A blasphemous Fable.

235

erence to His actual sacrifice:* No man taketh my life from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. Yet here is a class of clergy who claim the power to hold in their hands the body, blood, soul and divinity of the infinitely glorious and Sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, and offer Him, in the guise of a consecrated wafer, as a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice, on ten thousand altars every day! Truly, it seems impossible to imagine a more stupendous piece of blasphemous presumption.

It is blasphemous, secondly, because it arrogates the express authority of God Himself for this act of profanity, in direct opposition to His declaration: I WILL NOT GIVE MY GLORY TO ANOTHER. For how does the glory of God display itself most pre-eminently to our fallen race, but in the marvellous act of His divine mercy in offering His only begotten Son as a sacrifice for the sins of the world? Did not the angels, at the birth of Christ, proclaim on this account, GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST? Yet Rome pretends to invest her priesthood with a similar majesty, giving them authority to offer up the same Redeemer, in a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice, and to apply this sacrifice, at their pleasure, to the living and the dead! And they dare to assume this awful power, in the name of the Almighty!

It is blasphemous, thirdly, because it subjects the glorious Saviour of the world to the control of the priests, who are only His servants. For they undertake to offer him up as a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice. But it is impossible to sacrifice anything which God has not placed in our control, and made our special property. All the sacrifices

*John x. 18.

of which we read, were thus subject to the will of the sacrificer. The lambs, the cattle, the doves, the flour, the oil, which were offered to God in the Old Testament, were in this way the property of those who brought them in sacrifice. The sacrifices of praise, of contrition, of obedience of heart and life, were also under the control of the sacrificer, and hence it is a perfect absurdity to say that any man can sacrifice what is not given to him as his own, so that it is strictly subject to his individual will and disposition. Therefore, if your priests have power to offer Christ in sacrifice, it results of necessity, that Christ is subject to them, and that they exercise dominion over the Son of God! And how can we conceive a more awful blasphemy!

In these three respects, then, the denunciation of the Church of England is fully justified. Your popular doctrine she holds to be a BLASPHEMOUS FABLE, because it degrades the majesty of Christ, because it usurps the authority of God, because it treats the Sovereign Lord of heaven and earth as if he were the property of His own servants. And yet, we pronounce no curse upon you, notwithstanding. It is YOUR CHURCH, who, in her Council of Trent, commits a further blasphemy by cursing, over and over again, in her solemn Anathemas, ourselves, and all who hold, with us, the pure truth of the Holy Scriptures, and the doctrine of the primitive fathers; thus daring to assume another divine prerogative-yea, overruling the Word of the Most High, and proclaiming their insane decree as the infallible standard for the divine judgment !

But I have not yet done with this painful topic. The Church of England pronounces your doctrine to be not only a blasphemous fable, but a DANGEROUS DECEIT. I proceed, therefore, to this charge, as a task of duty.

First, then, it is a deceit, because your Council evades

A dangerous Deceit.

237

the error of declaring that Christ is actually immolated in sacrifice by the priests, and admits that His real sacrifice is only represented under visible signs, while, nevertheless, they maintain that He is offered as a real victim, in the Mass, which is therefore a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead. But what is this fine distinction worth, in the general apprehension of your deluded people? What more could you say of the awful atonement on the Cross of Calvary, than that it was a true, prop-` er, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead? And is there, in the history of human sophistry, a greater deceit than this, which, while it carefully avoids declaring a direct falsehood on the one hand, claims boldly the whole practical effect of the falsehood on the other?

Secondly, it is a dangerous deceit, because it chains your priests to the continual maintenance of an awful imposture, most perilous to their own souls; because it deludes the great majority of your people to a vain confidence in a false assumption; because it leads them to trust to your imaginary prerogative, far more than to the true sacrifice of their own hearts and lives to the service of the Redeemer; because it tempts them to feel safe in the purchase of Masses, instead of striving to work out their salvation by the fruits of holiness; in a word, because it virtually puts the priest in the place of Christ, by making his sacerdotal will the effectual arbiter of their eternal destiny.

I have now closed, Most Reverend Sir, this tedious examination of the grievous errors and corruptions of your modern Church, connected with your dogma of Transubstantiation, and your Sacrifice of the Mass. Doubtless you will think my language severe, and sadly deficient in courtesy. But I hope you will remember that I am engaged in the work of defending the doctrines of divine truth, against a

writer whose whole book is a constant, unsparing, and bitter libel upon the Reformed Church of England, and upon ourselves, who are her offspring. I hope you will remember that I am vindicating the genuine principles of the Gos pel, against a Church which gives us curses instead of courtesy, and which, when she had the power, tortured our forefathers in the dungeon, and burned them alive in the flames. I hope you will remember that I make no attack upon individual character, though Dr. Milner has assailed our martyred reformers with the strongest and coarsest invectives; that on the contrary, I have allowed the virtue and piety of a portion amongst the members and priesthood of your Church, even in the darkest times of her acknowledged licentiousness, and that I feel no other sentiment towards them all, at this day, than that of the kindliest personal good-will. My sole motive, in my humble work, is to contend earnestly for the truth once delivered to the saints, not only according to the precept, but in the spirit, of the Apostle; determined to do it thoroughly, that there might be no loop-hole through which error might escape exposure; and yet, I trust, with a constant recollection that for all that I have written, as well as for the temper in which I write, I have a solemn account to render to the Searcher of Hearts, when you and I shall stand before His great tribunal. Let it only be read in the same temper, and I ask

no more.

The End of Controversy, Controverted. 239

LETTER XXXVII I.

MOST REVEREND SIR:

THE doctrine of your Church in reference to your priestly absolution, enforced by means of the private confessional, forms the subject of your favorite author's forty-first letter; and here we have his usual ingenuity in the quotations of the Scriptures, the reference to the fathers, and the claiming of the Church and writers of England as being substantially on his side, while there is, of course, a careful suppression of the true history of the matter, and a strong statement of the great advantages and comforts derived from this part of your discipline.

The clearest method of explaining the controversy betwixt our respective Churches in relation to this important. point, will be to show, first, the common ground in which we agree, and then the contrasted particulars in which we differ. After this will come the history of your Church's innovations, with the proofs, and a few remarks on the alleged superiority of her system. The result will exhibit another example of the antagonism of Rome, and the fidelity of England, to the true scriptural and primitive rule.

Both Churches, in common with all the other Churches in the world, agree in the necessity of repentance of sin, confession of sin, and absolution from sin, without which (the case of infants alone excepted) there can be no salvation.