The sacrificial Hebrew language will always repay attention. It is more subtle and exact, in matters of sin and conscience, than the Greek; whereon the inspired writers frequently pile a weight of meaning, to which the latter language is hardly equal. Hebrew distinguishes sacrifice from sacrifice, sin from sin. You argue, for instance, in your Second Sermon, that if Job offered a daily sacrifice, before the coming of the Law, then Christians also, after the Law, may probably offer the like. But Job made a sacrifice for sin (Job i. 5), which was all burnt; we offer nothing for sin, and our oblation is all eaten. And though the Eucharistic sacrifice of praise might perhaps have been deemed, as a peace-offering, to be also in some sense an offering of blood (Lev. vii. 12), yet S. Paul has carefully obviated the idea. He will not even allow the venerable reading of the prophetic text (Hos. xiv. 2), which he quotes (Heb. xiii. 15), pharim, or “calves” of our lips, because the blood of beasts must be excluded entirely from Eucharistic comparisons, and, with blood, all idea of expiation in the Eucharist. And, therefore, with the LXX. he reads pheri, “fruit” of our lips giving thanks to the name of God.
Rightly, therefore, do you style the Eucharist (p. 124), “the sum and substance of our praises and thanksgivings;” though S. Paul does not go with you in adding that “it is the highest means of applying to our sins the mercies of God through the ever-availing sacrifice of Christ.” He reserves this pre-eminence to faith (Gal. v. 5); and faith is actually represented as the sacrificing priest of the spiritual house by Romanus the martyr of Antioch, about the beginning of the fourth century, in his dying address, which Prudentius versifies (Peristephanon x. 351). You will pardon the rudeness of an old English translation, made in the days of our Reformation, when heart answered to heart between the martyrs of earlier and later ages:
“At th’ holy porch a Priest is standing there,
And keeps the doors, before the church which been;
Faith is her name, a virgin chaste and clear,
Her hair tied up with fillets, like a queen.
For Sacrifices, simple, pure, and clean,
And such she knows are pleasing, bids this Priest
Offer to God, and to his dear Son, Christ.”
The sacrifices, thereafter described, being such as holy fear, sound knowledge, sobriety, and liberality. This, you will say, is declamation, not doctrine. But so is the mass of Nicene and ante-Nicene material which contradicts Romanus. If the one pleases you, the other may equally please me. Let, then, both of us be cautious, consistent, and scriptural.
At times you seem to retreat from your position that the Eucharist is a true sacrifice, describing it only as “the presenting afresh, and pleading afresh, and causing Christ himself to plead afresh, the merits of that one precious death” (p. 60). Certainly, to commemorate, present, or plead afresh a sacrifice once offered, is not the same thing as to offer it. But ever and anon you re-assert the Eucharist to be a true sacrifice, agreeably, you say, “to the sense of Holy Scripture, as attested by the consent of the Church from the beginning” (p. 77). Yet no such word as “sacrifice” is ever mentioned, in a Eucharistic sense, in any of the Apostolical Fathers; and an interpolation in S. Ignatius shows how much this deficiency of evidence was afterwards felt. “Without the bishop, baptize not [neither offer nor present sacrifice], nor make a feast of love” (Smyrn. 8). You extenuate the same significant absence of the word “priest,” which is never applied by those Fathers to any church minister, by telling us (p. 66), that Mr. Carter informs you that the omission is satisfactorily accounted for by the smallness of their extant writings, extending, he says, over no more than thirty octavo pages. You will find, however, in the Oxford edition, about 3,300 lines of SS. Clement, Ignatius (the shorter recension), and Polycarp, in Greek; besides some Latin fragments. This would fill a hundred printed pages in octavo, and is just equal to the united Gospels of S. Mark and S. John. Yet those most primitive Fathers know of no such thing as a Priest, or a Sacrifice, among the ministers and ordinances of the Church on earth; though it is the subject upon which their compositions almost exclusively turn, and they tell us much about Elders. This hardly looks like “the consent of the Church from the beginning” (p. 77).
But you urge that “the doctrine was maintained continuously for fifteen hundred years” (p. 99); and let me rejoin, opposed continually, upon scriptural grounds. Not seventy years after the decease of S. John, the Christian Athenagoras tells the Emperor Aurelius (Legat. 13), “The Framer of the Universe needs not blood, nor the fragrance of flowers and incense; the noblest sacrifice to Him is to know Him:” (here we have S. Paul’s “treasure”) “offering bloodless sacrifice,” (here is S. Paul’s “fruit of the lips,”) “and reasonable service,” (meaning, after S. Paul, our own bodies. Rom. xii. 1.) But it would fill a volume were I to trace onwards, from age to age, these Pauline streams of thought.
It is true that the Church liturgies are, many of them, full of the idea of Eucharistic sacrifice. But does the Church of England, as you say (p. 99), “maintain, in her office, the whole substance of these liturgies,” or even “all their main points”? Now, we will not assume as main points any but those which are repeated in all the principal classes, somewhat fancifully termed the liturgies of SS. James, Mark, Peter, and John. And these points are twelve; whereof seven—the Sursum corda, Tersanctus, recital of the Institution, Prayer for the Church on earth, Lord’s Prayer, the act of Communion, and the act of Praise—are preserved in our English liturgy; while four have disappeared—the Kiss, the Prayer for the descent of the Spirit on the elements, the Prayer for the dead, and the Mingling of the bread and wine. A fifth main point, the Oblation of the elements, had disappeared as well, from ordinary eyes, until recently discerned in a slight addition made to the rubric in 1662: “the Priest shall then place upon the table . . . bread and wine.” Not without reason did our liturgical Reformers shake themselves clear of the whole arrangement, and of four-twelfths of the substance of these offices, reducing the residue to a more Scriptural type. The Reformers knew the web that could be woven out of these liturgical materials, to entangle men, not merely in your “perfect accordance and harmony with the doctrine of a true propitiatory commemorative sacrifice offered up in the Eucharist to God” (p. 104), but in other doctrine, more advanced than you, or any man who studies the Bible, would be willing to accept.
If you would suffer the Law to be your schoolmaster, instead of these Liturgies, you would scarcely be able so much as to imagine that the “signs” of the Holy Communion could, under any circumstances, “be effective for sinners’ pardon through Christ’s body broken and his blood shed” (p. 104). For you would never bring yourself to understand how an unbloody could effect any part of the work of a bloody sacrifice, in a matter of propitiation. What a sacrificial solecism is it to speak, as you do (p. 131), of “an unbloody . . . propitiatory sacrifice”! Without shedding of blood is no remission of sins. “All that true and holy thing which the Church has ever had, as Christ’s own appointed means for the pardon of our sins,” is not, as you surmise (p. 131), the Eucharistic sacrifice, but faith in the blood of Jesus. The Church has never had anything else. Hers the faith; His the blood. “Lord, save me,” she prays; “thy faith hath saved thee,” He replies, from age to age. And her “pure offering,” which you correctly adduce from Malachi (i. 11), as referable to the Eucharist, is but a mincha, a bloodless meat-offering; fruit, of no use for pardon or propitiation.
Your reference (p. 150) to “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. xiii. 8), might suggest, though it does not establish, your idea that the one offering of Himself is, in some sense, continuous (p. 56) to the present day. But I know not why the framers of our Authorized Version did not render this passage as they rendered the same phrase when they came upon it again, four chapters further on (Rev. xvii. 8); “whose names were not written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain.” However translated, the passage must be expounded in accordance with S. Paul (Heb. ix. 26, 28), “Christ was once offered, in the end of the world.”
II. And so vanishes the Sacrifice from our altars, all but the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to the name of the Lord. But have we any Altars?