In all those old forms of worship of which we have been speaking, there is one service which is supposed to be of a higher character than all the rest, and to give them their worth and their interpretation. This is the service which belongs to a feast, called sometimes the Lord’s Supper, sometimes the Eucharist, sometimes the Communion.
This feast does exist at this day in every part of Europe, in various districts of Asia, of America, of Africa. It has existed for 1800 years. It has survived, therefore, all those changes of which we spoke when we were considering Baptism and the Creed; it has been the most holy symbol to nations, between which race, political institutions, acquired habits, had established the most seemingly impassable barriers. In each of these nations, during that course of years, there have been endless conflicts between rich and poor, nobles and plebeians. Nevertheless this feast, during the time when these conflicts were the greatest, was acknowledged as the highest gift to the great, and yet as one in which the lowest were intended to share. During the same period the boundary line between the untaught and the scholar was even stronger and more marked than that which was made by wealth or honours. The baron might need the help of the serf; the student seemed to dwell in a region altogether his own, yet he acknowledged that in this feast he found the deepest, most unfathomable subject for his thoughts and speculations, and that the most unlearned might possess its blessings as much as himself. When the Reformation came it may be supposed that one at least of these phenomena ceased; that this feast was no longer regarded as the centre round which religious and philosophical meditations naturally revolved. Unquestionably there was a change in this respect; it was the effort of the Reformation to detach itself from this centre; to a certain extent the different reformed bodies succeeded in discovering each a separate centre for itself. But it is equally true, that in spite of this effort the Reformers were compelled to make their views respecting this feast the characteristic and distinguishing feature of their systems. Because they could not agree respecting its character and validity, all the terrors of a common enemy, all the sympathies which attracted them to each other, were insufficient to bind them together.
Through the seventeenth century the strife continued; new religious and philosophical systems were completed or established; still the Eucharist, in Protestant no less than in Romish countries, was a strange remnant of the past, which could not be passed over, which it was most hard to compress into any of the systems, and yet which must be brought into them, seeing that it was continually asserting its power in defiance of them. The eighteenth century came, and the same processes which were used for shutting out the invisible in every other direction, were applied also in this. And yet tens of thousands of men and women in every part of Europe, would in that day have rather parted with their lives, or with anything more dear to them, than with this feast. And now in this nineteenth century there are not a few persons, who, meditating on these different experiments, have arrived at this deep and inward conviction, that the question whether Christianity shall be a practical principle and truth in the hearts of men, or shall be exchanged for a set of intellectual notions or generalisations, depends mainly on the question whether the Eucharist shall or shall not be acknowledged and received as the bond of a universal life, and the means whereby men become partakers of it.
Supposing this notion to be utterly extravagant and false, yet it must be interesting to know what the institution is which seems to have obtained so many willing and so many reluctant testimonies to its importance. Now to describe its nature may be difficult, without entering on some of the points upon which these parties are disagreed. But its origin is not a matter of dispute. Protestants, Romanists, Greeks, all who receive it, refer it to the same period of time, and practise it in obedience to the same authority. All would say, “The night before the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, when He was keeping the passover with His disciples, He took bread and wine, and blessed them, saying, ‘This is my body, this is my blood; do this in remembrance of me.’ This is the meaning of our custom; we continue it in subjection to this command.”
Now these words were addressed to a little band of disciples; to them, and only to them. There was no multitude present, as in the case of many of our Lord’s discourses; no distant bystanders to whom the sentence might apply: “What I say unto you, I say unto all.” Neither is there any express language affirming that the command given to these poor fishermen on that night was meant to extend to other ages. They might only signify that a person who had been deeply beloved was leaving with the friends from whom he was about to be separated a token and memorial of his intercourse with them. The words, indeed, “This is my body, this is my blood,” might sound strange and hyperbolical, especially in a moment of what seemed final separation, for then the utterances of such a friend would be especially simple and awful, as we know that His other utterances were; but yet they might only signify, This will remind you of my person, and this of the blood which is about to be so unrighteously shed. Such an explanation, however embarrassing, would be the easiest, nay, it would be the only possible one, unless there were some circumstances connected with the whole character of Him who spake the words, with His other acts and purposes, with the time when they were spoken, which determined them to a different sense.
Suppose now that the person who spoke these words was the Son of man and the Son of God; suppose at the very time He spoke them He had been declaring Himself to be the way through which men must come to the unseen Father, to be the truth, to be the life, to be in that relation to His disciples in which the vine is to its branches, to be about to bestow upon them a Spirit who should guide them into the knowledge of the Father and of the Son; suppose Him to have told His disciples that they were the appointed messengers of these truths to men; suppose Him to have prayed that not only they, but all who should believe in Him through their word might be one in Him as He and the Father were one; suppose Him to have connected all these mysterious words with the giving up of Himself to death; suppose death to have been felt in all ages and in all countries to be the great barrier between the visible and the invisible world; suppose sacrifice, or the giving up of certain animals to death, and the offering them to some unseen Ruler, had been felt in all countries which attained to anything like national fellowship and consistency to be the means whereby they could approach that Ruler’s presence, obtain His favour, remove His wrath; suppose sacrifices to have been the most essential part of the Jewish institutions, the most important element in their worship, the only way whereby they could draw nigh, as members of a nation, to the God of their nation; suppose them, however, to have been taught, both by the law which appointed those sacrifices and by the prophets who expounded it, that they were not valuable for their own sakes, but were accepted when they were performed by God’s appointment, through His priests, as a confession on the part of the offerer, that he had violated his relation to the head of the commonwealth and to its members, as a submission of the will, as a prayer to be restored to that position which through self-will had been lost, or else as a means of expressing that entire self-surrender, which was implied in the fact of belonging to the Divine society; suppose that the feast which the disciples were keeping with their Master was the most purely national and strictly sacrificial of all the feasts, that one which celebrated the first deliverance and establishment of the nation, and which recalled the fact that it was a nation based upon sacrifices in which every Jew realised the blessings of his covenant, rejoiced that God was his King, knew that he was indeed an Israelite!—suppose all this, and then consider whether that which seemed the only possible interpretation of Christ’s words, though a most difficult and perplexing one, do not become actually irrational and monstrous!
Consider whether anyone who believed what we know the Apostles did believe respecting their Master, His Person, His kingdom, could attach any but the very highest significance to language concerning His body and blood. Consider whether any persons who believed what we know they believed respecting their own office and work, could imagine that this significance was limited and temporary. Consider whether persons who connected, as we know they did connect, the kingdom whereof they were ministers with the earlier dispensations, could believe otherwise than that, by the same simple, wonderful method which had been used in all countries, and had been appointed, as they believed, by the authority of God Himself in their own, by the method which had enabled the Jews to enter into the fruition of their covenant and its privileges, and the neglect of which had again and again cheated them of it, He meant to put them in possession of all the substantial good things which He came to bestow upon mankind. Could they doubt that when they ate this bread and drank this wine, He meant that they should have the fullest participation of that sacrifice with which God had declared Himself well pleased, that they should really enter into that Presence, into which the Forerunner had for them entered, that they should really receive in that communion all the spiritual blessings which, through the union of the Godhead with human flesh, the heirs of this flesh might inherit? Could they doubt that the state of individual death which they had claimed for themselves in Baptism, was here to be practically attained by fellowship with Christ’s death; that the new life which they had claimed for themselves, as members of Christ’s body, was here to be attained through the communication of His life? Could they doubt that if their spirits were to be raised up to behold the infinite and absolute glory, here they were admitted into that blessedness; that if their hearts and affections desired a manifested and embodied king, here they became united to Him; that if spirit, soul, and body were to be subjected to the government of God’s Spirit, that each might be delivered from its own corruption, receive its own quickening, and exert its own living powers, here each received that strength and renewal by which it was enabled to do its appointed work, to overcome its peculiar temptations, to be fitted for its future perfection? Could they doubt that if they were baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and if this deepest unity were the foundation of such a union among men as no barrier of time, or space, or death, could break, here they were actually received into communion with that awful name, and into communion with all the saints who live by beholding it and delighting in it? Could they doubt that here the partial views and one-sided words and opposing thoughts of men, found their meeting-point and complete reconciliation; that here lay the clear vital expression of those distinctions which in verbal theology become dry, hard, dogmatic oppositions; that here it is apprehended how faith alone justifies, and how faith without works is dead; how it is we that act, and yet not we, but Christ in us; how he that is born of God cannot commit sin, and yet if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves; how we may be persuaded that neither life nor death, nor things present, nor things to come, shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ, yet may tremble lest we should be castaways? Could they doubt that it was their office to present Christianity in its different aspects to the different wants and circumstances of their own age and of ages to come; that it was the office of this sacrament to exhibit it as a whole truth, at once transcendent and practical, surpassing men’s thoughts, not dependent on men’s faith and opinions, and yet essentially belonging to man, the governing law of his being, the actuating power of his life? Could they doubt that they were to lay the foundation of the Church on earth, and that this sacrament was to give it permanency, coherency, vitality throughout all generations? And if this were their faith, why, I ask, is it not to be ours? What has happened to rob this sacrament of its meaning, or to make that meaning less applicable to us of the nineteenth century than it was to those who lived in the first, less necessary for us than it was for them? The answers to these questions are various.
Objections. The Quaker
In this case, as in that of Baptism, the Quaker believes that we have adhered dangerously to Jewish precedent, have preserved signs when they should have been abolished, have followed shadows when the spiritual substance was that which we should have apprehended. But here the sin is more flagrant. The essence of Christianity lies in the reality of the sacrifice which we, after the example and by the power of Christ, are able to offer up. For the surrender of ourselves, the true self-annihilation, this ceremony is substituted, a ceremony clothed with great names and fictitious attributes, in order that we may excuse ourselves from the necessity of any practical sacrifice.
I am not unwilling to incur the charge of tautology, for the sake of noticing again the first and more general of these complaints. For they receive a new and most valuable illustration from the special arguments which are connected with them. It will be remembered that the difference between us and the Quakers in the other instance seemed to be this. They suppose that the Christian Covenant, because it is spiritual, dispenses with that method which was sanctioned by divine authority in the earlier dispensation. We believe that the Christian Covenant, because it is more spiritual than the Jewish, requires another application of the same method in order that the difference may be perceived. Having the sign of the lower covenant to compare with the sign of the higher, I can understand wherein the one surpasses the other; the Quaker, being unable to make any such comparison, only talks of the distinction, cannot apprehend it in fact, cannot even express it in language: while he rates the old far below its true value, he yet continually in his thoughts reduces the new to a level with it, in his practice makes the perfect spirituality of the latter to consist merely in the absence of a characteristic which the degree of spirituality possessed by the former made necessary. Thus much with reference to the preliminary act or condition of the covenant. Applying the same rule to the results, privileges, and enjoyments of it, the Quaker asserts that the Jew realised the blessings of his covenant in a sacrificial feast; that the blessings of ours being spiritual, such a method is, in our case, impossible. We affirm, that the privileges which the Jews realised in their festivals were spiritual privileges; that the privilege of looking up to an invisible Guide and King and Friend, and rejoicing in Him, was a spiritual privilege; that the privilege of feeling themselves a nation was a spiritual privilege; that these are emphatically the privileges which the spirit of man craves for; that God gave them to the Jews in a most simple, reasonable method; and that when we understand what the things given were, it becomes difficult to imagine how by any other method they could have been received. We affirm again that our privileges are higher than those of the Jews, but higher only as being the perfection of what they had imperfectly. They are the privileges still of fellowship with God, of fellowship with our brethren; but of fellowship with God as with a Being who has entered into a direct union with our race in the Person of His Son; of fellowship with a Race in its Head, not merely with a particular Nation. Now we want to know what there is in the character of these blessings which makes a united festival unsuitable for the realisation of them? It was suitable, nay, actually necessary for the realisation of the others; shew us in some other way than by merely repeating the words, carnal and spiritual, how the change has taken place?
We grant most freely that there must be a change in the nature of the institution appropriate to a change in the nature of that which it expresses. We grant that Christianity is nothing, if it be not the actualization and substantiation of a union which was before to a great extent prophetical and ideal. We grant that a mere shadow, a pictorial feast, would be more inconsistent with the nature of the Gospel, than even of the Law—though inconsistent with either, seeing that in each case the feast ought to put the receivers of it into actual possession of that which at the time they were capable of possessing. But admitting all this, the questions recur, “Can there be no feast, which is applicable to the position of Christians, as the feast of the Passover was to that of the Jews? Have those who deny the existence of such a feast, stigmatizing it as a mere ceremony and phantasm, shewn that they retain the substance of Christianity?”
To examine this last point, let us consider why it is that the Quaker protests against this particular institution. The Christian sacrifice, he says, ought to be real; the giving up of a man’s own self to death according to the example of our Lord and Saviour. Our Lord’s death in itself was most real, carried into every act which He performed and every word which He spoke; how can we think that we manifest that death in a service less actual, individual, continuous? From this statement it will be seen at once, that the end of Christianity, according to the Quakers, is individual self-denial or self-sacrifice. Christ perfectly sacrificed Himself; by Christ’s power in us we may do the like; this is their habitual language. Now that Christianity involves this, that there is no meaning in it if the principle of self-sacrifice be not at the root of it, I believe I acknowledge as strongly as he can. But as we both agree that our Lord’s example is the one by which we are to shape ourselves, that the type of sacrifice is in Him, I must inquire whether He referred to sacrifice as the object of His life, or only as the indispensable condition of it. The answer which He gives on this point seems to me very express. He declares that He came to glorify His Father’s Name, to do His Father’s Will. He declares that He came to die for the sheep. Because He glorified His Father’s Name and would not glorify His own; because He would not be an individual man but would identify Himself with the lowest condition of those whom He was not ashamed to call His brethren, therefore do we see in Him the perfect example of self-sacrifice. The whole idea of His life is lost the moment we forget this. Imagine Him coming into the world not to manifest God, but to exhibit a specimen of glorious heroic self-sacrifice; not to die for men, but to shew how He could die, and the example perishes. We have an object presented to us which no man who has been used to contemplate his Lord with anything of love or devotion, could bear to look at. And yet if we believe that the end we are to keep in view in our own lives is this of self-annihilation, we either must make this change in the image we profess to copy, or else forget it altogether and fix our eyes only upon ourselves.
Nor is this all, as the history of the Quakers has proved. This doctrine of self-sacrifice and self-annihilation, when it has not led them into conscious self-righteousness and self-glorification, has occasioned a miserable confusion respecting their own lives and duties. If the Spirit of Christ, they have said to themselves, be leading us to entire crucifixion, shall we not be resisting Him if we keep alive any peculiar affection or faculty? And yet the same conscience which seemed to enjoin self-sacrifice, said also, How dare you crush those powers, energies, and affections which God has given you, and of which you are to render an account to Him? The difficulty is most practical, the contradiction most agonizing. And the fruits of it to those who have witnessed it, have been as distressing as to those who have been exercised by it: one part of them, thinking that such feelings must be the consequence of a dark superstition, fly to infidelity or indifference; another, more earnest and sincere, seeing that the sacrifice of Christ has been lost sight of in these efforts after self-sacrifice, have violently denounced all such efforts as godless and vain, and adopting sound language respecting the all-sufficiency of the one sacrifice, have made it a foundation for Antinomian doctrine and practice.
But if we kept this thought steadily before us, that the hallowing of God’s name is the end for which our Lord lived and for which we are to live; that to give Him thanks and praise for that which He is and for that which He has done, and so to enter into the perception and apprehension of that which He is and that which He has done, is the highest felicity which we can attain; that our Lord who was one with the Father did in all the acts of His life exhibit this perfect sympathy with Him and delight in Him, and submission to Him; that the voluntary sacrifice of His body to death was the final and consummate act of sympathy, delight, submission; that as self-will and disobedience are the obstacles to the communion of men with their Creator, so are they obstacles to communion with each other; that the same act therefore which removed the only obstacle to the one communion removed also the obstacle to the other; that the cross of Christ is the centre point of all fellowship; that while we seek our fellowship there, affirming ourselves to exist only as members of Christ’s body, and to derive our life from Him, we may find strength habitually to deny ourselves according to His example—we surely obtain an idea of Christianity altogether different from the other, and yet one which includes all the practical truth of it, and which must have hovered as we know it did hover before the minds of the early Quakers, in order that they might be able to conceive their own narrow and fragmentary notion. A person who lives in the light of this truth must look upon the sacrifice of Christ as distinct from all other sacrifices, because it is only by means of it that we are brought into the presence of God or are made one body. He cannot look upon the sacrifice of Christ as separate from any other sacrifice, because he conceives all sacrifices to derive their worth and meaning from it. He must regard self-sacrifice as the necessary element of a Christian life. He cannot permit it to assume a self-conscious and therefore contradictory character by regarding it as the means of procuring a blessing, when it is in fact the fruit and the fruition of a blessing already procured. He must consider every Christian obliged to mortify his selfish nature, in order that he may offer an acceptable sacrifice to God. He cannot confound the mortification of the evil nature with the destruction or weakening of a single faculty which God has bestowed. For those faculties are impaired and ruined by the dominion of the evil nature; they are strongest when it is most subdued. They must be kept strong because God requires them as a sacrifice; and the more they are sacrificed to Him the more strength do they acquire.
We have seen yet another instance in which the Quaker, refusing to maintain what he calls a mere form, has utterly perverted or lost a principle. I do not charge it upon him as a special sin that he has inverted the notion of sacrifice, has substituted means for ends, has introduced self-righteousness under the name of self-forgetfulness. These tendencies are common to all ages, they are precisely the tendencies of our individualizing natures. In this respect the Quakers are not different from the rest of men. The sin which I do charge them with is this: that when Christ had, of His love and mercy to mankind, provided them with a simple and wonderful testimony against these narrow notions and dividing tendencies; when He had embodied in a living feast the complete idea of His kingdom, which we, looking at things partially, from different sides, through the prejudices and false colourings of particular times and places, are continually reducing under some name, notion, or formula of ours; when He had made this feast effectual for imparting to men a faith far above the level of their ordinary theories and speculations; when He had given it as a bond to all peoples and languages and generations—they chose to fancy that His ordinance signified nothing, that they had a much better storehouse for His truths in their own fine thoughts and spiritual apprehensions. Of this sin I maintain that they are suffering the punishment in the almost entire loss of that Spirituality and that Universality which they hoped by these means to attain.
The Zuinglian, the Calvinist, the Lutheran
1. There is one objection to my statements on this subject in which pure Protestants would in general agree. They would say that when I call the Eucharist a sacrificial feast I am using dangerous language, incompatible with the full recognition of Christ’s finished sacrifice upon the cross. “If it be sacrificial it must be propitiatory; the words are convertible; then what becomes of the doctrine of the Atonement as it was held by the Reformers?”
Starting from this negative point of agreement our opponents soon divide themselves into several classes. To the first the Eucharist appears a mere memorial of a past transaction. When I treat it as a substantial feast, as in some strange way identified with the spiritual things of which it speaks, and as being a channel through which actual blessings are received, I am using phrases, they say, for which Scripture gives no warrant, and which are contrary to plain sense and experience.
The second class think differently. According to them the true believer does realise in the Sacrament an actual mysterious blessing. He not only recollects a past good; he is conscious of a present good; Christ is with him in the feast. The mistake I have committed consists in supposing the good to exist in the Sacrament apart from the faith of the receiver. Such a doctrine unsettles the very foundation of Protestant Christianity.
The third party by no means agree in this opinion. They think that the Sacrament has a reality in it which it does not receive from the mind of the partaker. Christ is actually consubstantiated with the elements. The error of the principle I have maintained consists in this, that it supposes us to be brought into a holy and Divine Presence, and yet offers no explanation of the way in which so wonderful a transaction takes place.
Before I consider the first objection, in which Zuinglians, Lutherans, and Calvinists agree, let me remind my readers of the remarks which I made under the last head. I affirmed that Quaker history had proved the incredible danger which results from supposing that our Lord’s sacrifice is merely a pattern or example of our sacrifices, or merely the power by which these sacrifices are effected. It must have an entirely distinct character; otherwise it is of no worth as an example or as a power. And I maintained further that this distinct character, in virtue of which it is an example and a power, is exhibited in this Sacrament, and that by losing this Sacrament the Quakers have lost the sense of it. I think these assertions hardly bear out the suspicion that I confound the sacramental act,—an act performed by men and therefore their act, by the hypothesis one of our sacrifices,—with the sacrifice of Christ; or suppose that the necessity of the one proves the other incomplete. Every word I have used leads to precisely the opposite conclusion. I have maintained that because the sacrifice had once for all accomplished the object of bringing our race, constituted and redeemed in Christ, into a state of acceptance and union with God, therefore it was most fitting that there should be an act whereby we are admitted into the blessings thus claimed and secured to us. And because those blessings were not given to the generation which lived in the days of our Lord’s incarnation and death, but to all generations, therefore is it fitting that this act should be renewed through all generations; and because those blessings do not belong to one moment of our existence but to every moment, therefore is it fitting that the act by which we receive them should continually be renewed by us during our pilgrimage on earth. When we say then that our feast, like that of the Passover, is sacrificial, we do not mean that it does not commemorate a blessing which has been fully obtained and realised; if we did we should violate the analogy in the very moment of applying it; for the Passover did commemorate a complete deliverance and the establishment of a national state in consequence of that deliverance. But as that deliverance was accompanied with a sacrificial act, and by a sacrificial act accomplished, and yet in this Passover the act was perpetually renewed; because in this way the nation understood that by sacrifice it subsisted and consisted; and because by such a renewal its members realised the permanent and living character of the good that had been bestowed upon them, so it is here. The sacrifice of Christ is that with which alone God can be satisfied and in the sight of which alone He can contemplate our race; it is therefore the only meeting-point of communion with Him; but this communion being established, it must be by presenting the finished sacrifice before God that we both bear witness what our position is and realise the glory of it; otherwise we have a name without a reality, and with the words “finished and complete” are robbing ourselves of the very thing which makes it so important that we should prize them and preserve them.
Why these considerations have been overlooked by Protestants I think will be evident from the remarks which were made in the former part. The worth of Protestantism consisted in this, that it asserted the distinct position of each man, affirming that he was a person and not merely one of a mass. This truth had been working itself out into clearness for many centuries, but the process was a strange and painful one. The conscience is that which tells each man he is a person, making him feel that which he has done in past time to be his own, giving him an awful assurance of identity, responsibility, permanence. Overburdened with the sense of evil, it sought for a remedy; it was commanded to perform certain services in the hope of finding one; with each attempt the sense of moral evil increased. The Reformers found that the whole scheme was a delusion. The services presumed that freedom of conscience which men sought to acquire by them; without it they were not true godly services. The emancipation of the conscience was therefore that which they sought as the step to all good; they declared that by faith in Christ, grounded upon acts of complete redemption done on their behalf, they could alone obtain it.
How true this language was, what a curse had come upon the Church through the denial of it, how necessary it was that, at that time especially but also at all times, it should be proclaimed, I have contended again and again. But it is equally certain that as the Quakers believe self-sacrifice, so the Reformers believed the emancipation of the conscience, to be not a necessary condition of our moral being but the end of it. Whatever contributed to this end was necessary, whatever did not contribute to it was worthless. The belief of Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross was that which had given peace to their consciences; that it had any purpose save that of giving peace to the conscience was more and more forgotten. And therefore it became necessary to explain how it accomplished this purpose. Then began all the theories about sacrifice, satisfaction, and imputation, which I spoke of as at once so fatal to the principles of the Reformation and to the practical life of Christianity, as affording no comfort to the humble heart, as leading to all disputes and separations, as preparing the way for the infidelity of the eighteenth century. These hungry notions of the understanding being substituted for the clear, simple belief of the Reformers that we are adopted into Christ by Baptism and are therefore children of God, and may draw nigh to Him in all duties and services, confessing the sins which have polluted us and separated us from Him, turned everything into confusion. Men knew that they were not approaching God with pure consciences; the Reformers said that if they did not, the service was a mockery; they therefore sought hither and thither for some better kind of faith which could give them relief; not finding it, they deemed the whole Gospel to be a dream and fable.
2. But that which lay beneath all these dark imaginations and sad results was, I believe, the imperfect apprehension which the Reformers themselves had of the nature of the Communion. This feast, says the Zwinglian, is nothing but the memorial of a past transaction. That it is the memorial of a past transaction is of course assumed in every word I have said. If it were not it could have no pretence to the name of Eucharist; it would bear no analogy to the Passover. But the Passover had not merely reference to the past. The Jew had been brought out of Pharaoh’s government and brought under God’s government. In commemorating the past emancipation of his nation he claimed for himself a privilege which belonged to it then. It would, I think, be insulting the Zwinglian to suppose that he thought the Christian ordinance, in this respect, different from its predecessor. He is particularly practical and rational; he must therefore know well that no men ever did or ever could celebrate with the least heartiness and affectionateness an event which they did not suppose in some sense to be the cause or the commencement of an improved condition of things, that condition of things being one with which they were in some way connected. The Zwinglian then cannot mean by his words “Simple memorial” that there is nothing of present continuous interest in it; if he did he would suppose, contrary to all his professions, that our Lord’s religion imposes, as a test of obedience, a most dry, dreary, unmeaning ceremony. But if he allows, as of course he will, that certain effects have followed from our Lord’s death, in which we are partakers, and that these effects, and not merely the cause which produced them, are recalled to us by this feast, then the question immediately occurs, What are these effects? The great effect which we believe to have proceeded from it, that in which every other is included, is that thereby we are made capable of entering into the presence of God; that a mercy-seat is revealed to mankind, where his Maker may meet with him. Supposing this were so, this must surely be one of the effects which is brought to our recollection by the Eucharist. I do not object to the word recollection; there is nothing in it which is not applicable to a Living Actual Presence. What I plead for is the duty of recollecting that presence in the Eucharist, because it is there.
But the Zwinglian will ask, Why there, and not elsewhere? The question may bear two constructions. It may mean, Why may we not feed upon the sacrifice of Christ at all times, and thus enter into the presence of Him who perfectly delights in that sacrifice? Or it may mean, God is omnipresent; why then are we not always in His presence? Evidently these two thoughts are of the most different kind, and originate in most different states of feeling. The first suggests to us the highest standard of perfection which a Christian can propose to himself, and yet a standard which, if what I have said be true, must be a most real and reasonable one: for that the Church is brought into the presence of God, is the first principle of the New Dispensation, the one which is especially involved in this sacrament; and if every one of us ought to consider himself a member of the Church, this wonderful privilege belongs to us, not in proportion as we raise ourselves to some individual excellence, but in proportion as we renounce all such distinctions, and yield ourselves to the Spirit who dwells in the whole body. What then I should say, in reference to this view of the case, is precisely what I have said in reference to the Quaker doctrine. If we acknowledge that the light is somewhere concentrated, that it reveals itself to us in some way which it has chosen; that the revelation is not for us only, but for all; if we make this acknowledgment practically, we are at least in the right road to the realisation of that blessing which it is so truly affirmed that we ought to seek. Otherwise we shall fancy that we produce this presence by our acts of meditation or faith; we glorify ourselves for these acts, and for a reality we get a dream; then we gladly betake ourselves to the other doctrine, which comes forth with the boast that it asserts “the Omnipresence of the Deity.”
So I believe it has happened with the Zwinglians. An early disciple of the school, attaching an almost superstitious veneration to the Bible, would at once have rejected this phrase as incompatible alike with its letter and its spirit. He would have asked how it could be reconciled with the words of the Book of Genesis, which speak of God as meeting Adam in the garden, as coming down to see the tower which men had builded, as appearing to Abraham at the tent door? A Zwinglian of the next century would have learnt perhaps to use the phrases, “figures,” “eastern allegories,” and such like, in reference to these passages. Still he would have said to himself, “Honest men use allegories and figures for some purpose; they mean something by them; it is a truth which they wish to convey. But if I admit these phrases, ‘ubiquity,’ ‘omnipresence,’ in their ordinary sense, I must suppose the Word of God less honest and true than the word of men; for these stories, instead of implying or hinting a truth, involve the direct contradiction of one.” But a Zwinglian of the third century will have mastered all these difficulties. He will at once dispose of these scriptural expressions, by calling them “anthropomorphic,” or indications of a low state of civilisation; or with less honesty he will pass them over altogether, only assuming that the phrase, “Omnipresence of the Deity,” must be good and true, whatever else, either in the early thoughts and feelings of men, or in the revelations to which these have been leading, should happen to be false.
Let us consider then for a moment the philosophy of this phrase. It has been adopted to convey the impression that the limits of space are not applicable to a Divine and absolute Being. But does it convey this impression to anyone who is capable of reflecting upon his own thoughts? Is “everywhere” less a word of space than “somewhere”? Did the ancients less imprison the Divine Essence in forms, when they spoke of it as inhabiting every tree and flower, than when they viewed it in the person of a Jupiter sitting on the Thessalian mount? No! in proportion as they attached personal qualities to their Jupiter, in proportion as they believed that He was capable of loving and hating, and that He had the feelings of a father, they were conceiving of Him infinitely less under the limits of space (and of time also) than when they were translating His name by “the air,” and regarding Him as a subtle fluid diffused through every portion of the universe. In the one case they were dreaming of a Spirit with whom men might converse; a Spirit indeed mixed of good and ill—their own image—but still to be apprehended by that which is spiritual in man: in the other case their thoughts were wholly physical; not the less so for being rarefied and subtilized; or if there was any thing else in them, it was what they derived from the older faith.
In strict conformity with this principle is that passage of our Lord’s teaching which is so often quoted to prove a very different doctrine. He told the woman of Samaria that a time was coming when neither on Mount Gerizim nor at Jerusalem should men worship the Father. He does not give as the reason, “God is everywhere;” but He rises at once to the higher level; He says “God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” And He connects with these words what would seem to modern thinkers the most direct contradiction of them: “We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews.” Unquestionably such language would have been utterly inconsistent with the Omnipresent doctrine; it was no wise inconsistent with the doctrine, “God is a Spirit.” Every step in the Jewish revelation and history had presumed that truth, and had been preparing the way for the full manifestation of it. Every step of it had been more fully bringing out the idea of God as the Holy One, as the Moral Being, the object of trust and awe and reverence. And in nothing had this idea been more expressed, than in those arrangements which seemed to localize the Divine Presence. Because He was the Holy One, He must not be worshipped in all the forms of nature and visible things; He must be viewed as distinct, personal; He must be approached, in the temple, through the priest with the sacrifice. By all these means, now regarded as so sensual, men were taught that it was not with their senses that they were to apprehend God; that it was that in them which desires truth and holiness which must seek Him, which by a wonderful method He was drawing towards Himself. And therefore, though simple people who had sought God without the law, might be far better prepared to welcome Him who brought their sins to their mind, and told them all things that ever they did, than the proud idolater of the law could ever be; yet those who had profited by the law, those who were Israelites indeed, and without guile, those who had served God day and night in the temple, and waited for the consolation of Israel, were far better prepared than any others could be to see the glory of God in the man Christ Jesus; to feel that there was no contradiction in the perfectly Holy One inhabiting a body of human clay; that it was a low, carnal, sensual notion of the Godhead, one which really identified Him with physical things, and therefore subjected Him practically to the laws of space, which made it seem to be a contradiction.
I maintain, then, that the highest, clearest, most spiritual, most universal idea of God which any creature can attain to, is not that which he receives from a dream about the attribute of omnipresence, but that into which he enters when he contemplates the fulness of truth and holiness and love, the absolute and perfect Being pleasing to identify Himself with a human soul and body, to suffer with them, to raise them out of death, to raise them to glory. We have not here an attempt to merge complete spirituality and distinct locality—each of which is demanded by man’s reason, each of which is necessary to the other—in a wretched abstraction called ubiquity, a notion vacant of all substance and reality, only serving to puff up the mind with the vague consciousness of possessing a great idea, which it really needs but has missed altogether. I should be scrupulous about the use of such language as this, in reference to a phrase which is so prevalent among religious people, and which may therefore have some sacred associations connected with it, if I did not see that it had been the means of perplexing the minds of little children, of making moral and Christian education almost impossible, of introducing infinite vagueness and weakness into our pulpit discourses, of preparing men’s minds for a settled and hopeless pantheism. That it has also been the means of lowering and confounding our feelings about the Eucharistic feast, is implied in all its other effects. But here it has met with an enemy able to cope with it. The impression that this sacrament is a reality, in spite of all men’s attempts to prove it and make it a fiction, has kept alive the belief that the presence of God is a truth and not a dream; and that we may enter into it in a better and truer way than by fancying ourselves in it, when we are only indulging pleasant sensations and high conceits.1
But if I maintain so strongly that it is only with the spirit that we can hold communion with a spiritual Being, how do I differ from the Calvinists, who admit that there is a Presence in the sacrament to those who believe? I do not think that I differ from them except when they differ from themselves. I no more suppose that our spirits can perceive a spiritual object without faith, than that our eyes can perceive a natural object if they be blind. Faith is as much that exercise in which the spirit is and lives, as sight is the exercise in which the eye is and lives. What more does the Calvinist require? He requires that we should suppose there is no object present, unless there be something which perceives it; and having got into this contradiction, the next step is to suppose that faith is not a receptive, but a creative power; that it makes the thing which it believes. We have seen what a tendency to this belief there has been among all Protestants; but we have seen also that there were characteristics in the creed of the Calvinist which ought especially to have delivered him from it. His principle is to refer every thing to the will of God, to suppose that nothing originates with the creature. How then has he fallen into an hypothesis apparently so foreign from his deepest convictions? He has been driven into it by his habit of resolving his belief of the Divine Will into his doctrine of individual Election. He cannot suppose that God has any higher end in His manifestations than the redemption and sanctification of particular men; the idea, therefore, of the God-Manhood, of God manifesting Himself in the person of His Son, shrinks and dwindles into a mere expedient for accomplishing His objects of mercy towards the favoured members of the race, and by necessary consequence the belief that He has devised a means whereby men, as members of a body, may apprehend Him who is the Head of the body, loses itself in this strange attempt to conceive a presence which is not a presence till we make it so. Still it is a curious and interesting fact, that the form and principle of Calvin’s doctrine, as distinguished from his system, was mainly upheld by his faith in this sacrament; and that when his followers approximated, as of necessity they did, more and more nearly to the Zwinglian doctrine on this subject, the system became more and more prominent and exclusive.
It is a great transition to go from either of these views to the Lutheran, wherein the actual presence of Christ as the ground of faith, and not as grounded upon it, is so unequivocally asserted. It might seem that in doing so I must change the character of my statements; that whereas I have hitherto been endeavouring to assert this presence against those who deny it, I must now, if I discover any difference with this class of Protestants, point out the danger of carrying a true principle to its extreme. But I shall make no such change, and I see no such danger. I complain of the Lutheran, as I do of the Zwinglian and the Calvinist, for seeking the deliverance of the individual conscience as an ultimate end; and therefore for failing to acknowledge the completeness and integrity of the blessing which Christ has bestowed upon His Church. Whatever logical perplexity the Lutheran has fallen into; whatever violence he has done to the understanding by his theory; whatever of confusion he has introduced between the sensible and the spiritual world, is, as I conceive, the consequence of his not taking the language of our Lord and of His Apostles in a sufficiently plain and literal sense. Our Lord says: “This is my body.” St. Paul addresses the Ephesian converts as sitting in the heavenly places with Christ. He tells the Philippians that their bodies shall be made like unto Christ’s glorious body. Surely this is Christianity. It is the Gospel of the deliverance of the spirit and soul and body from all the fetters by which they are held down, and prevented from fulfilling each its own proper function—from maintaining their right relations to each other. And this emancipation is connected with and consequent upon, our union, as members of one body, with Christ, the crucified, the risen, the glorified Lord of our race. Now, if these be the privileges of Christian men, and if these privileges, whatever they be, are in this sacrament asserted and realised, what a low notion it is, that we are invited to hold communion, not with Christ as He is, not with His body exalted at the right hand of God, but with a body consubstantiated in the elements.
Think only of the freedom, the fellowship of hope—not only compatible with, but inseparable from, humiliation and fear—implied in intercourse with the Prince and Forerunner who has actually broken through the barriers of space and time, whose body has been subjected to the events and sufferings of mortality, and who is now glorified with the glory which He had with the Father before the worlds were, and hereafter to be manifested in the sight of quick and dead. Bring these thoughts before you in connexion with the words: “This is my body,” and with the command that we should shew forth His death till He come; and then reflect, if you can, upon the logical dogma of Consubstantiation, the notion that all these blessings do in some way dwell in the bread and wine. Surely what we need is, that they should be made a perfectly transparent medium through which His glory may be manifested, that nothing should be really beheld by the spirit of the worshippers but He into whose presence they are brought. For this end the elements require a solemn consecration from the priest, through whom Christ distributes them to His flock; not that they may be clothed with some new and peculiar attributes; not that they may acquire some essential and miraculous virtue, but that they may be diverted from their ordinary uses, that they may become purely sacramental. No doubt the world is full of sacraments. Morning and evening, the kind looks and parting words of friends, the laugh of childhood, daily bread, sickness and death; all have a holy sacramental meaning, and should as such be viewed by us. But then they have another meaning, which keeps this out of sight. If we would have them translated to us, we need some pure untroubled element, which has no significancy, except as the organ through which the voice of God speaks to man, and through which he may answer: “Thy servant heareth.” Such we believe are this bread and wine when redeemed to his service: let us not deprive them of their ethereal whiteness and clearness by the colours of our fancy or the clouds of our intellect.
Rationalistic Objections
The philosophical objections to the Eucharist in our day will generally take some such form as this: “The Christian mysteries are evidently a continuation and adaptation to new circumstances of those which formed such an important element in Pagan worship. It would be wrong to say of either, that no meaning is involved in them, that they are merely the inventions of priestcraft. Unquestionably the Samothracian worship did express, not only to those who took part in it, but to the Greeks generally, something deep and awful, something which lay beyond the region of their sense and ordinary experience. The priests availed themselves of the feelings respecting the invisible, which are so curiously wrought into our being, sometimes for a good purpose, sometimes for an evil one. As long as their own faith lasted, they did much to keep alive what was good in the minds of their countrymen; the mischief was, that they continued to practise the rites long after it was possible to attach any value to them; hence insincerity in themselves and growing superstition and debasement in those who looked up to them. Then the old forms of religion passed away, and after an interval of mere scepticism, some new one, suitable to the stage of progress which the world has reached, was of necessity introduced; this, of course, must have its mysteries. They were destined to pass through the same process as the others; first honestly received as the symbols of that which men’s hearts and consciences dreamed of, then sinking into mere impostures. The effort to speak of them now as if they had any reality or significance is a deceitful effort; in persons of any intelligence, a consciously deceitful one; in others, an instance of the mad fanaticism which seeks to galvanize that which has been long dead.”
That there is much plausibility in this statement, and that there are some undoubted truths in it, few will question. The danger is, that one set of persons, being shocked at the conclusion, should not dare to ask themselves what the truths concealed in it are: and should therefore go away with an uncomfortable sense of being only half honest in a service which they nevertheless feel that they cannot part with; and that another class, taking as little pains to sift assertions which come to them with such an air of evidence and wisdom, should adopt them as the satisfactory explanation of difficulties which seem half historical, half personal, and which, if they can but be cleared out of the history, may, it is hoped, cease to perplex us in our own lives. Let it then be conceded at once, 1st. That there is a point of connexion between the Christian mysteries and those of the old world. 2ndly, That the priests in the old world did, as it has been said they did, partly keep alive in the worshippers a sense of what is true and unchangeable, partly sanctify and perpetuate the transitory notions and degrees of knowledge which belonged to their own or a previous stage of civilisation. 3rdly, That the priests in the old world did, as it is reported of them, gradually become deceivers both of others and themselves. 4thly, That neither of these evil tendencies has been confined to the heathen world, but has been manifested just as strongly in Christian Europe, and has connected itself especially with the sacrament of which we are speaking. 5thly, That we are not, any of us, free from either of these tendencies now; that we are as liable to them, and as likely to fall into them, as our forefathers in any age. 6thly, That the temptation to practise those galvanic experiments upon obsolete customs, which have been alluded to, has been strong at all times, and may, on some accounts, be particularly strong at this time. All these concessions I make without a moment’s hesitation, and I will now proceed to examine them in detail.
1st. It is not pretended that the resemblance between the old mysteries and the Christian mysteries consists in any similarity of actual rites or practices. It lies, according to the statement of these philosophers, in the deep acknowledgment which there has been in all ages of a something which the senses cannot grapple with, and which is most awful and necessary for men. That this feeling belongs to the most permanent part of our being; that it cannot satisfy itself; that of every faith, and every society, the deepest principle must be mysterious: this is admitted by both parties. Thus much is involved, and so far as I can see, no more is involved, in the assertion, that the mysteries of Eleusis have that which corresponds to them in the Christian Church.
2ndly, The confusion in the minds of the ancient priest, as well as of the ancient worshippers, was of this kind. He believed in an awful Being above man, and not cognizable by the senses; he believed in an outward universe speaking to the senses. Whether that Being, and this world, were distinct or the same; whether he stood apart in his own awfulness, or was to be seen in the outward forms, or was to be recognized in the hidden powers and life of the universe; whether he was nearer to man, according to the faith of the heroic ages, or to the world in which man dwelt, were the puzzles which nothing could solve, and which the confused indefinite character of the mysteries well expressed. Hence that mixture of a permanent faith with transitory notions, which is so often referred to. The physical world was an unknown unexplored world. Sensible observations, which were, of course, various in every region, were the groundwork of all the study respecting it; these observations were generalised into theories; these theories became parts of the sacerdotal theology. Its nature was necessarily therefore determined by localities, and alterable with the increase of experience. But being grafted upon that which was not changeable, it was treated as if it possessed the same sacredness; and both flourished and suffered together. Hence—
3rdly, We are able to explain the causes of that insincerity which distinguished the later from the earlier priests. The moral aspects of the worship; the reverence for that which the inner man desires; the affections and sympathies which can be rendered to that which is personal, and strictly speaking only to that—these were most strong in the infancy of nations: the sense of the absolute and the unapproachable lay beneath these feelings, but was not brought out into distinct consciousness. The physical notions which were attached to these acknowledgments of moral relations were of a simple kind, directly deduced from simple sensible observations. In process of time, the one set of feelings became weaker and baser; the facts of the other kind, and the inferences from them, were multiplied. The remnants of ancient faith, and still more of ancient fear, became inextricably combined with these; human desires and sympathies inseparably attached themselves to, and embodied themselves in, visible things; these became the real objects of worship, in spite of an ever struggling conviction, that they were not meant to be so, and that the ceremonies and mysteries which had been handed down were not strictly appropriate to them. Meantime the philosopher having enlarged his sphere of outward observation, having felt an impenetrable depth, as well as an undefinable extent, in the world around him, having detected inconsistencies in the anthropomorphic notions of his countrymen, having crushed his own human longings, and lost his sympathies with individual men, begins to speak of the world as the one great mystery. That which he expresses in abstract language, is really the habit of thought in the age generally. The priest secretly confesses that it is his own; but, either from fear, from affection and reverence, from an honest conviction that he has something which the philosopher has not, from mere ignorance, from all these motives combined, or from lower motives than any of these, he cleaves to the old forms and language, cleaves to them so much the more tenaciously, because he doubts whether one part of them may not be as insecure as another, and therefore dreads lest the loss of any part should involve the loss of the whole. The people, meanwhile, are conscious of wants of which the philosopher takes no account, conscious that they are despised by him. They have no longer any guides to that which is higher and nobler than their own conceits; these must at all hazards be gratified; the priest seeks to gratify them, and sinks lower himself, while he drags them down in the attempt.
4thly, It is not difficult for any student of modern history, in both these cases, to perceive the parallel between heathendom and Christendom. If we look at the first ages, we see those deep thoughts concerning God, His being, His unity, His relations to men, which I spoke of in a former section, mixing themselves with, and sometimes almost losing themselves in, speculations about the outward world and the creatures which inhabit it—speculations derived from no revealed authority, ascertained by no careful study and experiment, founded on no satisfactory data; for the most part, the result of mythological or philosophical traditions. These speculations, however, could not be separated by men whose souls and spirits were wholly occupied with Divine contemplations from that which is Divine. They felt that God must be the author of the outward world, that it must be made for His glory, that there are in it marvellous types of that which is spiritual. They believed, moreover, that the visible and invisible had been brought into close and inseparable union, by the incarnation of the Son of God; that every part of their own lives, and of creation, was to be informed by the New Life which had been manifested; and they could not understand how they might maintain these principles, and yet not invest with a certain sanctity their own conceptions of the universe. Then came the downfall of that world under which the Fathers lived, and the growth of the new forms of society in Western Europe. By the merciful providence of God, a great part of the treasures of past times was hidden from the Latin and Teutonic nations, that they might not be hindered from following their own peculiar and appointed course of discipline. This discipline led them into a class of investigations, upon which the Fathers had only in part entered, or which had been entirely subordinate in their minds to the higher theology—investigations respecting the nature of man, the laws and conditions under which he is and acts. Such inquiries, pursued with earnest and holy feelings, and as I think, with the most positively beneficial results, as far as their own peculiar sphere of labour was concerned, by the schoolmen, led, however, to increased confusion in the provinces both of theology and physics. For both alike were viewed through the forms and colours of the human intellect; the invisible relations which the heart and reason acknowledge, the visible things which the eye perceives, were alike subjected to our conceptions and theories, and treated as inseparable from them. In the sacrament of which we are speaking, the results were so striking as to be a clue to those which meet us in every other direction. In the age of the Fathers there might have been a frequent blending of physical with spiritual language; not in general arising from any unbelief in the distinct reality and substantiality of that which is unseen, but rather from a desire to invest the outward universe with a portion of its glory. But in the middle age all these expressions must be stiffened into a theory; logic must inseparably incorporate theological idea with the physical notion, and must itself claim dominion over both. And then it signified not how much the understanding recoiled at its own invention; the dogma was established, the sacrament meant transubstantiation, and those who admitted the institution to be sacred, must at all hazards receive the opinion.
5thly, Such being the state of things, it is not wonderful that for a time faith in the sacrament, as a witness of a real communion between man and his Maker, should be able to uphold the notion which was appended to it; that in a later time the extravagance of the notion should have served to destroy faith already from other causes waxing weak; that the priests should have made desperate efforts to keep both alive together; that in doing so they should have resorted to arguments which made the evil part of their scheme yet stronger, and obscured still more its purer element; that the effect upon their own minds, and the minds of their flocks, should have been a still increasing insincerity. Nor must we suppose that these sad effects were stopped by the Reformation, or that after the Reformation they were confined to those who remained in communion with Rome. Every great shaking must bring out that which is true and sound in men’s hearts, and make the untruth in those who have willingly yielded to it more palpable as well as more actually dominant. The first effect, I make no doubt, took place in the hearts of many Romanists. They were thrown back upon their higher moral principles; these they thought were invaded by the new doctrines; these could not be sacrificed on account of any intellectual puzzles and contradictions. On the other hand, a more conscious and direct identification of the formula with the principle must have been the consequence of the decrees of the Council of Trent upon those who yielded to them, and a disposition to invent some antagonist formula would have been excited by the same cause in the reformed bodies. While the controversies which these attempts awakened were proceeding in the religious circles, men in general became occupied with that new class of thoughts to which I alluded in my first part. The principle upon which the outward world had been hitherto investigated was shewn to be impracticable; men were taught how they might study it in itself, without imputing to it their own conceptions; the new method was rewarded with the most signal discoveries; gradually, as I observed, a pursuit which had produced and which promised such grand results, took the place of every other. This alone was supposed to be founded upon any sure data; if there were any other region, it could only be examined according to these data. Of course all the physical mixtures which had intruded themselves into theology, were scornfully rejected; this was the first step. The next was a disbelief in those forms and conceptions of the mind itself, which had so much darkened the face of nature. And since the Romanist theology was inseparably interwoven with both physics and logic; the Reformation theology not much with physics but even more with the forms of the understanding; there grew up an almost unavoidable suspicion of both. And this suspicion might only have been profitable, as in the end I trust it will prove, if along with it there had not arisen that entire disbelief in spiritual realities, of which moral corruption was the primary, the pride of physical speculation only the secondary, cause. This incredulity found its way into the hearts of the priests of both communions. In some it had the effect of inducing a general latitudinarianism, a willingness to abandon all ancient forms, a tolerance of all kinds of language, because there seemed to be no truth to which any of them was pointing. In others it occasioned a pertinacious clinging to everything which had been, through old tradition or modern innovation, identified with theological principles. The root of these evils was the same in the third age as in the first. God and the world were confounded. That which the spirit of man demands for its satisfaction, that which humanity seeks after as its object, was identified with the visible things over which the spirit is meant to rule, in which humanity is meant to see the image of those realities that surpass it. Hence the mysteries of Christianity, which the first age had sought to connect with misunderstood terrestrial things for the sake of glorifying them, which the second age had connected with those forms and conceptions of our own minds wherein physical things had been hitherto contemplated, were in the third age described as utterly unmeaning by the wise and prudent, who had learnt the right method of studying nature and the impositions which the mind practises upon itself—were held fast with a loving but trembling faith by the poor and the childlike, who, amidst all perplexities, will not forsake that which their hearts tell them that they need.
6thly, I have traced then the causes and the progress of the confusion which is common to the history of the Pagan and the Christian world. And now the question occurs, who are likely to fall into this confusion in our day, and by what means is it to be avoided? I by no means deny that we, the priests of the Christian covenant, are in danger of falling into it. We hear many denials all around us; we are told that things are obsolete, which we feel were never so much needed as now; we are informed that what is objective is nothing worth, and we find from the history of the world that the subjective notions and fancies of men have brought all kinds of perplexities into it. We observe a continual inclination to reject that which seems to us solid and precious, and we are threatened that this inclination is to increase indefinitely. What so natural as that we should throw ourselves back upon the past, that we should pledge ourselves to what we think a determined resistance to the spirit of the age—not only seeking to retain what we have, but to recover what we have lost; that we should number among our losses the apprehensions respecting the physical world, which belong to the infancy of society, the logical systems which grew up in its boyhood; and that we should think the effort to regain these a proof of our reverence for God’s sacraments, an acknowledgment of their permanent and real character? Such feelings, I say, are most natural, and just so far as we yield to them we shall unquestionably try to galvanize the habits and notions of a foregone period.
But why should we not yield to them? I answer: Because in doing so we shew that we are not free from the spirit of the age, but are infected by it; because in doing so, we shew that we are not impressed with the permanence and reality of God’s sacraments, but have yielded to the prevailing scepticism respecting them. For what is the spirit of the age, as it exhibits itself in those philosophers whose objections we are now considering? I have endeavoured, in a former part of this work, to shew that no persons are so disposed as they are to confound God with the world—to look at this visible universe, with its mysterious powers and properties, as the real Being, or at least as the greatest manifestation of the real Being. This pantheistic tendency is especially our tendency at this time; and this has been in all past times the source of that confusion between the permanent and the transitory, the essential and the accidental, which we are told, and rightly told, to beware of. And therefore Christian priests will not be the only galvanizers. It is to the philosophers of the age following the promulgation of Christianity, to Plotinus and Porphyry and Jamblichus, that we are indebted for the most remarkable galvanic experiments on record. They tried to reproduce the old Pagan forms, expressly as a means of giving a body to their philosophy, which otherwise they felt that it had not, and as a means of resisting the progress of the new kingdom. There are symptoms of the same inclination among us now. We shall see more and more of them. Pantheism never has existed, and never will exist, in that naked essential character which it affects. It will beget idolatries, and since the imagination of man has well-nigh exhausted itself in that kind of production, these idolatries will not be new, but old. How may they be withstood? I believe in no way so effectually as by the simple putting forth of this sacrament, not clothed with a number of fantastic rites and emblems, but in its own dreadful grandeur, as the bond of communion between heaven and earth,—as a witness that man is not a creature of this world, but has his home, his citizenship in another,—as a witness that his spirit is not the function or creature of his body, and has not therefore need to make out its enjoyments from the things which the eye sees, and the ear hears; but that his body is the attendant and minister of his spirit, is to be exalted by it, is to bring all visible things under it,—as a witness that the Son of man is set down at the right hand of the Throne of God, and that those who believe in Him, and suffer with Him, are meant to live and reign with Him there. The forms of nature, the forms of the understanding, have striven to reduce this sacrament to their own level; it remains as a mighty power in God’s hands, to raise man above these forms, into communion with Himself.
The Romish System
After the remarks under the last head, it may seem scarcely needful that I should vindicate my statements respecting this sacrament from the charge of Romanism; but since I have maintained that the character of the Eucharistic feast is sacrificial, that Christ is really present in it, and that the words of institution are to be taken literally; since it is very evidently implied in what I have said, that a certain order of persons first received the sacramental elements, and that a certain order ought to administer them now: it may be advisable to shew, even at the risk of some repetition, wherein I am opposed to the Romish theory upon each of these points.
1. I need only ask the reader to compare the observations which were made respecting the difference between the Catholic and the Romish idea of Baptism, and the Catholic and Romish forms of worship, with those which have been made in this section respecting the question of sacrifice; in order that he may perceive the principle which governs all three cases. I complained that the baptized man, according to the Romish theory, only receives a momentary gift, and is not admitted into a permanent state; and that the worshipper, according to the Romish notion, is purchasing some future benefit by his acts of devotion, not claiming a blessing which has been already purchased for him. It is impossible that he should not act in strict conformity to these maxims when he is dealing with the sacrifice which is the foundation of the Christian’s state, and the consummation of the Christian’s worship. The Eucharistic sacrifice is of course regarded by him as the means of obtaining those advantages and blessings which Christ’s sacrifice has not fully procured for us, or which we through our sins and negligence have lost. Such, I need hardly say, is the view commonly presented of it by Romish writers, and such is the view against which all the attacks of the Reformers were directed; consequently the doctrine which I have put forward, that this feast derives its peculiarity, derives its sacrificial character, from the fact that a complete sacrifice has been offered up for man, is far more formally and practically opposed to Romanism than that which is prevalent in our day. There is no formal opposition between the doctrine which denies the very existence of a Eucharistic sacrifice, and that which affirms it to be the carrying out of an incomplete sacrifice made for us by Christ. The two opinions contradict each other, but they cannot be brought into comparison; each is continually gaining strength from the denial which is contained in the other: but what each asserts, or to what test they can be brought, the supporters of them are constantly puzzled to discover. Neither is there a practical opposition, for the Protestants are constantly losing sight of the finished sacrifice of Christ, in their anxiety to assert the importance of human faith; and the Romanists are constantly trying, through a violent effort of recollection, assisted by visible images and presentations, to bring back the very event of our Lord’s crucifixion, and all the circumstances attending it: so that there is an unconscious confession on the part of the one, that there must be acts of ours in which the blessing of the sacrifice is realised; on the part of the other, that it is that one sacrifice, and not any repetition of it by us, in which all virtue dwells. I maintain that the sacrament being acknowledged as the sacrificial feast of the new dispensation, realises and harmonises these two truths, satisfies the meaning which the Romanist feels that he cannot part with, and so enables him to cast aside, as degrading, dangerous, and antichristian, that doctrine which has been one of the greatest barriers between him and his Protestant brethren.
2. To the same habit of mind which introduced this view of the Eucharistic sacrifice, we must attribute the entertainment which was given by the Church, after some hard struggles, to the doctrine respecting the transubstantiation of the elements. I have discovered the intellectual origin of this dogma in the scholastic philosophy; but that philosophy could never have given it currency, if there had not been a moral predisposition in men’s minds to receive it. The cry for some signal proof of condescension to our low estate, the sense of a weakness which could only be met by a mighty act of Divine humiliation, these feelings characterised the Middle Ages, and constituted their strength. The belief that by these acts the spirit of man was to be raised out of its grave of sense, was to be made capable of actual communion with the invisible and the absolute; this belief hovered about many minds, was conveyed in many emblems and enigmas, was actually grasped by some earnest and thoughtful men, but never really entered into the practical life of the period. To shew forth acts of bravery, condescension, sacrifice, and so to glorify God, was the desire of a number; to inspire others with the same ambition, the aim of a few. But everywhere one may trace the wish to see the likeness of God in visible things, and under earthly conditions, rather than the craving to see Him as He is. I have no need to inquire how far good or evil preponderated in this temper of mind. That it was a very imperfect one, most will be ready to acknowledge; and that its imperfection laid it open to invasions of gross sensuality, is only questioned by resolutely one-sided or one-eyed inquirers. In such a state of mind it was impossible that the thought of communion with Christ where He is, should be as distinctly presented to the best men in their best moments, as it may now be presented to indifferent men who may very little realise their own vision. The discovery, therefore, of a substitute for this faith, of a way in which Christ might be believed to be present by a fresh act of descent and condescension into the circumstances of human nature, was naturally and eagerly welcomed; the obstacles which the understanding opposed to the opinion readily swept away. What sensuality and death grew out of this notion, were fostered by it, and helped to keep it alive; what profaneness mingled in the speculations to which it gave rise, how it connected itself with every other shape of idolatry, I think all ecclesiastical history demonstrates. But I have no belief that the demonstration will be heeded, that facts will not be perverted and explained away, that the natural results of a system will not be treated as if they might be condemned without any reference to the system itself, unless men be led to perceive that there is a spiritual truth which this doctrine has been counterfeiting and keeping out of sight, and to which it is in far more direct antipathy than it ever can be to the different Protestant and infidel notions which have been set up against it.
3. It is evident from these remarks, and from all which I have said in this section, that I do not seek to get rid of the papal notion respecting a real Presence, merely by saying that what is spiritual is also most real. I do indeed look upon that proposition as nearly the most important one which a theological student can think of or remember, and also as the one which Romanism is most habitually denying. But I have maintained, that in order to the full acknowledgment of Christ’s spiritual presence, we must distinctly acknowledge that He is clothed with a body; that if we lose this belief, we adopt a vague pantheistic notion of a presence hovering about us somewhere in the air, in place of a clear spiritual apprehension of a Person in whom all truth and love dwell; that the spiritual organ therefore does demand an actual body for its nourishment; that through that spiritual organ our bodies themselves are meant to be purified and glorified; that this sacrament meets and satisfies the needs both of the human spirit which is redeemed, and of the body which is waiting for its redemption. But all these admissions only bring out the difference with the Romanist into stronger relief. To enter into fellowship with Christ as He is, ascended at the right hand of God, in a body of glory and not of humiliation, this must be the desire of a Christian man, if he seek the presence of a real, not an imaginary object, if he desire his body as well as his spirit to be raised and exalted. On this ground then he must reject all theories which involve the imagination of a descent into the elements; on this ground, also, he must feel that the intellectual contradiction which such theories contain, and even boast of, is the counterpart of a spiritual contradiction still more gross and dangerous.
4. I must say a few words before I conclude upon the difference between my views and those of the Romanists, respecting those who administer this sacrament. The pure Protestant expresses his differences in such words as these. The Romanist, he says, unhappily connecting the idea of sacrifice with the Eucharist, necessarily supposes that the Christian Church must have its priests as well as the Jewish; we rejecting the first idea, of course reject the second. Now as I have so carefully connected the idea of sacrifice with the Eucharist, it follows from this statement, that if I suppose it to be administered by human hands at all, I must suppose those hands to be, in some sense of the word, sacerdotal. Nay, it would seem to follow by almost necessary inference, that if I suppose the Jewish sacrifice to have passed into something higher, I must suppose the Jewish priesthood to have passed into something higher. And this in fact is my belief. I do think that a Melchisedec priesthood has succeeded to an Aaronical priesthood, even as the power of an endless life has succeeded to the law of a carnal commandment. I do think that he who presents the perfect sacrifice before God, and himself and his people as redeemed by that sacrifice, has a higher function than he had who presented the daily offering, or made the yearly atonement before God. I do think that he who is permitted to feed the people with this bread and wine has a higher work to do than he who came out of the holy place to bless the people in God’s name. And I complain of the Romanists for lowering this office, for depriving it of its spiritual and Catholic character, for reducing it to the level or below the level of that which existed before the incarnation. No honour which is put upon the person of the priest can make amends to him for the degradation which he suffers by being treated as if he were without the veil, pleading for admission into the presence of God, not claiming the privilege for himself and his people of being admitted into it. No emblems which exhibit his own mysterious glory and beauty can be any compensation for the loss of the belief that he is permitted with open face to behold the glory of his Lord. Above all, the differences which are made between him and his flock, especially that most gross and offensive one, by whatever arguments it may be palliated, of permitting him alone to receive the sacramental wine, do but shew that he is not like his Lord, that he is not one of many brethren, but has only the melancholy delight of fancying that there are blessings reserved for him in which other men are not sharers. Herein he is far below the Jew. The high priest believed that he was one of a kingdom of priests; that he received his garments of beauty and his holy mitre because he was their representative. A Jew would have answered to the complaint of Korah. “Ye take too much upon you, seeing that all the congregation are holy, every one of them,”—“We take this upon us which has been put upon us, because the congregation is holy, and because it would not be holy if we were not consecrated to be witnesses and preservers of its holiness.” A Jew could see that the oil upon Aaron’s head went down to the skirts of his garments. It is not surely for Christians and Catholics to set up an office in the Church against the Church itself, to set at naught the ascription which they are appointed to offer up in the name of the whole body: “Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and hath made us kings and priests unto God and His Father; to Him be glory and dominion for ever and for ever.” But I am intruding upon the subject of the next section.
Notes
Mr. Coleridge has expressed all that I have been saying on this momentous subject in these striking words: “All this comes from the young men of this day having been educated to understand the Divine Omnipresence in any sense rather than the alone safe and legitimate one, The Presence Of All Things To God.”—Aids to Reflection, p. 398; and consider the whole passage from p. 388 to p. 401.↩︎