doctrine, as may be seen by the way in which its advocates shift about. The essential point is this, that a sacrifice performed by a priest other than our Divine High Priest is still needed to reconcile God to us (so that without it the propitiation made for us all by our Lord upon the cross is no propitiation for us individually), and that this sacrifice is regarded as being either identical with or supplementing or applying that which the Church of England defines as in itself a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.' This sacrifice of Christ may indeed be said to be applied by and accepted in the Sacrament of Baptism and other means of grace, and by acts of faith, but this without admitting the notion of any other sacrifice, inasmuch as none of these acts are sacrificial. I have not mentioned the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, because, to assume that this is only a sacrament and not a sacrifice of application would be begging the question between us. It is quite clear that one of the sacraments is no sacrifice. The question is whether the Ritualists are right in asserting, contrary to the nature of a sacrament and the analogy of Baptism, that the other Sacrament is a sacrifice; and to this point I will now address myself, as my case against the moderate Ritualists would be imperfect without it.

And here, again, there is a total absence of anything like definite or direct proof. There is in Scripture nothing which can be reasonably interpreted as a direct command to offer sacrifice or any institution of a sacrificial priesthood; on the contrary, the word which signifies sacrificing priest' is never applied to the Christian ministry, but the term used is one which has not a trace of any such signification. There is no direct proof; nothing but shaky inferences from still more shaky interpretations. Nor is there in our Prayer-Book the smallest trace of any

sacrifice, the same in kind as that of Christ on the Cross, which these men would have us receive, nor of any sacrifice in any other sense than that in which any and every religious act may be so termed, except the offering by the congregation of the unconsecrated bread and wine, which cannot therefore be a sacrifice offered by the priest in consecration. It is not even termed in the Prayer-Book a sacrifice of remembrance, and the remembrance itself is attached not to the act of the priest, but to our 'receiving these Thy creatures of bread and wine' in exact harmony with St. Paul's words, that the showing the Lord's death till He come consists in the eating the bread and drinking the cup, and not in the blessing the bread or blessing the cup. There are five several acts directed to be performed by the consecrator, no one of which has the slightest approach to a sacrifice offered, or even an oblation made to God. The taking the bread has not-nor the breaking the bread, nor the laying hands on the bread, nor the taking the cup, nor the laying hands upon it. What is done is simply in performance of the command to do what Christ did at the institution; nor is there the slightest hint of a sacrifice in the Catechism. The word altar, and the word sacrifice in the sense which 'altar' would throw upon it, have been struck out of the Prayer-Book, and the sacrificial power which was formerly conferred in express terms upon the priest at ordination, and is so still in Rome,' finds no longer any place in our Ordination Service. Everything points the same way.2

In their views, then, of the Real Presence in the elements, in the sacrifice of the altar, in the worship of the

1 The ordaining bishop, according to the Roman Pontifical, after anointing the head of the candidate for the priesthood, delivers to him the paten and chalice with the words: 'Receive thou power to offer sacrifice to God, and to celebrate masses both for the quick and the dead.'

2 See note F 3 for further remarks on this subject.

sacrament, in prayers for the dead, in auricular confession as an ordained means or sacrament of pardon--to take the most salient points-the men of whom I speak are departing from the Church of England. To these points perhaps may be added their general view of Christian worship, which, under their auspices, is daily becoming more and more a matter of culte, of music, decoration, painting, vestments, processions, attitudes, banners, in short, external appliances and exhibitions, rather than the expressions of a contrite heart, the upliftings of a craving and grateful mind. Some of the details of this system, indeed, if not the whole system itself, may be matters in which a divergence of opinion may be allowed; matters in which a Church may allow those who hold to one system and those who hold to another to co-exist within its pale without endangering the loss of its candlestick; they are matters of argument rather than of law or right; but in what I have above called the salient points, no such differences of opinion, or at least of teaching, are admissible, and what we have to deal with at the present moment is not opinion but teaching, not probability but law. They are, too, departures not merely from the Church of England but from the genius of Christianity and the requirements of that belief which we call faith; for I cannot think that a sound theology which looks upon these views as merely errors of excess, errors in believing too much, insignificant and excusable, perhaps even pious and praiseworthy. Those who think or speak of them as errors on the safe side (if it is possible for error ever to be on the safe side), forget the danger which attaches to them both logically and practically; for such is the symmetry and completeness of Christ's revelation, that it is impossible in any material points to believe anything which is not revealed without falling either actually or by implication into an act of unbelief,

more or less grave, in what is revealed. Thus the theory of the Real Presence in the elements, however much in harmony it may be with human conceptions, throws into the background God's gift to our souls, the presence of Christ, and fixes the mind rather on the contemplation of God's presence on the altar in time present, than a thankful remembrance of his passion in time past. Faith in the sacrifice performed by the priest is an act of disbelief in the one sacrifice offered by our great High Priest t; prayers for the dead imply a disbelief in God's promises of present rest and future glory to the faithful departed. Auricular confession is such a mass of disbeliefs that it would take us too long to go through them; the worship of Christ on the altar is a disbelief of what God has taught us of his own nature and attributes. There may be those to whom these disbeliefs seem matters of little moment, to my mind unless we are to hold that it matters not what we believe or what we do not believe, these misbeliefs or disbeliefs, call them which you will, are full of sin and danger, and no Church can admit or permit them without running the risk of forfeiting the charter of its incorporation, and sinking down to the level of a mere human society. This is more especially true of a Church from which these things have been, by God's blessing, so completely cast out, that in order to gain any pretence or colour for re-introducing them, it was necessary to force upon our formularies a non-natural interpretation. For a Church thus situated to re-admit them is, to my mind, an act of sin, as well as an act of madness. To my mind we owe no more sacred duty to our Church, I had almost said to our Lord, than the contending manfully, steadily, perseveringly, hopingly against the designs of these men. That which is the duty of a patriot towards his country is now the duty of a Churchman towards his Church.

NOTE I.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HIGH CHURCHMEN AND

RITUALISTS.

[The following are passages from manuscripts and note-books which bear reference to the subjects in the foregoing chapters. It may have been the intention to work them into the text, but it seems best to print them in a separate form.]

The Ritualists claim to represent the High Church Party, and thus to have a locus standi among the recognised sections in our Reformed Church. We true High Churchmen have reason to be grateful to Mr. Capel for having drawn the line so clearly between Ritualists and High Churchmen; and his testimony is all the more valuable because lookers-on see more of the game than the players themselves. It may be doubted whether there has been a more decided attempt at imposition, or rather personation, than the way in which these men have sheltered themselves under the name of High Churchmen; and if we have reason to wonder at the boldness which claims, there is at least as great reason to wonder at the blindness which concedes the claim. The point is so easily tested. Let any Ritualist of the moderate school, the past years of whose ordained life carry him back some five and thirty years, compare himself as he is, his views, practices, aims as they are, with what he and they were when first he took orders, and I am very much mistaken if he will not find in himself such definite advances towards Romanism, or rather retrogression towards Mediævalism, that he cannot be held to be a sound and loyal minister of the Reformed Church in the sense in which he was so when he first entered on his office, or indeed in any satisfactory or sufficient sense at all. Compare what these men hold and teach with what were the highest of the high held previously to the Oxford movement, and it will be seen that they differ, not in mere accidents, but in essence. How many

of the practices which now form a Ritualistic clergyman's everyday life were in use then? how many of the doctrines taught symbolically by these practices, or more definitely by sermons, lectures, tracts, were then accepted?