of the Lord's Supper as a commemoration. ISO EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH Is it not strange that the very aspect which, as " mere commemoration," is so fiercely attacked by you should, by a little manipulation, be transformed into this most " Catholic " doctrine of sacrifice ? One can see the beginning of the process in Mr. Sadler's pages, although he refrains from pushing it very far. The texts mainly relied on are, of course, " Do this in remembrance of Me," and, " As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup ye do shew the Lord's death till He come." Mr. Sadler says, " The sacrificial character of the Eucharist depends on these words " ; and he lays the foundation for the doctrine by deducing from them the assertion : " The act of celebrating the Eucharist must directly be set forth as the most solemn memorial or commemoration possible before God and men of the sacrifice of the death of Christ." Now, it is out of these words, which I have itali- cized, that the doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice is developed. And yet, while of course the sacrificial aspect of our Lord's death is prominent in the Sacra- ment, it is not expressed in either of these texts, and the idea of a commemoration before God is interpolated without the slightest justification. If the word " shew " seems to you capable of ambi- guity, then look at the Revised Version, where you will find, " Ye proclaim the Lord's death " ; or, LORD'S SUPPER: ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 151 better still, look at the Greek, and you see a word (KarayyeXteTe) which is commonly used of " preach- ing," proclaiming the Gospel, but never of human action towards God. I cannot find any ancient autho- rity for this gloss upon the word which turns up in all your manuals. Cyprian, from whom, if from any one, we should expect to get it, interprets the phrase, "The blood of Christ is preached," 1 plainly understanding it only of proclamation before men. In spite of the support for the doctrine which he thus deduces from these texts, Mr. Sadler does not conceal from himself or his readers that the evidence of Scripture is insufficient to establish this conception of the Eucharist. He makes some important admis- sions. Thus : " The sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist most assuredly does not seem prominent in the Scrip- tures which teach us the nature of the Sacrament. It appears rather in them as an ordinance in which God offers something to us than one in which we offer anything to Him." And, after enumerating the characteristics of " sacrifice " as it appears in the Old Testament, he says : " The Holy Eucharist, then, has scarcely one fea- 1 " Christi sanguis scripturarum omnium sacramento ac testimonio effusus praedicatur." (See T. C. Edwards, ad lee.). 152 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH ture in common with the things which in Scripture are called, and which English Churchmen commonly call, sacrifices." "The things offered in the Sacrament cost the offerer nothing. There is neither pain nor death suffered at the time by the thing offered. It is not wholly consumed or destroyed in such a sense as to be lost to the offerer. Nor is it partially destroyed, and the remainder consumed by the priests alone, as in the Levitical offerings most resembling it in form." The conclusion is surely obvious (and, remember, the arguments are Mr. Sadler's, not mine), namely, that the Eucharist is not a " sacrifice " at all. If that be so, it does not in the least affect the ques- tion at issue whether or not it " possesses the most intense sacrificial reality," as he proceeds to argue that it does. It is on his own showing not a sacrifice. That there is a truth, after which you are groping, true to Scripture and to experience, of which this idea is but a parody, I indeed believe. What it is I shall try to show later on. But it is to the credit of Mr. Sadler's candour that he recognises the un-Scriptural character of " Catholic " teaching on this subject. What he has to say of a general kind in its favour contains nothing beyond an emphasizing of the im- portance attached to the Sacrament in the early Church, which in itself, and in default of Scriptural LORD'S SUPPER: ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 153 evidence, has no bearing on the question. For there may well have been, and in fact there were, quite other grounds for attaching high value to the Sacra- ment, apart from any sacrificial aspect. But I suspect you will regard Mr. Sadler, in this matter, as an unsatisfactory, if not a dangerous, cham- pion of your cause. Shall we try Canon Knox Little ? He is frankly more concerned with what "the Church of England" teaches than with what the Bible has to say. But he tries at least to establish his view of the first by the second. And on this point he gives no uncertain sound. " My contention is," he says, " that the Church of England teaches that the Eucharist is in the true sense a sacrifice." 1 That his Church in so doing has Scripture behind her he proposes to prove. 2 The Eucharistic sacrifice is "foretold in prophecy" and " taught in the New Testament." The proofs from prophecy resolve themselves into a vague reference in Isaiah to " priests and Levites " to be appointed from among the Gentiles, and the famous text in Malachi (i. n) : " For from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same My name shall be great among the Gentiles : and in every place shall incense be offered unto Me, and a pure offering." 1 Sacerdotalism, p. 217. 2 Ibid. p. 223. 154 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH The Canon's comment on this passage is so interest- ing that I will quote it. " Now, here, * the sacrifice which should be offered is designated by the special name of meal offering.' It was not to be accepted from the Jews, but from the Gentiles. 'It was a special sacrifice, offered by itself as an unbloody sacri- fice, or together with the bloody sacrifice. In the daily sacrifice it was offered morning and even- ing with the lamb ; as this was typical of the precious bloodshedding of the Lamb without spot upon the Cross, so was the meal offering which accompanied it of the Holy Eucharist.' " On which I would remark : 1. There is nothing whatever "special" about the word translated " offering." It occurs some two hun- dred times in the Old Testament. What is "special" is the rendering "meal offering" adopted by Canon Knox Little, a rendering which the word receives only once in the Authorized Version (Num. v. 15). 2. Out of all the cases in which this word (min- chah) occurs (some two hundred in all), it is only five times translated " sacrifice " ; and each of these five, with one exception, has been quietly corrected by the Revised Version to " offering." 3. The distinction is of greater importance than perhaps you have recognised. The " minchah " was a " cereal offering," consisting of fruit, corn or vege- LORD'S SUPPER: ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 1 55 tables, things not regarded as having the quality of life. On the other hand, an entirely different word is retained to express the sacrifice of things having life (zebach). The two forms of sacrifice may have con- curred in some ceremonies. But they were essentially different in the conception they expressed. Now, to which of them, if to either, are we to relate the sacri- fice of Christ ? We can have no hesitation in saying to the second to the zebach, and not to the minchah. It is the surrendered life in which we see the eternal value of our Lord's atonement. He gave " His life a ransom for many." And, further, it was the zebach, not the minchah, which furnished the worshippers with the means for a feast of reconciliation. So it is His broken body that Christ offers as the means of Communion. The " pure offering " of Malachi can- not, therefore, have any connection with the great sacrifice of the New Testament. It cannot be a prophecy of any ceremonial which repeats or "pleads" the sacrifice of Christ. 1 1 For the thorough investigation of the subject I would refer you to Robertson Smith's Re/igion of the Semites (chap, vi.), from which I take one sentence : " The cereal offering, therefore, has strictly the character of a tribute paid by the worshipper to his god, as indeed is expressed by the name minha ; whereas when an animal is sacrificed, the sacrificer and the deity feast together, part of the victim going to each." EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH 4. This want of connection is plain even in the Canon's own words. What was offered " with the Lamb " has nothing to do with what purports to represent the offering of the Lamb. 5. Attentively considered, therefore, this famous passage, if it has anything to do with the Eucharist at all, proves that it is in correspondence, not with those Old Testament rites which prefigured the sacrifice of the Cross, where the victim was a living one, but with rites of an entirely different character, in which the worshipper offered not a substitute for himself, but a material representation of himself. 6. Once more. The connection between Mala- chi's "pure offering" or "unbloody sacrifice" and the Eucharist is by no means supported, as is so commonly asserted, by the universal testimony of the Catholic Church. Tertullian interprets this prophecy of " the preaching of the Gospel unto the end of the world," and again as fulfilled in " simple prayer out of a pure conscience." St. Jerome expounds these words of the prophet thus : " He means that the prayers of the saints are to be offered unto the Lord, not in the single province of Judasa, but in every place." 7. But, apart from all these considerations there is a final one which deprives your theory of all support from this passage, and that is the uncertainty whether it is a prophecy at all, whether it is not a description LORD'S SUPPER: ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 157 of what is, and not of what is to be. The balance of authority and the evidence of the Versions is strongly in favour of the present tense rather than the future. Indeed, if you will look at our own Revised Version, you will find that this text on which you so much rely has disappeared as a prophecy of the future : "And in every place incense is offered unto My name, and a pure offering." These things being so, is it vain to hope that your school will cease to harp upon this text as furnishing a prophecy of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, or even a pre- sumption in favour of your doctrine ? The Canon's evidence from the New Testament, apart from the Words of Institution, resolves itself into two passages whose connection with the matter in hand is so distant and obscure that they testify rather to the weakness of the case which looks to them for support. " Leave there thy gift berore the altar " is a counsel obviously addressed to Jews in the only terms which they could understand. Jesus used such terms just as He used the language of Palestine. And you might as well insist that the only proper language for the Church is Aramaic as argue from such a saying that there must be an altar in the Christian Church. There is more apparent plausibility about the quota- tion from the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is so 158 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH familiar in this connection : " We have an altar whereof they have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle." But you ought to know that there is no good ground for connecting this phrase with the Eucharistic sacrifice or directly with the Lord's Table at all. It is by no means, as Canon Knox Little somewhat dis- ingenuously suggests, " the opponents of Catholic doctrine " alone who " interpret this solely of the act of sacrifice on Calvary." You will not call Thomas Aquinas an opponent of Catholic doctrine, and yet his explanation of these words is this : " That altar is either the Cross of Christ on which Christ was sacrificed for us, or Christ Himself, in whom and through whom we offer our prayers." But it is not necessary for me to go into detail on this question, seeing that the whole matter has been thoroughly sifted, and a clear decision arrived at by one to whose authority and scholarship we all bow. In the excursus on the subject which you will find in his Commentary on the Hebrews, Bishop Westcott has disposed of this and of many arguments of the same class. His conclusion is : " In this, the first stage of Christian literature, there is not only no ex- ample of the application of the word Qvaiaffrrfpiov to any concrete, material object, as the Holy Table, but LORD'S SUPPER : ANGLO-CATHOLIC VIEW 1 59 there is no room for such an application." ] The tran- sition from a spiritual to a material sense of the word appears to begin with Irenaeus, but it is not fully accomplished till " the writings of Cyprian mark a new stage in the development of ecclesiastical thought and language." There remain the Words of Institution themselves, in which Canon Knox Little and others find evidence for the sacrificial theory on which Mr. Sadler was too good a scholar to insist. I must say this attempt to find the required evidence in the words translated " do " and " in remembrance " seems to me to amount to a confession of despair. We are asked to believe that the words, "do this," may rightly be translated, " offer this " or " sacrifice " this. Possibly they might be so paraphrased if the word " sacrifice " or " offering " were in the context ; but not otherwise. The word iroielv is as wholly neutral as our word " do " or " perform " ; and even in those passages in the Septuagint where it seems to be used in a sacrificial sense it gets that colouring 1 Westcott, Epistle to the Hebrews, pp. 456-458. Even by Irenaeus the spiritual interpretation of the word " altar " is emphatically asserted. " He wills that we also should continually offer our gift at the altar. The altar, therefore, is in heaven (for thither are our prayers and offerings directed), and there also the temple " (Adv. Haer., iv. c. 34). l6o EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH from the presence in the context of indubitable refer- ence to sacrifice. When a master says to a boy, " Do a piece of prose," and is understood to mean " translate a piece," it does not follow that " do " means " translate," though in this case the one word could be substituted for the other. If Jesus had said, " Do this sacrifice," we admit that " offer this sacrifice " would have been a fair paraphrase of the words. But when He said, " Do this," to paraphrase by " offer this " is as arbitrary a proceeding as could well be conceived. 1 The same must be said about the phrase etopa TOV o-w/iaro? teal rov ai/iaro?) we have no proofs that before the time of Eusebius in the East men spoke of an offering of the Body of Christ in the Lord's Supper." * The time of Eusebius corresponds with the first quarter of the fourth century ; and if we go back from this late point to the close of the second century, we may make the rule absolute. There is in the first two centuries no case where "sacrifice" or any cognate word is used in Christian literature to signify a sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ. Christianity stood forth before the world unique and supreme in its possession of a spiritual conception of God. This carried with it as a corollary a relation between God and man which is fundamentally ethical and spiritual. This relation may find natural expres- sion in outward forms, and may by them be assisted, but is in itself primary, prior to all forms, and in- dependent of them. " In accordance with the purely spiritual representa- tion of God, it was firmly held that only a spiritual service was well-pleasing to Him, and that all cere- monies were done away. Since, however, according to Old Testament and Apostolic tradition, it was just p l Harnack, Dogmengeschkkte, i. p. 391. 190 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH as firmly held that Divine worship was sacrifice, the Christian homage to God was regarded from the point of view of a spiritual sacrifice. In the most general sense it was understood as a sacrifice of heart and of obedience, as also the sanctification of the whole personality in soul and body to God." " In the most special sense what was accounted as the sacrifice (jirpotr^opd, S&pa) was the prayers, sent up by the worshippers in the Divine service of the congregation, and the gifts offered along with them, out of which the communion elements were taken, and which were applied, partly to a common meal, partly to the support of the poor." l This quotation from Harnack refers to the first period of the Church's history as an organized com- munity, and covers the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, of Justin, of Clement, and of Irenaeus. In a word the Church, being taught by the Spirit that sacrifices were no longer necessary, learnt of the same Spirit that all worship is sacrifice. The early Church recognised that the one final and sufficient offering of a propitiatory character had been offered by Christ upon the Cross that the only offer- ing by man which coulii be well-pleasing in God's sight was the surrender of himself. This last concep- tion fully accounts for all language whether in the 1 Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, i. p. 173. CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE : FALSE AND TRUE 19 1 New Testament or in early Christian literature which seems to have a sacrificial significance. It is the conception underlying St. Paul's appeal that the Romans should " present their bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is their reasonable service," that is to say " their spiritual worship " (\oyifcr) \arpeia). These are the "spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ " which St. Peter exhorts his converts to present. The sacrifice rendered by Christians according to the writer to the Hebrews is the " sacrifice of praise to God," "the fruit of our lips " (Heb. xiii. 15). For this sacrifice, internally one of self-surrender, externally one of praise and thanksgiving, which was required of the individual, the Church provided in its public worship a symbolic expression. Praise and prayer, worship and adoration were the spiritual sacrifices of the Christian ; and the offering or his substance, the presentation to God for the use of the poor and the sick of bread and wine and the fruits of the earth, was the solemn expression of his surrendered will. Now as these things took place at the weekly gathering for worship which found its climax in the " breaking of bread," the idea of " sacrifice " in this spiritual sense came almost inevitably to be associated with the Eucharist. 192 EVANGELICAL DOCTRINE BIBLE TRUTH We find the first trace of this in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, where the ceremony is described as "sacrifice of thanksgiving." From this point forward the description becomes common, and an ever-widening entrance is made for the introduction of Old Testament ideas and Old Testament terms in connection with sacrifice. The habit of regarding all prayers as sacrifices, the mistaken interpretation of the passage in Malachi, the gradual separation of the Eucharist from the common meal of which it was at first a part, all these and other influences served to strengthen and deepen the sacrificial conception. But even in Justin and Irenaeus the chasm is not bridged which divides the spiritual sacrifice of thanksgiving in connection with the Eucharist from a Eucharist which is in any sense an offering of the body and blood of Christ. Down to the end of the second century and even later, it remains true that " the sacrifice in the Lord's Supper is, in its character and main purport, that is to say apart from the alms-offering which in practice was connected with it, nothing else than a sacrifice of prayer." * Among the offerings made at this service of weekly worship were bread and wine, and of them a portion was set aside for the purpose of fulfilling the Lord's 1 Harnack, Dogmengesckichte, \. p. 179. CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE : FALSE AND TRUE 193 command, " Take and eat this, Drink this, Do this, in remembrance of Me." The offerings of the people became the elements of the Eucharist ; and in them the Church of the first two centuries recognised the " pure " or " unbloody " sacrifice of Malachi. Her Qvala, or Trpo