264 MINISTERIAL POWER. - rance, and miserable failures of the men who have striven to reach it, or have thought that they strove, or have pursued something else, when this was that after which they really aimed-reading in history, too, and in his own experience, the danger of looking upon men in any light but as the appointed means of transmitting the gifts of God to man, which is the idolatry of other creatures, -and the misery of refusing to look upon them in that light of wanting every thing immediately, and for our own purposes, which is selfidolatry—which two evils, have been in every age the great obstacles to finding that whereof we are in search;-reading in history, and in the experience of his own life, the mischief of looking upon natural things as good in themselves, and not looking at them as good and precious when honoured and set apart by God and to Him,— first, is disposed humbly to submit to the method of this institution, because it is a prescribed one; and, secondly, humbly and devoutly to honour it, because God has permitted him some glimpses into its wisdom. But while the idea of the elder church thus beautifully corresponds to all the cravings of a later period, whatever of confusion in those points which concern not the transmitted faith, but arose only from the lack of experience in those who received it, were easily obviated by the English Reformers, instructed in the evils which these innocent confusions had brought forth, and as keenly alive as any men of their times to the necessity of asserting the freedom DANGER OF SUPERSTITION. 265 and justification of the conscience. And here, again, we may perceive how remarkably, while they took away that of which their own age had perceived the danger, they were hindered from taking away that of which future ages would perceive the want. How the notion of a vicarious dignity in the ministers on the one hand,—of a substantive virtue in the elements on the other, had destroyed the very life of this Sacrament, by making it in very deed cease to be a Sacrament, I have partly explained already. It was impossible that the early church could foresee this danger; and that while they spoke of the glory of those human agents, who were set apart for this service, and of those natural creatures which were consecrated to it, they should not have used many warm and passionate phrases, to betoken that which they understood to be through them transmitted. But, did cautious coldness save the foreign Reformers from the peril of setting too much store, either by the visible man or the visible bread? In the case of the Lutheran, we have seen that it did not. Even Calvin, for the sake of averting the worse evil of losing the whole blessing, was forced to speak in such phrases, as led one cautious historian to accuse him of being at times half a Romanist; nay even Zwingle, when he hoped to escape the whole peril, did in fact only introduce it afresh in another way. The memorial feast, despoiled of every sacramental association, must have acquired a glory of its own, most dangerous to the heart of 266 REAL PRESENCE. the communicant, most likely, as your friends, who were chiefly brought into contact with English Zwinglians discovered, to degenerate into superstition. There was but one way of deliverance from this natural danger, and that was to establish the idea of a real presence; to believe in an actual communion between the Living Head and and his members; and so to make every person and thing connected with the service, precious only as steps in that ladder. This course our Reformers adopted; they regarded Christianity itself as a great Sacrament, and thus they were positively precluded from the temptation of assigning a separate and independent value to that by which they might, nevertheless, in speaking to honest ears and humble hearts, express all its value. By putting the idea of Communion as the final cause of all acts of Christian devotion, our Reformers, however, did much more than merely explain the nature of those acts, and justify the arrangements which the direct words of Christ, or the authority of the church, had settled for the performance of them. They threw a broad and brilliant light upon the connection between these acts and those more transcendent acts, of which He in his own person was the only author and finisher. What perplexity may have occasionally haunted the minds of men in the elder church, while they dwelt on the idea of a finished sacrifice to put away sin, and yet felt the continual presence of sin,-how this perplexity deepened into error, and what FINISHED SACRIFICE. 267 practical fruits it bore, when men began to reflect more deeply on the operations of their own minds, I showed in my last letter. I showed how the notion of acts, still to be performed in order to complete that justification, which something within them that they could not gainsay, told them was in some very practical sense not complete, became gradually stronger, and invented expressions for itself in innumerable arbitrary mortifications and penances, but especially in the innovations which crept into the service of the Eucharist. It was comparatively easy for the Reformation to sweep these away, and to prove how fearfully they outraged the dignity of that Divine Atonement which they professed to honour. Merely to confront such impositions with the express language of Scripture, and then to appeal directly to the conscience, whether it did not find that deliverance and purification from the reception of the simple declaration of God, which it had not obtained from all its own experiments, was all that the case seemed to require. And yet, by degrees, the Reformers discovered themselves, their successors have discovered more certainly since, that in some way or other the feeling against which they thought they had provided so successfully, did again and again recur in the minds, not of the unlearned only, but of the wise-not of the disciples only, but of the teachers. Protestants had need of their casuists to track the windings of the hearts of men, as much as Romanists. Protestants, who had most 268 PROTESTANT EQUIVOCATIONS. thoroughly informed themselves on the doctrines of their faith, who could argue most successfully on the shame and impossibility of looking to any source of pardon and peace but the Offering once made for sin,-found themselves in solitary hours, in midnight watchings, haunted by the same perplexities and terrors which they had deemed to be the exclusive portion of the unhappy creatures who had sought refuge in material and outward consolations. Protestants were found, secretly introducing, not penances and mortifications of the flesh, but acts and efforts of the intellect, or experiences of the heart, as necessary accompaniments or prerequisites to the simple recognition of an accomplished deliverance. Protestants were obliged to qualify their assertions with phrases and adjectives, which went near to reduce them to utter vagueness and unmeaningness: Faith justified, but it must be a living faith; it was a sin to doubt the full atonement of Christ, but then your must be sure that you took it in the right sense. And then the fierce reaction against such equivocations, which, let them come with what show of moderation or learning they may, earnest men will not bear, on matters so nearly concerning their life, was a hard, desperate Antinomianism, restoring those phrases which had been gradually pared and smoothed away to their original roughness and simplicity, but setting them up in opposition to teachings that were intended to promote holiness and purity of life, and therefore imparting to them a deadly meaning and effect. |