INTRODUCTION. "BEFORE all other things, this we must be sure of especially, that this Supper be in such wise done and ministered, as our Lord and Saviour did, and commanded to be done, as His holy Apostles used it, and the good fathers in the primitive Church frequented it". This is an explicit enunciation of the principle upon which our Liturgy was remodelled in the sixteenth century, and of the sense in which the Reformers intended that we should receive and interpret it. That this is the right and truly Catholic principle cannot be denied ; hence it is gratifying to find that it is not confined to the passage just quoted, but that it pervades all the Homilies-that it appears also in the Book of Common Prayer, especially in those parts which treat "concerning the service 1 Homily concerning the Sacrament. : of the Church", and "of ceremonies, why some be abolished, and some retained”, and at the commencement of the Commination Service and is sanctioned in the sixth, twenty-fourth, and twenty-ninth Articles of Religion. Above all, our Church expressly ties down her ministers to the patristic interpretation in the exercise of their prophetic office. The following canon on the subject was drawn up in the Convocation of 1571, the same which ratified the Thirtynine Articles:-"The preachers chiefly shall take heed that they teach nothing in their preaching, which they would have the people religiously to observe and believe, but that which is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old Testament and the New, and that which the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops have gathered out of that doctrine." Ecumenical councils have naturally the first and principal claim upon our homage; for, composed, as they are, of the representatives of "the holy Church throughout all the world", who have met in the name of Christ, their decrees may well be regarded as infallible. National synods, such as those in which the revisions of our Prayer Book were sanctioned, are necessarily of minor authority, and should invariably be tested and explained by the former. This is important to remember in reference to our present subject, for we find that those general councils distinctly describe the holy Eucharist both as an Oblation and a Viaticum, no less than a Communion, which is the only light in which it is now popularly regarded, owing to the partial or obscure language of the Articles. The English Church recognizes six general councils; those six, which, as the Homily declares, "were allowed and received of all men",1 having been held when the Church was at unity with herself. These were the councils of Nice, A.D. 325; Constantinople, 381; Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451; and the second and third of Constantinople, 553 and 680. Some theologians, however, consider the fifth and sixth merely as supplemental to the third and fourth; and this 1 Homily against peril of Idolatry. view of them is probably the reason why the realm acknowledges the authority of the four first as paramount in cases of heresy.1 St. Gregory in like manner seems to distinguish these above all others, when he says, "I receive the four councils of the holy universal Church as the four books of the Holy Gospel".2 Next to the decrees of general councils, the doctrine of the Church is to be sought for in the Liturgies and patristic writings of this early period. When we find that these documents, though used and promulgated in countries widely distant one from the other, invariably agree in regard to points of faith and practice, it is almost impossible to contemplate those particulars in any other light than as apostolical traditions, or the voice of the spirit of truth. 11 Elizabeth c. i, s. 36. Not but that the realm contemplates other general councils as well, for where the Act of Parliament decrees that nothing shall be adjudged to be heresy except that which heretofore hath been "so adjudged by the authority of the canonical Scriptures; or by the first four general councils, or any of them", it goes on, "or by any other general council wherein the same was declared heresy by the express and plain words of the said canonical Scriptures". 2 St. Greg. Ep. lib. iii, 10. |