THE

CHRISTIAN EXAMINER.

MARCH, 1843.

RECENT TRINITARIAN PUBLICATIONS.*

In the first of these pamphlets we have the first formal American statement of the High Church doctrines of the Oxford school, with which we have met. In the second we have an explicit statement of the Low Church view of the same subjects. In the third we have an expression of the feeling, with which the Catholic Church, both in this country and in England, regards the movements, which have lately taken place in the Episcopal branch of the Church Universal.

The circumstances, under which these two advocates of High and Low Church doctrines appear before the public, are somewhat novel. One of the main advantages, attending a church of established forms, is stated by Paley to be uniformity of doctrine, exhibited in the same pulpit. Under an opposite mode of administration, the consequence would be, "that a Papist, or a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Moravian, or an Anabaptist, would successively gain possession of the pulpit." The very thing, which the Episcopal forms were intended to obviate, seems in this case to have taken place. On the twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity, Bishop Whittingham_instituted Mr. Johns to the Rectorship of Christ's Church in Baltimore, and in a discourse without any text, unless a quotation on the opposite page from Irenæus may be considered as such, asserts that the person he has just instituted is a priest, that the Lord's

The Priesthood in the Church. The Protestant Episcopal Pastor. The Religious Cabinet. VOL. XXXIV. -3D S. VOL. XVI. NO. I.

1'

table is an altar, the elements of communion a sacrifice, and, if we comprehend aright the force of his language, that in partaking of those elements, the communicant eats and drinks "the proper and natural body and the proper blood of Christ." In the evening of the same day, the person so instituted preaches a sermon to the same congregation, in which he says, "I am no more a priest, in the sense of the word objected to, than you are, my brethren, who are laymen; nor can I, in the same sense, offer sacrifice any more than you." The table is not an altar. And moreover he asserts, "It is both theologically and philosophically erroneous to speak of the reception of even the proper spiritual body of Christ in, with, or under the bread and wine of the Eucharist;" and closes by saying, that he will never preach such doctrines, "so help me God! A more awkward predicament it is difficult to conceive, than for a Bishop to preach one doctrine in the morning, at the institution of a Rector, and for the Rector on the evening of the same day to contradict him, and promulgate precisely the opposite doctrine. We do not say this in derision or in triumph. Far be it from us to take pleasure in the dissensions of any branch of the Christian Church. It is not one sect alone that suffers on such occasions, but our common Christianity. Our common Lord is wounded in the house of his friends. wish merely to point out the fact, that creeds and forms are no security for uniformity of faith, or for the peace of a church. However carefully they may be worded, there arises the same dispute about the meaning of terms and phrases, which existed in relation to the language of the Bible, upon which all creeds profess to be founded.

We

But it is time to exhibit the statements and arguments of these two advocates of High and Low Church doctrines. The Bishop, after instituting the Rector, holds the following language as to the office with which he had invested him.

6

"In the office which we have just been using, I have, by the prescription of the Church, had occasion again and again to speak of your pastor as a priest,' and of the duties which have now been committed to him as 'sacerdotal functions'implying that as a priest he is to minister among you, and therefore to offer sacrifice, at what we learn from the rubrics or directions incorporated in the Office, to call the 'altar' of Christian worship.

"It is a very serious thing to use such language in the imme

diate presence and solemn worship of HIM who, while He searcheth the heart, hateth a lie, and the maker and lover of it, if we have any doubts of its correctness. Yet such have been started. It is my purpose to examine the grounds for acquiescing, in the view adopted by the Church and put forth in the framework of her most solemn formularies.

"An objection, that must be met at the outset, is, that we have no Scriptural sanction for such procedure;- that the New Testament no where speaks of 'priest,' 'altar,' or 'sacrifice,' as pertaining to the worship of the New and better Covenant. This is a matter not wholly certain, since the epistle to the Hebrews says 66 we have an altar ;" and our Saviour in his Sermon on the Mount, where the Gospel is set in contrast with the Law, speaks of His followers leaving their gifts on the altar, to be first reconciled with their brethren, before they offer; while the apostles repeatedly make mention of the gifts and offerings of Christians in terms implying a sacrificial character. But for the moment setting these passages aside, what will follow, suppose it should be granted that the application of the terms "priest," 'sacrifice,' and 'altar' to a ministry and worship under the Gospel, does not occur in the New Testament? Just this

་

that the terms, and the things they signify, will be left in the same position as the terms 'Sabbath' and Bible,' and the things they signify. If there be no mention of a Christian priest, there is none, also, of a Christian Sabbath. If our being all priests, a royal priesthood,' a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices,' kings and priests unto God,' excludes a delegated priesthood of men separated to the work, then our time being all holy, our whole lives consecrated unto God, must exclude (as some few sects have from time to time, in opposition to the mass of the Christian community, maintained) the dedication of the seventh day as holy unto the LORD. If our having One great high Priest, for ever making intercession, by the oblation of his One sufficient Sacrifice, excludes the ministration of earthly priests; so we have One heavenly Sabbath, a rest remaining for the people of GOD, to which we are bid look forward, and for an entry into which we are taught to labor. If the absence from the New Testament, of the words 'priest,' 'sacrifice,' and 'altar,' in application to the ministers and mode of Christian worship, could prove the ministry of the Gospel to be no priesthood, its service no sacrifice, needing and admitting of no altar, then the absence of the words Bible' and 'Holy Scriptures' from the New Testament, in application to its own form and contents, would prove that the New Dispensation has no sacred volume, the word of God, written by apostles and evangelists, no claim to be His revelation of His will.

"This negative mode of arguing, then, will not do. The books of the New Testament are part and parcel of the Bible, though they no where say so. The Lord's Day is the Christian Sabbath, though no where called so. The gospel ministry may be a priesthood, the worship of the Church a sacrifice, though no where so described."

Such are the Bishop's views of the sacerdotal functions of the Christian ministry. He then attempts to draw the line between the Episcopal and Roman Catholic doctrines upon this subject. Of the clearness and satisfactoriness of this distinction, we leave others to judge.

"Unquestionably, like every other truth, this, of the sacerdotal character of the Christian ministry, has been liable to misinterpretation and abuse. Errors of the most dangerous nature have grown out of it, and prevailed to a very great extent, and find their misguided advocates to this very day and at our thresholds. A priesthood, assuming the character of mediatorship and intercessorship, sprung up in days of predominant ignorance, out of the amalgamation of half discarded paganism with the Christian forms and doctrines. A worship offered not with, but for the people, in a tongue unknown to them, and a voice inaudible, crept into use among insufficiently instructed converts, from the barbarous hordes that changed the face of Europe in the sixth and following centuries, and, in similar circumstances, found its way among the Churches of the East, depriving their time-honored forms of half their beauty and nearly all their efficacy. Crude, contradictory, and low views of the Christian sacraments, led to utterly unscriptural notions of the sacrificial nature of the blessed eucharist, and while they, almost blasphemously, elevated it into a constantly recurring, and simultaneously multiplied, propitiatory repetition of the one great mystery wrought on Calvary, degraded it into dependence for its nature, worth, and efficacy, on the intention of the frail and sinful man commissioned with its administration. Ministerial intervention for the remitting or retaining sin, by admission to the sacraments or exclusion from their privileges, assumed the form, for ten centuries unheard of in the Church, of judicial reconciliation of offenders in absolution, given on terms at the discretion of the fallible, mortal judge.

"Such a priesthood the reformers found, claiming privileges, which it refused to test by the written record of its commission, and exercising those privileges, even on its own showing of their extent, in abuses the most fearful and soul-destroy

ing. Is it wonderful that some, who set themselves to gainsay its usurpations, failed, in the corruption which they saw, to find the simple, scriptural original? and under the exclusive worship, mumbled in an unknown tongue, of a mass and pardonmongering ministry, lost sight of the Christian priesthood and its spiritual sacrifices?

"Some, not all; for God be thanked, our branch of the Catholic Church of Christ, while it purged away the accumulated errors that had soiled its discipline and worship, retained alike the form of sound words in doctrine, and the golden casket of ritual observances, that it found transmitted, unbroken and unchanged from primitive days and apostolic men. A ministry derived, by pure succession, from the fount in the Lord's own commission, has never ceased to keep up its claim to the priestly character, by professing unto GoD and man to celebrate and make' before the Divine majesty,' with the 'offering' of 'holy gifts,' a 'sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving,' as the 'bounden duty and service' of a redeemed people, seeking 'for themselves and the whole Church'' remission of sins and all other benefits of the passion' of their Saviour.

"This I do not hesitate to single out as the great characteristic of the Church, distinctive of its position from that of all the surrounding bodies a due regard for the Christian priesthood, as exercised in the administration of the sacraments. On the one hand, Rome degrades the divine institutions, baptism and the Supper of the Lord, by raising to their level ordinances, partly of inferior use, partly of corrupt origin and dangerous tendency. On the other, Protestant sects and schisms from our own body, have little by little given up, first the commission to administer the sacraments, then the accurate conception of their use and nature, and at last the just estimation and due reverence for institutions, certainly placed, by our Lord's own command and the doctrine of his apostles, on higher ground than is assignable to any other joint overt act of Christian duty. Time was, when the difference between the Church and surrounding bodies, on this point, was less than prevailing looseness of opin- . ion now renders it; and we might even quote the Westminster Confession and the Assembly's Catechism (to say nothing of Luther and Calvin and Knox and Cartwright) in our justification against those, who upbraid us as a sacramental Church,' on account of the stress laid, as well in our formularies of faith and worship, as in our practice, on what the Assembly's larger Catechism terms means of salvation and seals of the benefits of Christ's death and mediation,' and the Synod of Dort describes assigns and seals, by means whereof GOD worketh in us by the power of the Holy Ghost.'"