THE CHRISTIAN EXAMINER. MARCH, 1843. RECENT TRINITARIAN PUBLICATIONS.* In the first of these pamphlets we have the first formal American statement of the High Church doctrines of the Oxford school, with which we have met. In the second we have an explicit statement of the Low Church view of the same subjects. In the third we have an expression of the feeling, with which the Catholic Church, both in this country and in England, regards the movements, which have lately taken place in the Episcopal branch of the Church Universal. The circumstances, under which these two advocates of High and Low Church doctrines appear before the public, are somewhat novel. One of the main advantages, attending a church of established forms, is stated by Paley to be uniformity of doctrine, exhibited in the same pulpit. Under an opposite mode of administration, the consequence would be, "that a Papist, or a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Moravian, or an Anabaptist, would successively gain possession of the pulpit." The very thing, which the Episcopal forms were intended to obviate, seems in this case to have taken place. On the twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity, Bishop Whittingham instituted Mr. Johns to the Rectorship of Christ's Church in Baltimore, and in a discourse without any text, unless a quotation on the opposite page from Irenæus may be considered as such, asserts that the person he has just instituted is a priest, that the Lord's The Priesthood in the Church. The Protestant Episcopal Pastor. The Religious Cabinet. VOL. XXXIV. -3D S. VOL. XVI. NO. I. 1 table is an altar, the elements of communion a sacrifice, and, if we comprehend aright the force of his language, that in partaking of those elements, the communicant eats and drinks "the proper and natural body and the proper blood of Christ." In the evening of the same day, the person so instituted preaches a sermon to the same congregation, in which he says, "I am no more a priest, in the sense of the word objected to, than you are, my brethren, who are laymen; nor can I, in the same sense, offer sacrifice any more than you." The table is not an altar. And moreover he asserts, "It is both theologically and philosophically erroneous to speak of the reception of even the proper spiritual body of Christ in, with, or under the bread and wine of the Eucharist;" and closes by saying, that he will never preach such doctrines, "so help me God!" A more awkward predicament it is difficult to conceive, than for a Bishop to preach one doctrine in the morning, at the institution of a Rector, and for the Rector on the evening of the same day to contradict him, and promulgate precisely the opposite doctrine. We do not say this in derision or in triumph. Far be it from us to take pleasure in the dissensions of any branch of the Christian Church. It is not one sect alone that suffers on such occasions, but our common Christianity. Our common Lord is wounded in the house of his friends. We wish merely to point out the fact, that creeds and forms are no security for uniformity of faith, or for the peace of a church. However carefully they may be worded, there arises the same dispute about the meaning of terms and phrases, which existed in relation to the language of the Bible, upon which all creeds profess to be founded. But it is time to exhibit the statements and arguments of these two advocates of High and Low Church doctrines. The Bishop, after instituting the Rector, holds the following language as to the office with which he had invested him. "In the office which we have just been using, I have, by the prescription of the Church, had occasion again and again to speak of your pastor as a priest,' and of the duties which have now been committed to him as 'sacerdotal functions'implying that as a priest he is to minister among you, and therefore to offer sacrifice, at what we learn from the rubrics or directions incorporated in the Office, to call the altar' of Christian worship. "It is a very serious thing to use such language in the imme diate presence and solemn worship of HIM who, while He searcheth the heart, hateth a lie, and the maker and lover of it, if we have any doubts of its correctness. Yet such have been started. It is my purpose to examine the grounds for acquiescing, in the view adopted by the Church and put forth in the framework of her most solemn formularies. "An objection, that must be met at the outset, is, that we have no Scriptural sanction for such procedure; that the New Testament no where speaks of 'priest,' 'altar,' or 'sacrifice,' as pertaining to the worship of the New and better Covenant. This is a matter not wholly certain, since the epistle to the Hebrews says 66 we have an altar ;" and our Saviour in his Sermon on the Mount, where the Gospel is set in contrast with the Law, speaks of His followers leaving their gifts on the altar, to be first reconciled with their brethren, before they offer; while the apostles repeatedly make mention of the gifts and offerings of Christians in terms implying a sacrificial character. But for the moment setting these passages aside, what will follow, suppose it should be granted that the application of the terms "priest," 'sacrifice,' and 'altar' to a ministry and worship under the Gospel, does not occur in the New Testament? Just this - that the terms, and the things they signify, will be left in the same position as the terms 'Sabbath' and Bible,' and the things they signify. If there be no mention of a Christian priest, there is none, also, of a Christian Sabbath. If our being all priests, a royal priesthood,' a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices,' 'kings and priests unto God,' excludes a delegated priesthood of men separated to the work, then our time being all holy, our whole lives consecrated unto God, must exclude (as some few sects have from time to time, in opposition to the mass of the Christian community, maintained) the dedication of the seventh day as holy unto the LORD. If our having One great high Priest, for ever making intercession, by the oblation of his One sufficient Sacrifice, excludes the ministration of earthly priests; so we have One heavenly Sabbath, a rest remaining for the people of God, to which we are bid look forward, and for an entry into which we are taught to labor. If the absence from the New Testament, of the words 'priest,' 'sacrifice,' and 'altar,' in application to the ministers and mode of Christian worship, could prove the ministry of the Gospel to be no priesthood, its service no sacrifice, needing and admitting of no altar, then the absence of the words' Bible' and. Holy Scriptures' from the New Testament, in application to its own form and contents, would prove that the New Dispensation has no sacred volume, the word of God, written by apostles and evangelists, no claim to be His revelation of His will. |