304

PRESBYTERIAN ASCENDANCY.

divine institution, that they need her help to support them. Looking at things in this light, I am not only not concerned to defend the measures of Laud and of Charles (at the beginning of his reign), I am concerned, upon church grounds, to put in as strong a protest against them as is made against them on other grounds by the Puritans. And I am not only not concerned to prove how it was possible that the Episcopal Church should have been brought into such deep waters as she afterwards was, I am bound to think that they were intended as well for her own purification as for the illustration of the real principle on which she rested. But if I think this most important lesson and warning is to be gathered from the proceedings before the rebellion commenced, what lesson shall we learn from its success? I have no need to teach it, you will find it in the pages of Harry Vane, John Milton, George Fox. They will tell you what were the blessings to the conscience and spirit of man when the church idea, which they found so intolerable, was subverted. Milton, above all, who on his return from Italy poured forth all his eloquence in support of the ten Presbyterian ministers,― Milton, who saw the dawn of a brighter era so near that his words burst into poetry, as he invokes the Prince of all the kings of the earth to come forth from his bridal chamber and put on the robes of his visible Majesty,-before many years had to lament, that new presbyter was but old priest writ large, and to confess, tacitly if not openly, that the

OPPRESSION OF DOGMAS.

305

forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament were more galling to him by far than the prelatists had ever been. It is difficult to imagine what must have been the feelings of men like him, when they saw, in place of the beautiful order which their pure spirits had imagined rising out of the wreck of forms and systems, the most organized scheme of dogmatical despotism that the world has perhaps ever witnessed. That Laud's schemes to prevent men from dogmatizing and arguing were most vain and arbitrary, I freely confess; but surely if the spirit of man smarted under his rods, it groaned more deeply under the scorpions of the Westminster Assembly. The obligation never to put forth a formal proposition upon any manner of doctrine, is not so dreadful as being compelled to convert all thoughts, feelings, aspirations, into propositions.

To those who examine the writers of that age (I do not mean the Episcopalians), there is evidence that the self-imposed yoke was a most fretting one. But what course remained?- they had thought the discipline of the prelates unbearable; they now ascertained the discipline of the Presbyterians to be so. Where should they go next? Milton and Fox (that I may join together the names of two men who, as a member of your Society once remarked to me, were the most dissimilar in all outward qualifications and accomplishments, the most like in some of the habits of their minds, and eventually in their creed), Milton and Fox, the one secretly, the other before

306

FOX SET ASIDE SACRAMENTS.

the world, proclaimed that ordinances and dogmas had been both weighed in the balance, and found wanting, and that what remained was either to maintain a hermit life of spiritual contemplation, or, if it were possible, to build up a society of which this should be the end, and which should throw aside all those outward forms and notions that had hindered the attainment of it. Here, then, was the commencement of another great moral experiment, of which it behoves us shortly to examine the results.

But first, let me ask you to reflect for a few moments upon the position which Fox must have assumed before he could decree that the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not essential to the constitution of the Christian church. You are apt, I fancy, to set the question before yourselves in this way :-" It is very true that on a certain solemn occasion, the most solemn that has ever occurred in the history of the world, our Lord did take bread, and break it, saying, This do in remembrance of me ;' but there is little said respecting the appointment; there is nothing positively to determine that the words extended beyond the immediate friends of our Lord, who were sitting with him at that table. That three of the Evangelists should record the event may be singular; but why is there no allusion to it in the fourth, the most spiritual of all the Gospels, the one written by the beloved disciple? That some memorial festival is alluded to by St. Paul in the 11th chapter of the First Epistle to the Corin

WHAT HE ASSUMED.

307

thians we admit, and that there is a kind of allusion to its having been a part of a revelation to himself; but here again the ceremony may have been connected with the regulations of a particular church; there is no distinct assertion of its universal obligation, still less of that obligation extending beyond the Jewish period, and it seems to us that the whole character of the Gospel dispensation, as a spiritual dispensation, is hostile to the continuance of a mere outward ceremony, after the principle of it has been once established and received into the heart."

Now attend to your own last words. You admit that it is a dispensation,-that there is something wonderful and peculiar in Christianity, that it was the crowning point and consummation of a former dispensation;—you admit that the one had something to do with the other, by the very language which asserts their difference. Having this common ground to go upon, I am bound to tell you that your way of putting the question is a most inadequate and deceitful one. It is not merely that in the judgment of all former ages our Lord meant to institute a ceremony which should continue in his church, and that George Fox, having great spiritual illumination, saw that the words had no such meaning; but it is that the church in all former times, looking at the whole of God's revelation, connecting the Jewish scheme with the Christian scheme, the root and stem with the flowers and fruit, had decided, that in this institution is contained the

308

WHAT HE ASSUMED.

spirit and form of Christianity, as in the institution of the Passover was embodied the form and spirit of Judaism, and that George Fox, upon his own responsibility, set at nought this conclusion. The whole church acknowledged as strongly as he could, that Christians are brought into a spiritual world, into the holiest of holies, not the figure of the true, but the very presence of God himself. But they said, this institution just as much embodies these higher privileges, and is as necessary to the full enjoyment of them, as the elder ordinance was necessary to the enjoyment of the privileges of the second court into which men were at first admitted. They said, without this institution the distinction between our privileges and those of the Jew will be lost sight of, we shall as surely sink back into a condition no higher than theirs, as they sunk back into a condition no higher than that of the Gentiles, when they forgot the ceremonies of the elder worship. They said, if you consider the circumstances under which this feast was instituted, if you consider who it was that instituted it, and the words in relation to the Passover which accompanied it, you cannot conceive a more solemn obligation of the one ordinance, or more solemn substitution of the other. The words could not, did not mean to the Apostles more than they meant to us; they meant less. The words of the institution were to get their life from events to which those who first heard them had not yet been witnesses; and this being premised, it was