Eight Sermons on the Priesthood, Altar, and Sacrifice

by Mayow Wynell Mayow

Here then, surely, he who has been ordained a priest, and received the Holy Ghost that he may remit or retain sins, is to exercise his ministry in the absolution of the penitent soul.

But if it be said, There is no minute description or account of the mode of absolution, it may still be but declaratory or precatory; I say, then, turn once again to another place, and see if the form and method of the absolution be not there actually all which we can suppose even an Apostle himself could use. In the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, when the sick man is in the full contemplation of death, and perhaps death very near at hand, the priest being solemnly engaged in his office of preparing him for it, the distinct direction is given that the sick person shall be “moved to make a special confession of his sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter. After which confession, the priest shall absolve him (if he humbly and heartily desire it) after this sort.” And the words are: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to His Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great mercy forgive thee thine offences;” (so far we have the declaration of the power left to the Church, and either, it may be said, declaratory or precatory words, “forgive thee.” But this is not all; immediately it is added), “And by His authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins; in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” [90]

Now, brethren, I do not desire to say much in comment on such words as these. But I do say, and I know not how to avoid saying, first, if such authority was committed to the priest, when was it committed to him, or how, but at his ordination, and in and by “the form and manner of ordering priests,” which we have before noted? And, secondly, can any reasonable being believe that the Church could have drawn up such a service, and put such words into the priest’s mouth when dealing solemnly and truly with a sick or dying man, and yet believe that such power of absolution, as a part of the priest’s distinctive character and endowment by God, had not been conferred upon him? or maintain that she thought our Blessed Lord’s commission extended no further than to its first recipients, and died out with the Apostles themselves, when still she uses the words continually in her “ordering of priests?” If it be said,—Well: still we cannot believe this, and can only say that we heartily desire to remove from our Prayer-book and Ordinal, as a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit, all traces of such authority being given,—I can only reply that this argument is wholly beside our present question. I am not now arguing whether such an interpretation and use of Holy Scripture be the right interpretation and use, (though I have given reasons before for feeling sure it is,) but I am shewing what is the mind and understanding herein of the Church of England. I am silencing, if I may, (and in the judgment of right reason I cannot conceive that I should fail in doing so,) the calumny that they who maintain the doctrine of the priesthood are disloyal to the Church of England, or deviating from the principles of the Reformation. For, not merely according to what right reason must, I think, enforce to be the intention of those who drew up our formularies, but according to the simple sense of those formularies, this doctrine and none other is the only doctrine which can be made consistent with the documents themselves, or which they can justly be taken to enunciate. We have at times heard not a little of the dishonesty of those who, it is said, have taken our formularies in a non-natural sense, on the Catholic side, though in a sense which they deemed they would fairly bear. If this argument be good for anything, against whom can it so conclusively be brought as against such as will affirm that, when in the most solemn exercise of a bishop’s office, the bishop says, “Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God,” the Church intends that there is no gift of the Holy Ghost bestowed, and no priest made at all? Or, again, when he says, adopting Christ’s own words of commission,—“Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven unto them, and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained;”—that in this there is no intention to teach that the commission of Christ extended beyond the Apostles themselves, and that no power of binding or loosing is conferred by this solemn act? Or, yet again, who tell us that when the priest is instructed to exercise this holy function of absolving penitents, either that they may come “with a full trust in God’s mercy and with a quiet conscience” to the Holy Eucharist, or, in the solemn moments of serious sickness, perhaps the near prospect of death, (things and times surely beyond all others to drive away the very notion of unreal or unmeaning words, which must also, if they be such, be to the poor penitent most deceitful and misleading words also); that then the Church gives her instruction to use the word of absolution, and say, “By His authority committed unto me, I absolve thee from all thy sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” and yet means hereby only a mockery and a delusion; that there is no such power, no such authority, no such absolving at all; surely all this is not a mere non-natural sense which the words will bear, though it may not be the most obvious at first sight, but is a non-natural sense so monstrous that they will not bear it at all.

So much I say in proof of the mind of the Church of England upon the subject of the priesthood, as involved in the priestly function of absolution. It is but a small part of what might be said, but it is as much perhaps as our time will now permit, and I cannot understand it to be less than sufficient (unless our Reformers in the sixteenth century, and the Revisers of our Book of Common Prayer and offices since, are to be esteemed either as the most incompetent or the most impious of men,) to prove the point for which I have adduced the wording of our Ordinal, and the comment upon this given by other parts of the Prayer-book, namely, that our Church unmistakably maintains the doctrine of the Christian priesthood, not merely the name but the thing, in the same reality and power in which the Church universal has ever claimed and ever maintained it.

And this remark may give us, if it please God, a wholesome thought with which to conclude this morning. Let us ever strive and pray, that we may never for a moment be severed in heart or hope, or even in thought, from the universal Church. Let us love it, and cleave to it, as we contemplate it one and undivided of old, however, alas, now distracted by unhappy divisions. Let us beware of encouraging a self-sufficient or self-reliant temper, as if we shewed our wisdom or independence, by isolating ourselves from that which has been the faith of the Church, not here or there, but everywhere from the beginning. If we can discover (as in most points of importance we may if we will,) what are the truths which have been held always, everywhere, and by all, (semper, ubique, ad omnibus, according to the well-known rule of St. Vincentius,) we may be certain that we shall run into no serious error, nor perverted interpretations of Holy Scripture dangerous to our souls. Individuals, however gifted, may go astray. Individual Churches may err, and have erred, even in matters of faith; but the whole Church at large, the Church Catholic, we may be sure, has not done so, nor ever shall, or how should it be, what St. Paul tells us “the Church of God” is, “the pillar and ground of the truth,” [95a] or how should be fulfilled our Blessed Lord’s word and promise,—“The gates of hell shall not prevail against It;” [95b] and again, “Lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” [95c] So, indeed, let us look upon Her with tender reverence as the spouse of Christ. “Oh! pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love Thee.” [95d]

SERMON VI.
The Christian Altar.

HEBREWS xiii. 10.
“We have an Altar.”

I resume our subject: the priesthood, altar and sacrifice in the Christian Church, and the mind of the Church of England upon it. On Sunday last we treated of this in part, shewing in relation to it what were the “old paths,” and pointing to the proof that our Church walks in them, recognising and maintaining a true priesthood in those who minister at her altars, by the solemn committal to them of the power of absolution, a thing which she would not do upon any other hypothesis than that of their possessing a true sacerdotal character. We had not time to say much upon the altar or the sacrifice. Our text, however, now leads us by no uncertain course to this portion of our subject, especially when placed in connection with St. Paul’s emphatic question in another place: “Are not they which eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar?” You will remember that we examined both those passages on a former occasion, [97] when we were regarding the scriptural testimony to the doctrine, and I need not repeat what I then said. But they will lead us on now naturally,—after the remarks I made last week upon the Christian priesthood, as borne witness to by the primitive Church, and maintained in the Church of England,—to some consideration of the sacrifice also, as borne witness to and maintained in like manner.

“We have an altar,” says the Apostle. Of course it is in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist that this altar is used, and the sacrifice made; the great commemorative sacrifice of the Christian Church, wherein we do not repeat, or attempt to repeat, (God forbid,) the one sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction once for all made upon the Cross, but yet are allowed to present before God the Father, the memorial of that ever-blessed offering, by the Body and Blood of Christ really present, (though not after the manner of any “corporal presence of Christ’s natural flesh and blood,” but) after a true though mystical and heavenly manner; to present this, I say, according to His will and ordinance, by which it is granted us to apply to ourselves the merits of His death and passion, and to obtain His own prevailing intercession for us before the throne of God; whereby, too, our souls and bodies, as we “eat of the sacrifice are partakers of the altar,” and gain heavenly nourishment and sustenance unto everlasting life.

We have seen already that such is the judgment and doctrine of the primitive Church in its understanding of Holy Scripture, as shewn by the early Christian writers, and by the ancient liturgies. Also, that the doctrine was maintained continuously for fifteen hundred years. Our question now is, What has our own Church said and done in this matter at or since the Reformation? Does she maintain, or does she reject, the previous teaching of the Church Universal, and put something else in the place of its doctrine, and its understanding of Holy Scripture upon the subject?