[15a] Cor. ii. 2, and i. 23.
[15b] In Tract 81, p, 75, adverting to expressions including the terms Christ crucified, they say, “It may be seen by an attention to the context in all the passages, where these expressions occur, that it is a very different view, and in fact the opposite to the modern notion, which St. Paul always intends by it. It is the necessity of OUR being crucified to the world; it is OUR humiliation together with Him; mortification of the flesh; being made conformable to His sufferings and death. It was a doctrine which was foolishness to the wise, and an offence to the Jew, on account of the debasement of the natural man which it implied.”
[16a] Brit. Crit. for April, 1842, p. 446.
[16b] Newman’s Lectures on Justification, p. 160, 236, 247.
[16c] Pusey’s Letter to the Bishop of Oxford, p. 71.
[16d] Newman’s Lecture on Justification, p. 68.
[16e] Tract 90, p. 13.
[17] Tract 80 and 87.
[18] That Aristotle should teach that we are to become right-minded by acting rightly, is not to be wondered at. He knew nothing of the work of the Spirit of God, or of the love of Christ, or of the impossibility (see Acts x. and xii.) of our acting rightly without the grace of the Holy Spirit to give a right mind first. But that Oxford Divines should teach so is to be wonderfully “dark amidst the blaze of noon!”
[19] To be grafted into the church is to be outwardly admitted into the enjoyment of church privileges and ordinances. Rightly means, not as hypocrites, but with the repentance and faith of the regenerate. The wicked, and such as be void of a lively faith, do receive the sacrament of so great a thing as regeneration to their condemnation. Not receiving baptism rightly, they have no true part in the privileges and ordinances of the church, which are thereby sealed to the faithful.