4. Erroneous views of the Lord's Supper.A. The Romanist view.The Romanist view,—that the bread and wine are changed by priestly consecration into the very body and blood of Christ; that this consecration is a new offering of Christ's sacrifice; and that, by a physical partaking of the elements, the communicant receives saving grace from God. To this doctrine of“transubstantiation”we reply:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of Scripture. In Mat. 26:26,“this is my body”means:“this is a symbol of my body.”Since Christ was with the disciples in visible form at the institution of the Supper, he could not have intended them to recognize the bread as being his literal body.“The body of Christ is present in the bread, just as it had been in the passover lamb, of which the bread took the place”(John 6:53 contains no reference to the Lord's Supper, although it describes that spiritual union with Christ which the Supper symbolizes;cf.63. In 1 Cor. 10:16, 17, κοινωίαν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ is a figurative expression for the spiritual partaking of Christ. In Mark 8:33, we are not to infer that Peter was actually“Satan,”nor does 1 Cor. 12:12 prove that we are all Christs.Cf.Gen. 41:26; 1 Cor. 10:4).Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.(b) It contradicts the evidence of the senses, as well as of all scientific tests that can be applied. If we cannot trust our senses as to the unchanged material qualities of bread and wine, we cannot trust them when they report to us the words of Christ.Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.[pg 967](c) It involves the denial of the completeness of Christ's past sacrifice, and the assumption that a human priest can repeat or add to the atonement made by Christ once for all (Heb. 9:28—ἅπαξ προσενεχθείς). The Lord's Supper is never called a sacrifice, nor are altars, priests, or consecrations ever spoken of, in the New Testament. The priests of the old dispensation are expressly contrasted with the ministers of the new. The former“ministered about sacred things,”i. e., performed sacred rites and waited at the altar; but the latter“preach the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:13, 14).Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”(d) It destroys Christianity by externalizing it. Romanists make all other service a mere appendage to the communion. Physical and magical salvation is not Christianity, but is essential paganism.Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.[pg 968]Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.B. The Lutheran and High Church view.The Lutheran and High Church view,—that the communicant, in partaking of the consecrated elements, eats the veritable body and drinks the veritable blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine, although the elements themselves do not cease to be material. To this doctrine of“consubstantiation”we object:(a) That the view is not required by Scripture.—All the passages cited in its support may be better interpreted as referring to a partaking of the elements as symbols. If Christ's body be ubiquitous, as this theory holds, we partake of it at every meal, as really as at the Lord's Supper.(b) That the view is inseparable from the general sacramental system of which it forms a part.—In imposing physical and material conditions of receiving Christ, it contradicts the doctrine of justification only by faith; changes the ordinance from a sign, into a means, of salvation; involves the necessity of a sacerdotal order for the sake of properly consecrating the elements; and logically tends to the Romanist conclusions of ritualism and idolatry.(c) That it holds each communicant to be a partaker of Christ's veritable body and blood, whether he be a believer or not,—the result, in the absence of faith, being condemnation instead of salvation. Thus the whole character of the ordinance is changed from a festival occasion to one of mystery and fear, and the whole gospel method of salvation is obscured.Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.
4. Erroneous views of the Lord's Supper.A. The Romanist view.The Romanist view,—that the bread and wine are changed by priestly consecration into the very body and blood of Christ; that this consecration is a new offering of Christ's sacrifice; and that, by a physical partaking of the elements, the communicant receives saving grace from God. To this doctrine of“transubstantiation”we reply:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of Scripture. In Mat. 26:26,“this is my body”means:“this is a symbol of my body.”Since Christ was with the disciples in visible form at the institution of the Supper, he could not have intended them to recognize the bread as being his literal body.“The body of Christ is present in the bread, just as it had been in the passover lamb, of which the bread took the place”(John 6:53 contains no reference to the Lord's Supper, although it describes that spiritual union with Christ which the Supper symbolizes;cf.63. In 1 Cor. 10:16, 17, κοινωίαν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ is a figurative expression for the spiritual partaking of Christ. In Mark 8:33, we are not to infer that Peter was actually“Satan,”nor does 1 Cor. 12:12 prove that we are all Christs.Cf.Gen. 41:26; 1 Cor. 10:4).Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.(b) It contradicts the evidence of the senses, as well as of all scientific tests that can be applied. If we cannot trust our senses as to the unchanged material qualities of bread and wine, we cannot trust them when they report to us the words of Christ.Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.[pg 967](c) It involves the denial of the completeness of Christ's past sacrifice, and the assumption that a human priest can repeat or add to the atonement made by Christ once for all (Heb. 9:28—ἅπαξ προσενεχθείς). The Lord's Supper is never called a sacrifice, nor are altars, priests, or consecrations ever spoken of, in the New Testament. The priests of the old dispensation are expressly contrasted with the ministers of the new. The former“ministered about sacred things,”i. e., performed sacred rites and waited at the altar; but the latter“preach the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:13, 14).Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”(d) It destroys Christianity by externalizing it. Romanists make all other service a mere appendage to the communion. Physical and magical salvation is not Christianity, but is essential paganism.Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.[pg 968]Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.B. The Lutheran and High Church view.The Lutheran and High Church view,—that the communicant, in partaking of the consecrated elements, eats the veritable body and drinks the veritable blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine, although the elements themselves do not cease to be material. To this doctrine of“consubstantiation”we object:(a) That the view is not required by Scripture.—All the passages cited in its support may be better interpreted as referring to a partaking of the elements as symbols. If Christ's body be ubiquitous, as this theory holds, we partake of it at every meal, as really as at the Lord's Supper.(b) That the view is inseparable from the general sacramental system of which it forms a part.—In imposing physical and material conditions of receiving Christ, it contradicts the doctrine of justification only by faith; changes the ordinance from a sign, into a means, of salvation; involves the necessity of a sacerdotal order for the sake of properly consecrating the elements; and logically tends to the Romanist conclusions of ritualism and idolatry.(c) That it holds each communicant to be a partaker of Christ's veritable body and blood, whether he be a believer or not,—the result, in the absence of faith, being condemnation instead of salvation. Thus the whole character of the ordinance is changed from a festival occasion to one of mystery and fear, and the whole gospel method of salvation is obscured.Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.
4. Erroneous views of the Lord's Supper.A. The Romanist view.The Romanist view,—that the bread and wine are changed by priestly consecration into the very body and blood of Christ; that this consecration is a new offering of Christ's sacrifice; and that, by a physical partaking of the elements, the communicant receives saving grace from God. To this doctrine of“transubstantiation”we reply:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of Scripture. In Mat. 26:26,“this is my body”means:“this is a symbol of my body.”Since Christ was with the disciples in visible form at the institution of the Supper, he could not have intended them to recognize the bread as being his literal body.“The body of Christ is present in the bread, just as it had been in the passover lamb, of which the bread took the place”(John 6:53 contains no reference to the Lord's Supper, although it describes that spiritual union with Christ which the Supper symbolizes;cf.63. In 1 Cor. 10:16, 17, κοινωίαν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ is a figurative expression for the spiritual partaking of Christ. In Mark 8:33, we are not to infer that Peter was actually“Satan,”nor does 1 Cor. 12:12 prove that we are all Christs.Cf.Gen. 41:26; 1 Cor. 10:4).Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.(b) It contradicts the evidence of the senses, as well as of all scientific tests that can be applied. If we cannot trust our senses as to the unchanged material qualities of bread and wine, we cannot trust them when they report to us the words of Christ.Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.[pg 967](c) It involves the denial of the completeness of Christ's past sacrifice, and the assumption that a human priest can repeat or add to the atonement made by Christ once for all (Heb. 9:28—ἅπαξ προσενεχθείς). The Lord's Supper is never called a sacrifice, nor are altars, priests, or consecrations ever spoken of, in the New Testament. The priests of the old dispensation are expressly contrasted with the ministers of the new. The former“ministered about sacred things,”i. e., performed sacred rites and waited at the altar; but the latter“preach the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:13, 14).Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”(d) It destroys Christianity by externalizing it. Romanists make all other service a mere appendage to the communion. Physical and magical salvation is not Christianity, but is essential paganism.Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.[pg 968]Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.B. The Lutheran and High Church view.The Lutheran and High Church view,—that the communicant, in partaking of the consecrated elements, eats the veritable body and drinks the veritable blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine, although the elements themselves do not cease to be material. To this doctrine of“consubstantiation”we object:(a) That the view is not required by Scripture.—All the passages cited in its support may be better interpreted as referring to a partaking of the elements as symbols. If Christ's body be ubiquitous, as this theory holds, we partake of it at every meal, as really as at the Lord's Supper.(b) That the view is inseparable from the general sacramental system of which it forms a part.—In imposing physical and material conditions of receiving Christ, it contradicts the doctrine of justification only by faith; changes the ordinance from a sign, into a means, of salvation; involves the necessity of a sacerdotal order for the sake of properly consecrating the elements; and logically tends to the Romanist conclusions of ritualism and idolatry.(c) That it holds each communicant to be a partaker of Christ's veritable body and blood, whether he be a believer or not,—the result, in the absence of faith, being condemnation instead of salvation. Thus the whole character of the ordinance is changed from a festival occasion to one of mystery and fear, and the whole gospel method of salvation is obscured.Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.
4. Erroneous views of the Lord's Supper.A. The Romanist view.The Romanist view,—that the bread and wine are changed by priestly consecration into the very body and blood of Christ; that this consecration is a new offering of Christ's sacrifice; and that, by a physical partaking of the elements, the communicant receives saving grace from God. To this doctrine of“transubstantiation”we reply:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of Scripture. In Mat. 26:26,“this is my body”means:“this is a symbol of my body.”Since Christ was with the disciples in visible form at the institution of the Supper, he could not have intended them to recognize the bread as being his literal body.“The body of Christ is present in the bread, just as it had been in the passover lamb, of which the bread took the place”(John 6:53 contains no reference to the Lord's Supper, although it describes that spiritual union with Christ which the Supper symbolizes;cf.63. In 1 Cor. 10:16, 17, κοινωίαν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ is a figurative expression for the spiritual partaking of Christ. In Mark 8:33, we are not to infer that Peter was actually“Satan,”nor does 1 Cor. 12:12 prove that we are all Christs.Cf.Gen. 41:26; 1 Cor. 10:4).Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.(b) It contradicts the evidence of the senses, as well as of all scientific tests that can be applied. If we cannot trust our senses as to the unchanged material qualities of bread and wine, we cannot trust them when they report to us the words of Christ.Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.[pg 967](c) It involves the denial of the completeness of Christ's past sacrifice, and the assumption that a human priest can repeat or add to the atonement made by Christ once for all (Heb. 9:28—ἅπαξ προσενεχθείς). The Lord's Supper is never called a sacrifice, nor are altars, priests, or consecrations ever spoken of, in the New Testament. The priests of the old dispensation are expressly contrasted with the ministers of the new. The former“ministered about sacred things,”i. e., performed sacred rites and waited at the altar; but the latter“preach the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:13, 14).Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”(d) It destroys Christianity by externalizing it. Romanists make all other service a mere appendage to the communion. Physical and magical salvation is not Christianity, but is essential paganism.Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.[pg 968]Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.B. The Lutheran and High Church view.The Lutheran and High Church view,—that the communicant, in partaking of the consecrated elements, eats the veritable body and drinks the veritable blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine, although the elements themselves do not cease to be material. To this doctrine of“consubstantiation”we object:(a) That the view is not required by Scripture.—All the passages cited in its support may be better interpreted as referring to a partaking of the elements as symbols. If Christ's body be ubiquitous, as this theory holds, we partake of it at every meal, as really as at the Lord's Supper.(b) That the view is inseparable from the general sacramental system of which it forms a part.—In imposing physical and material conditions of receiving Christ, it contradicts the doctrine of justification only by faith; changes the ordinance from a sign, into a means, of salvation; involves the necessity of a sacerdotal order for the sake of properly consecrating the elements; and logically tends to the Romanist conclusions of ritualism and idolatry.(c) That it holds each communicant to be a partaker of Christ's veritable body and blood, whether he be a believer or not,—the result, in the absence of faith, being condemnation instead of salvation. Thus the whole character of the ordinance is changed from a festival occasion to one of mystery and fear, and the whole gospel method of salvation is obscured.Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.
4. Erroneous views of the Lord's Supper.A. The Romanist view.The Romanist view,—that the bread and wine are changed by priestly consecration into the very body and blood of Christ; that this consecration is a new offering of Christ's sacrifice; and that, by a physical partaking of the elements, the communicant receives saving grace from God. To this doctrine of“transubstantiation”we reply:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of Scripture. In Mat. 26:26,“this is my body”means:“this is a symbol of my body.”Since Christ was with the disciples in visible form at the institution of the Supper, he could not have intended them to recognize the bread as being his literal body.“The body of Christ is present in the bread, just as it had been in the passover lamb, of which the bread took the place”(John 6:53 contains no reference to the Lord's Supper, although it describes that spiritual union with Christ which the Supper symbolizes;cf.63. In 1 Cor. 10:16, 17, κοινωίαν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ is a figurative expression for the spiritual partaking of Christ. In Mark 8:33, we are not to infer that Peter was actually“Satan,”nor does 1 Cor. 12:12 prove that we are all Christs.Cf.Gen. 41:26; 1 Cor. 10:4).Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.(b) It contradicts the evidence of the senses, as well as of all scientific tests that can be applied. If we cannot trust our senses as to the unchanged material qualities of bread and wine, we cannot trust them when they report to us the words of Christ.Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.[pg 967](c) It involves the denial of the completeness of Christ's past sacrifice, and the assumption that a human priest can repeat or add to the atonement made by Christ once for all (Heb. 9:28—ἅπαξ προσενεχθείς). The Lord's Supper is never called a sacrifice, nor are altars, priests, or consecrations ever spoken of, in the New Testament. The priests of the old dispensation are expressly contrasted with the ministers of the new. The former“ministered about sacred things,”i. e., performed sacred rites and waited at the altar; but the latter“preach the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:13, 14).Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”(d) It destroys Christianity by externalizing it. Romanists make all other service a mere appendage to the communion. Physical and magical salvation is not Christianity, but is essential paganism.Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.[pg 968]Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.B. The Lutheran and High Church view.The Lutheran and High Church view,—that the communicant, in partaking of the consecrated elements, eats the veritable body and drinks the veritable blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine, although the elements themselves do not cease to be material. To this doctrine of“consubstantiation”we object:(a) That the view is not required by Scripture.—All the passages cited in its support may be better interpreted as referring to a partaking of the elements as symbols. If Christ's body be ubiquitous, as this theory holds, we partake of it at every meal, as really as at the Lord's Supper.(b) That the view is inseparable from the general sacramental system of which it forms a part.—In imposing physical and material conditions of receiving Christ, it contradicts the doctrine of justification only by faith; changes the ordinance from a sign, into a means, of salvation; involves the necessity of a sacerdotal order for the sake of properly consecrating the elements; and logically tends to the Romanist conclusions of ritualism and idolatry.(c) That it holds each communicant to be a partaker of Christ's veritable body and blood, whether he be a believer or not,—the result, in the absence of faith, being condemnation instead of salvation. Thus the whole character of the ordinance is changed from a festival occasion to one of mystery and fear, and the whole gospel method of salvation is obscured.Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.
4. Erroneous views of the Lord's Supper.A. The Romanist view.The Romanist view,—that the bread and wine are changed by priestly consecration into the very body and blood of Christ; that this consecration is a new offering of Christ's sacrifice; and that, by a physical partaking of the elements, the communicant receives saving grace from God. To this doctrine of“transubstantiation”we reply:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of Scripture. In Mat. 26:26,“this is my body”means:“this is a symbol of my body.”Since Christ was with the disciples in visible form at the institution of the Supper, he could not have intended them to recognize the bread as being his literal body.“The body of Christ is present in the bread, just as it had been in the passover lamb, of which the bread took the place”(John 6:53 contains no reference to the Lord's Supper, although it describes that spiritual union with Christ which the Supper symbolizes;cf.63. In 1 Cor. 10:16, 17, κοινωίαν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ is a figurative expression for the spiritual partaking of Christ. In Mark 8:33, we are not to infer that Peter was actually“Satan,”nor does 1 Cor. 12:12 prove that we are all Christs.Cf.Gen. 41:26; 1 Cor. 10:4).Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.(b) It contradicts the evidence of the senses, as well as of all scientific tests that can be applied. If we cannot trust our senses as to the unchanged material qualities of bread and wine, we cannot trust them when they report to us the words of Christ.Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.[pg 967](c) It involves the denial of the completeness of Christ's past sacrifice, and the assumption that a human priest can repeat or add to the atonement made by Christ once for all (Heb. 9:28—ἅπαξ προσενεχθείς). The Lord's Supper is never called a sacrifice, nor are altars, priests, or consecrations ever spoken of, in the New Testament. The priests of the old dispensation are expressly contrasted with the ministers of the new. The former“ministered about sacred things,”i. e., performed sacred rites and waited at the altar; but the latter“preach the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:13, 14).Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”(d) It destroys Christianity by externalizing it. Romanists make all other service a mere appendage to the communion. Physical and magical salvation is not Christianity, but is essential paganism.Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.[pg 968]Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.B. The Lutheran and High Church view.The Lutheran and High Church view,—that the communicant, in partaking of the consecrated elements, eats the veritable body and drinks the veritable blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine, although the elements themselves do not cease to be material. To this doctrine of“consubstantiation”we object:(a) That the view is not required by Scripture.—All the passages cited in its support may be better interpreted as referring to a partaking of the elements as symbols. If Christ's body be ubiquitous, as this theory holds, we partake of it at every meal, as really as at the Lord's Supper.(b) That the view is inseparable from the general sacramental system of which it forms a part.—In imposing physical and material conditions of receiving Christ, it contradicts the doctrine of justification only by faith; changes the ordinance from a sign, into a means, of salvation; involves the necessity of a sacerdotal order for the sake of properly consecrating the elements; and logically tends to the Romanist conclusions of ritualism and idolatry.(c) That it holds each communicant to be a partaker of Christ's veritable body and blood, whether he be a believer or not,—the result, in the absence of faith, being condemnation instead of salvation. Thus the whole character of the ordinance is changed from a festival occasion to one of mystery and fear, and the whole gospel method of salvation is obscured.Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.
A. The Romanist view.The Romanist view,—that the bread and wine are changed by priestly consecration into the very body and blood of Christ; that this consecration is a new offering of Christ's sacrifice; and that, by a physical partaking of the elements, the communicant receives saving grace from God. To this doctrine of“transubstantiation”we reply:(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of Scripture. In Mat. 26:26,“this is my body”means:“this is a symbol of my body.”Since Christ was with the disciples in visible form at the institution of the Supper, he could not have intended them to recognize the bread as being his literal body.“The body of Christ is present in the bread, just as it had been in the passover lamb, of which the bread took the place”(John 6:53 contains no reference to the Lord's Supper, although it describes that spiritual union with Christ which the Supper symbolizes;cf.63. In 1 Cor. 10:16, 17, κοινωίαν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ is a figurative expression for the spiritual partaking of Christ. In Mark 8:33, we are not to infer that Peter was actually“Satan,”nor does 1 Cor. 12:12 prove that we are all Christs.Cf.Gen. 41:26; 1 Cor. 10:4).Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.(b) It contradicts the evidence of the senses, as well as of all scientific tests that can be applied. If we cannot trust our senses as to the unchanged material qualities of bread and wine, we cannot trust them when they report to us the words of Christ.Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.[pg 967](c) It involves the denial of the completeness of Christ's past sacrifice, and the assumption that a human priest can repeat or add to the atonement made by Christ once for all (Heb. 9:28—ἅπαξ προσενεχθείς). The Lord's Supper is never called a sacrifice, nor are altars, priests, or consecrations ever spoken of, in the New Testament. The priests of the old dispensation are expressly contrasted with the ministers of the new. The former“ministered about sacred things,”i. e., performed sacred rites and waited at the altar; but the latter“preach the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:13, 14).Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”(d) It destroys Christianity by externalizing it. Romanists make all other service a mere appendage to the communion. Physical and magical salvation is not Christianity, but is essential paganism.Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.[pg 968]Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.
The Romanist view,—that the bread and wine are changed by priestly consecration into the very body and blood of Christ; that this consecration is a new offering of Christ's sacrifice; and that, by a physical partaking of the elements, the communicant receives saving grace from God. To this doctrine of“transubstantiation”we reply:
(a) It rests upon a false interpretation of Scripture. In Mat. 26:26,“this is my body”means:“this is a symbol of my body.”Since Christ was with the disciples in visible form at the institution of the Supper, he could not have intended them to recognize the bread as being his literal body.“The body of Christ is present in the bread, just as it had been in the passover lamb, of which the bread took the place”(John 6:53 contains no reference to the Lord's Supper, although it describes that spiritual union with Christ which the Supper symbolizes;cf.63. In 1 Cor. 10:16, 17, κοινωίαν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ is a figurative expression for the spiritual partaking of Christ. In Mark 8:33, we are not to infer that Peter was actually“Satan,”nor does 1 Cor. 12:12 prove that we are all Christs.Cf.Gen. 41:26; 1 Cor. 10:4).
Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.
Mat. 26:28—“This is my blood ... which is poured out,”cannot be meant to be taken literally, since Christ's blood was not yet shed. Hence the Douay version (Roman Catholic), without warrant, changes the tense and reads,“which shall be shed.”At the institution of the Supper, it is not conceivable that Christ should hold his body in his own hands, and then break it to the disciples. There were not two bodies there. Zwingle:“The words of institution are not the mandatory‘become’: they are only an explanation of the sign.”When I point to a picture and say:“This is George Washington,”I do not mean that the veritable body and blood of George Washington are before me. So when a teacher points to a map and says:“This is New York,”or when Jesus refers to John the Baptist, and says:“this is Elijah, that is to come”(Mat. 11:14). Jacob, The Lord's Supper, Historically Considered—“It originally marked, not a real presence, but a real absence, of Christ as the Son of God made man”—that is, a real absence of hisbody. Therefore the Supper, reminding us of his body, is to be observed in the church“till he come”(1 Cor. 11:26).
John 6:53—“Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves”must be interpreted byverse 63—“It is the spirit that giveth life; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life.”1 Cor. 10:16—“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of[marg.:‘participation in’]the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of[marg.[pg 966]‘participation in’]the body of Christ?”—see Expositor's Greek Testament,in loco;Mark 8:33—“But he turning about, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and saith, Get thee behind me, Satan”;1 Cor. 12:12—“For the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body; so also is Christ.”cf.Gen. 41:26—“The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one;”1 Cor. 10:4—“they drank of a spiritual rock that followed them: and the rock was Christ.”
Queen Elizabeth:“Christ was the Word that spake it: He took the bread and brake it; And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it.”Yes, we say; but what does the Lord make it? Not his body, but only a symbol of his body. Sir Thomas More went back to the doctrine of transubstantiation which the wisdom of his age was almost unanimous in rejecting. In his Utopia, written to earlier years, he had made deism the ideal religion. Extreme Romanism was his reaction from this former extreme. Bread and wine are mere remembrancers, as were the lamb and bitter herbs at the Passover. The partaker is spiritually affected by the bread and wine, only as was the pious Israelite in receiving the paschal symbols; see Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 25, 42.
E. G. Robinson:“The greatest power in Romanism is its power of visible representation. Ritualism is only elaborate symbolism. It is interesting to remember that this prostration of the priest before the consecrated wafer is no part of even original Roman Catholicism.”Stanley, Life and Letters, 2:213—“The pope, when he celebrates the communion, always stands in exactly the opposite direction [to that of modern ritualists], not with his back but with his face to the people, no doubt following the primitive usage.”So in Raphael's picture of the Miracle of Bolsina, the priest is at the north end of the table, in the very attitude of a Protestant clergyman. Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:211—“The unity of the bread, of which each enjoys a part, represents the unity of the body of Christ, which consists in the community of believers. If we are to speak of a presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper, that can only be thought of, in the sense of Paul, as pertaining to the mystical body,i. e., the Christian Community. Augustine and Zwingle, who have expressed most clearly this meaning of the Supper, have therefore caught quite correctly the sense of the Apostle.”
Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 40-53—“The phrase‘consecration of the elements’is unwarranted. The leaven and the mustard seed were in no way consecrated when Jesus pronounced them symbols of divine things. The bread and wine are not arbitrarily appointed remembrancers, they are remembrancers in their very nature. There is no change in them. So every other loaf is a symbol, as well as that used in the Supper. When St. Patrick held up the shamrock as the symbol of the Trinity, he meant that every such sprig was the same. Only the bread of the daily meal is Christ's body. Only the washing of dirty feet is the fulfilment of Christ's command. The loaf not eaten to satisfy hunger is not Christ's symbolic body at all.”Here we must part company with Dr. Fox. We grant the natural fitness of the elements for which he contends. But we hold also to a divine appointment of the bread and wine for a special and sacred use, even as the“bow in the cloud”(Gen. 9:13), because it was a natural emblem, was consecrated to a special religious use.
(b) It contradicts the evidence of the senses, as well as of all scientific tests that can be applied. If we cannot trust our senses as to the unchanged material qualities of bread and wine, we cannot trust them when they report to us the words of Christ.
Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.
Gibbon was rejoiced at the discovery that, while the real presence is attested by only a single sense—our sight [as employed in reading the words of Christ]—the real presence is disproved by three of our senses, sight, touch, and taste. It is not well to purchase faith in this dogma at the price of absolute scepticism. Stanley, on Baptism, in his Christian Institutions, tells us that, in the third and fourth centuries, the belief that the water of baptism was changed into the blood of Christ was nearly as firmly and widely fixed as the belief that the bread and wine of the communion were changed into his flesh and blood. Döllinger:“When I am told that I must swear to the truth of these doctrines [of papal infallibility and apostolic succession], my feeling is just as if I were asked to swear that two and two make five, and not four.”Teacher:“Why did Henry VIII quarrel with the pope?”Scholar:“Because the pope had commanded him to put away his wife on pain of transubstantiation.”The transubstantiation of Henry VIII is quite as rational as the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Eucharist.
(c) It involves the denial of the completeness of Christ's past sacrifice, and the assumption that a human priest can repeat or add to the atonement made by Christ once for all (Heb. 9:28—ἅπαξ προσενεχθείς). The Lord's Supper is never called a sacrifice, nor are altars, priests, or consecrations ever spoken of, in the New Testament. The priests of the old dispensation are expressly contrasted with the ministers of the new. The former“ministered about sacred things,”i. e., performed sacred rites and waited at the altar; but the latter“preach the gospel”(1 Cor. 9:13, 14).
Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”
Heb. 9:28—“so Christ also, having been once offered”—here ἅπαξ means“once for all,”as inJude 3—“the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints”;1 Cor. 9:13, 14—“Know ye not that they that minister about sacred things eat of the things of the temple, and they that wait upon the altar have their portion with the altar? Even so did the Lord ordain that they that proclaim the gospel should live of the gospel.”Romanism introduces a mediator between the soul and Christ, namely, bread and wine,—and the priest besides.
Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:680-687 (Syst. Doct., 4: 146-163)—“Christ is thought of as at a distance, and as represented only by the priest who offers anew his sacrifice. But Protestant doctrine holds to a perfect Christ, applying the benefits of the work which he long ago and once for all completed upon the cross.”Chillingworth:“Romanists hold that the validity of every sacrament but baptism depends upon its administration by a priest; and without priestly absolution there is no assurance of forgiveness. But the intention of the priest is essential in pronouncing absolution, and the intention of the bishop is essential in consecrating the priest. How can any human being know that these conditions are fulfilled?”In the New Testament, on the other hand, Christ appears as the only priest, and each human soul has direct access to him.
Norman Fox, Christ in the Daily Meal, 22—“The adherence of the first Christians to the Mosaic law makes it plain that they did not hold the doctrine of the modern Church of Rome that the bread of the Supper is a sacrifice, the table an altar, and the minister a priest. For the old altar, the old sacrifice, and the old priesthood still remained, and were still in their view appointed media of atonement with God. Of course they could not have believed in two altars, two priesthoods and two contemporaneous sets of sacrifices.”Christ is the only priest. A. A. Hodge, Popular Lectures, 257—“The three central dangerous errors of Romanism and Ritualism are: 1. the perpetuity of the apostolate; 2. the priestly character and offices of Christian ministers; 3. the sacramental principle, or the depending upon sacraments, as the essential, initial, and ordinary channels of grace.”“Hierarchy,”says another,“is an infraction of the divine order; it imposes the weight of an outworn symbolism on the true vitalities of the gospel; it is a remnant rent from the shroud of the dead past, to enwrap the limbs of the living present.”
(d) It destroys Christianity by externalizing it. Romanists make all other service a mere appendage to the communion. Physical and magical salvation is not Christianity, but is essential paganism.
Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.[pg 968]Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.
Council of Trent, Session VII, On Sacraments in General, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the sacraments of the New Testament are not necessary to salvation, but are superfluous, and that without them, and without the desire thereof, men attain of God, through faith alone, the grace of justification; though all [the sacraments] are not indeed necessary for every individual: let him be anathema.”On Baptism, Canon IV:“If any one saith that the baptism which is even given by heretics in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with the intention of doing what the church doth, is not true baptism, let him be anathema.”Baptism, in the Romanist system, is necessary to salvation: and baptism, even though administered by heretics, is an admission to the church. All baptized persons who, through no fault of their own, but from lack of knowledge or opportunity, are not connected outwardly with the true church, though they are apparently attached to some sect, yet in reality belongto the soulof the true church. Many belong merelyto the bodyof the Catholic church, and are counted as its members, but do not belongto its soul. So says Archbishop Lynch, of Toronto; and Pius IX extended the doctrine of invincible ignorance, so as to cover the case of every dissentient from the church whose life shows faith working by love.
Adoration of the Host (Latinhostia, victim) is a regular part of the service of the Mass. If the Romanist view were correct that the bread and wine were actually changed into the body and blood of Christ, we could not call this worship idolatry. Christ's body in the sepulchre could not have been a proper object of worship, but it was so after his resurrection, when it became animated with a new and divine life. The Romanist error is that of holding that the priest has power to transform the elements; the worship of them follows as a natural consequence, and is none the less idolatrous for being based upon the false assumption that the bread and wine are really Christ's body and blood.
The Roman Catholic system involves many absurdities, but the central absurdity is that of making religion a matter of machinery and outward manipulation. Dr. R. S. MacArthur calls sacramentalism“the pipe-line conception of grace.”There is no patent Romanist plumbing. Dean Stanley said that John Henry Newman“made immortality the consequence of frequent participation of the Holy Communion.”Even Faber made game of the notion, and declared that it“degraded celebrations to be so many breadfruit trees.”It is this transformation of the Lord's Supper into the Mass that turns the church into“the Church of the Intonement.”“Cardinal Gibbons,”it was once said,“makes his own God—the wafer.”His error is at the root of the super-sanctity and celibacy of the Romanist clergy, and President Garrett forgot this when he made out the pass on his railway for“Cardinal Gibbons and wife.”Dr. C. H. Parkhurst:“There is no more place for an altar in a Christian church than there is for a golden calf.”On the word“priest”in the N. T., see Gardiner, in O. T. Student, Nov. 1889:285-291; also Bowen, in Theol. Monthly, Nov. 1889:316-329. For the Romanist view, see Council of Trent, session XIII, canon III:per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:585-602; C. Hebert, The Lord's Supper: History of Uninspired Teaching.
B. The Lutheran and High Church view.The Lutheran and High Church view,—that the communicant, in partaking of the consecrated elements, eats the veritable body and drinks the veritable blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine, although the elements themselves do not cease to be material. To this doctrine of“consubstantiation”we object:(a) That the view is not required by Scripture.—All the passages cited in its support may be better interpreted as referring to a partaking of the elements as symbols. If Christ's body be ubiquitous, as this theory holds, we partake of it at every meal, as really as at the Lord's Supper.(b) That the view is inseparable from the general sacramental system of which it forms a part.—In imposing physical and material conditions of receiving Christ, it contradicts the doctrine of justification only by faith; changes the ordinance from a sign, into a means, of salvation; involves the necessity of a sacerdotal order for the sake of properly consecrating the elements; and logically tends to the Romanist conclusions of ritualism and idolatry.(c) That it holds each communicant to be a partaker of Christ's veritable body and blood, whether he be a believer or not,—the result, in the absence of faith, being condemnation instead of salvation. Thus the whole character of the ordinance is changed from a festival occasion to one of mystery and fear, and the whole gospel method of salvation is obscured.Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.
The Lutheran and High Church view,—that the communicant, in partaking of the consecrated elements, eats the veritable body and drinks the veritable blood of Christ in and with the bread and wine, although the elements themselves do not cease to be material. To this doctrine of“consubstantiation”we object:
(a) That the view is not required by Scripture.—All the passages cited in its support may be better interpreted as referring to a partaking of the elements as symbols. If Christ's body be ubiquitous, as this theory holds, we partake of it at every meal, as really as at the Lord's Supper.
(b) That the view is inseparable from the general sacramental system of which it forms a part.—In imposing physical and material conditions of receiving Christ, it contradicts the doctrine of justification only by faith; changes the ordinance from a sign, into a means, of salvation; involves the necessity of a sacerdotal order for the sake of properly consecrating the elements; and logically tends to the Romanist conclusions of ritualism and idolatry.
(c) That it holds each communicant to be a partaker of Christ's veritable body and blood, whether he be a believer or not,—the result, in the absence of faith, being condemnation instead of salvation. Thus the whole character of the ordinance is changed from a festival occasion to one of mystery and fear, and the whole gospel method of salvation is obscured.
Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.
Encyc. Britannica, art.: Luther, 15:81—“Before the peasants' war, Luther regarded the sacrament as a secondary matter, compared with the right view of faith. In alarm at this war and at Carlstadt's mysticism, he determined to abide by the tradition of the church, and to alter as little as possible. He could not accept transubstantiation, and he sought avia media. Occam gave it to him. According to Occam, matter can be present in two ways, first, when it occupies a distinct place by itself, excluding every other body, as two stones mutually exclude each other; and, secondly, when it occupies the same space as another body at the same time. Everything which is omnipresent must occupy the same space as other things, else it could not be ubiquitous. Hence[pg 969]consubstantiation involved no miracle. Christ's body was in the bread and wine naturally, and was not brought into the elements by the priest. It brought a blessing, not because of Christ's presence, but because of God's promise that this particular presence of the body of Christ should bring blessings to the faithful partaker.”Broadus, Am. Com. on Mat., 529—“Luther does not say how Christ is in the bread and wine, but his followers have compared his presence to that of heat or magnetism in iron. But how then could this presence be in the bread and wine separately?”
For the view here combated, see Gerhard, x: 352—“The bread, apart from the sacrament instituted by Christ, is not the body of Christ, and therefore it is ἀρτολατρία (bread-worship) to adore the bread in these solemn processions”(of the Roman Catholic church). 397—“Faith does not belong to the substance of the Eucharist; hence it is not the faith of him who partakes that makes the bread a communication of the body of Christ; nor on account of unbelief in him who partakes does the bread cease to be a communication of the body of Christ.”See also Sadler, Church Doctrine, 124-199; Pusey, Tract No. 90, of the Tractarian Series; Wilberforce, New Birth; Nevins, Mystical Presence.
Per contra, see Calvin, Institutes, 2:525-584; G. P. Fisher, in Independent, May 1, 1884—“Calvin differed from Luther, in holding that Christ is received only by the believer. He differed from Zwingle, in holding that Christ is truly, though spiritually, received.”See also E. G. Robinson, in Baptist Quarterly, 1869:85-109; Rogers, Priests and Sacraments. Consubstantiation accounts for the doctrine of apostolic succession and for the universal ritualism of the Lutheran Church. Bowing at the name of Jesus, however, is not, as has been sometimes maintained, a relic of the papal worship of the Real Presence, but is rather a reminiscence of the fourth century, when controversies about the person of Christ rendered orthodox Christians peculiarly anxious to recognize Christ's deity.
“There is no‘corner’in divine grace”(C. H. Parkhurst).“All notions of a needed‘priesthood,’to bring us into connection with Christ, must yield to the truth that Christ is ever with us”(E. G. Robinson).“The priest was the conservative, the prophet the progressive. Hence the conflict between them. Episcopalians like the idea of a priesthood, but do not know what to do with that of prophet.”Dr. A. J. Gordon:“Ritualism, like eczema in the human body, is generally a symptom of a low state of the blood. As a rule, when the church becomes secularized, it becomes ritualized, while great revivals, pouring through the church, have almost always burst the liturgical bands and have restored it to the freedom of the Spirit.”
Puseyism, as defined by Pusey himself, means:“1. high thoughts of the two sacraments; 2. high estimate of Episcopacy as God's ordinance; 3. high estimate of the visible church as the body wherein we are made and continue to be members of Christ; 4. regard for ordinances as directing our devotions and disciplining us, such as daily public prayers, fasts and feasts; 5. regard for the visible part of devotion, such as the decoration of the house of God, which acts insensibly on the mind; 6. reverence for and deference to the ancient church, instead of the reformers, as the ultimate expounder of the meaning of our church.”Pusey declared that he and Maurice worshiped different Gods.