Church Ministry in Kensington / A Recent Case of Hieratical Teaching Scripturally Considered

Transcribed from the 1867 R. Clay, Son, and Taylor edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
A RECENT CASE OF Hieratical Teaching SCRIPTURALLY CONSIDERED.
BY JOHN PHILIP GELL, M.A. PERPETUAL CURATE OF ST. JOHN’S, NOTTING HILL.
LONDON: PRINTED BY R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, BREAD STREET HILL. 1867.
Your Christmas offering to your former bishop, of Salisbury, to your flock in South Kensington, and to the public at large, has taken eight months to reach me; so slowly does literature circulate from end to end of the ancient parish of Kensington. But I cordially hope that my present acknowledgments may arrive before Christmas comes again; for you have chosen an appropriate offering, your own workmanship, in the shape of Eight carefully-written Sermons, upon the Sacrifice, Altar, and Priest of the Christian dispensation.
I. “Sacrifice,” says the judicious Hooker (Eccl. Pol. v. 78), “is now no part of the Church ministry.” Nevertheless your first position is, that “we (clergy) have this treasure in earthen vessels,” and you take the text of your First Sermon from the words, though not the meaning of S. Paul (2 Cor. iv. 7), where he writes, not, as you expound (p. 5), of the treasure of sacerdotal privilege, but of the treasure of Gospel knowledge; as he speaks elsewhere of the treasures of knowledge remaining hid in Christ (Col. ii. 3); a passage which you apply more accurately, as the text of your Eighth Sermon. You even go so far (p. 40) as to aver that “by Christ’s own appointment . . . his very body and blood are truly offered . . . day by day;” though S. Paul says of Christ, that “He needeth not daily to offer up sacrifices” (Heb. vii. 27). Must we then offer sacrifices without Him? Surely when you remember the same Apostle pleading for one death, one judgment, and one offering, as co-ordinate verities (Heb. ix. 27, 28); and declaring that “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” (Heb. x. 26), you will no longer find a difficulty in “admitting it to be conceivable,” (should you not say, certain?) “that it was intended that sacrifice should altogether cease when the Great Sacrifice was completed” (p. 46).