RECOGNISED BY THE NATIONS.

217

mite invaders; that, on the contrary, it harmonised admirably with the previous respect for marriage, and with the principles of order among the German tribes, and soon converted them into settled political societies. I contend, that this

idea of Christ being the

King of kings and

Lord of lords; that by him kings reign and princes decreed justice, was not only not destroyed by the union of the church with the Roman state, but that it was never more strongly asserted than in the forms of our own Saxon constitution.

But there did come a time, after the great victories of Charlemagne, when the princes of the earth, those even who proclaimed themselves the Soldiers of Christ, violently invaded the principle. From the moment that the new Roman empire arose, it was evident that a kind of universal kingdom, inconsistent with the distinct freedom of each nation on the one hand, inconsistent with the true universal kingdom of Christ on the other, was beginning to manifest itself; and this antiChristian principle reached its height when the monarchs of Germany began to dispose of investitures at their pleasure, subjecting the church to their state convenience.

It was then that a man arose, of a brave and noble spirit, pious and self-denying, to assert, as he meant and thought, the supremacy of Christ. Alas! in the very act of lifting himself to maintain his Master's rule over statesmen and politicians, Hildebrand himself became one of them; him

self struck a more dreadful blow at the idea of Christ's kingdom, than even the potentates whom he defied. For it was reserved for him, for this good, and well-intentioned, and powerful man, to assert the doctrine that Christ had appointed a Vicar on earth; in other words, that he was not a real and present king; that his ministers are not princes holding immediately under him, but holding of him, through a visible and mortal substitute. I am not here speaking of the invasion of the principle of Episcopacy, implied in the assumption of this paramount power in one bishop, -that is a subject for future investigation. At present I am only discussing the vicarious doctrine, which was not indeed now first broached, (how could so very natural a notion have been then first broached?) but which first assumed a positive formal shape under the pontificate of Gregory the Seventh, just a thousand years after the destruction of the Jewish polity. But how does this point concern our present subject? Most closely. The idea of an actual communion established between heaven and earth, in the incarnate Mediator, was now practically set asidenot resisted by the violence of self-willed statesmen, but denied in the church. Now, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, if we have interpreted past history rightly, stands on this idea. When it was gone, it was impossible that the simple feeling of a direct communication of life from God to man, of man being directly fed with manna from heaven, could endure. But was,

therefore, the want of such a communication, less? No; it was, in one sense, greater than ever. For men, as we have seen, were now entering upon that stage, in which questions concerning themselves, their own wants, their own connexion with God, became the first and most prominent in their minds. The feeling, God talketh with man as with a friend,' had ceased; the feeling, 'I heard his voice walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and I knew that I was naked, and I hid myself,' was never so realized before. The schoolmen, the intellectual expositors of the feelings of the age, speculated, therefore, with earnest and feverish and longing desire for wisdom to explain the nature of that bond which they knew had been contracted between man and his Lord, and of which they, more than even those who had so simply and so lovingly recognised it, perceived the necessity. They had the works of the Fathers, of the Latin Fathers, at least, to study and reflect upon; they had the forms and institutions of the church still preserved, in which to read the meaning of the Fathers; they had the Scriptures, teaching them of sacrifices once appointed as means of a sinner's approach to God; they had the Popedom standing in the way, as a barrier against the belief that the actual incarnation of the Son of God was that which justified the language of the Fathers, expounded the meaning of the forms and connected the Sacrifices of the Old Testament with the Sacraments of the New. How naturally, out of these elements, did

220

TRANSUBSTANTIATION.

the doctrine of Transubstantiation arise. The body and blood of Christ are not perceived to be indeed the bonds between earth and heaven, between man and his Lord; therefore the bread and wine lost their actual, sacramental meaning. But the sense of their dignity, the want of the connexion implied in it, have not departed. Hence they are invested with a natural, sensible virtue; they are treated as at once natural and supernatural, dead and living, sensible and spiritual. Man is not lifted by them to heaven, but heaven is lowered to the conceptions and notions of man. And he is punished in that wherein he sinned. The intellect put itself in a position which it had no right to assume; the intellect was degraded by its own inventions; it created the contradiction which was its torment.

But the carnal heart was punished equally with the proud understanding. It sought peace in the sin which it loved; and the faster it pursued the faster the vision fled. It found comfort in the thought of a blessing brought so near, that it could catch it without being raised out of the slough into which it had sunk ; but it never could realize the blessing. It rejoiced that instead of the manna it had quails; but while they were yet in the mouth the anger of God came upon it.

And now, then, all those points wherein the Fathers had shown that they loved God better than they understood men, became to their successors, distressed with these new problems concerning themselves, positive sources of confusion

OTHER ABUSES.

221

and mischief. Man, not now chiefly busy with the thought how heaven has sought reconciliation with him, but how he may seek reconciliation with heaven, inevitably falls back upon the ideas of the older covenant; supposes the offering up of the body of Christ at the Eucharist the great work, and the offering up of Christ himself on the Cross, a comparatively unmeaning thing; trusts in all the means whereby he had been told to seek to realize the blessings of the covenant as means of purchasing them, and continually invents schemes for himself, not good for either purpose, in order to accomplish both. Again, feeling the want of constant teachings and illuminations from above, but not feeling that he is constituted in Christ, and that these teachings and illuminations are the continued endowment promised to him, he supposes the union to be established and created at those times, and by those acts which Christ hath appointed for the witnesses of it, and for imparting the blessings of it. Again, seeking after fellowship with a Being from whom he feels himself hopelessly estranged, the idea of tiers of saints and angels, through whom he is to ascend into the presence of his Lord, becomes part of his habitual faith. Lastly, it is a consequence of the same state of mind, that men exalted the events and conditions of their own lives, which, in the former age, had been glorified by the two Sacraments, to a level with them; and began accurately to define how many of these conditions are deserving of this

P