"And, my dear aunt, was this the only point of difference which you discerned between us and your Tractarian friends?"
"O no. Perhaps if I refer to a passage in a sermon which I heard the venerable Mr. Ingleby preach, it will give you an idea of the other point of difference I perceived. It was contained in a sermon from John iii. 14, 15, and was to this effect: Jesus Christ stands in the same relation to us which the elevated brazen serpent did to the bitten Israelites—every one who looked to it was healed. We, as sinners, are thus addressed: 'Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else' (Isa. xlv. 22). 'You are not,' he said, with intense earnestness, 'to look to your virtues for salvation, nor are you to look to your religious ceremonies for salvation; but you are to look to Jesus Christ, symbolized by the brazen serpent of the Hebrew camp, a living Saviour, and one mighty to save.' This was a beautiful passage, beautiful from its simplicity and its adaptation to our condition. I have been baptized, confirmed, have taken the sacrament many times, and have passed through the entire process of ecclesiastical training, but I now find I am not spiritually regenerated, and that I need a Saviour just as much as any unbaptized heathen."
"Tractarians," said Miss Roscoe, "neither deny nor repudiate Jesus Christ; they maintain his original dignity, and often depict, in strongly exciting language, his humiliation and his sufferings. They also extol him as the perfection of moral dignity, combined with personal excellencies of the purest order; but they do not give to him that prominence as a Saviour mighty to save, which the inspired writers and which the evangelical clergy give to him. His substitutional work they virtually reject, as we do the legend of baptismal regeneration. He is, in their ecclesiastical domain, more as the spectre of the Christian faith, moving silently in dim twilight amongst its established forms and lifeless ceremonies, than as the ever-living Son of God, giving life to the spiritually dead, healing the moral disorders of fallen humanity, and saving the chief of sinners from everlasting woe."
On Sunday afternoon they all went to church, and heard the curate deliver his farewell sermon, which, like most sermons of the same school, was a pompous eulogium on the church, its apostolic orders, and its sacraments. Jesus Christ was visible in the remote distance, but not drawing the people to himself by the virtue of his death; the efficacy of the attractive power was deposited in the laver of baptism, and the absolution of the priesthood.
"I am devoutly thankful," said Mrs. Roscoe, as they were returning from church, "that this is the last sermon of the Tractarian school we shall have from this pulpit."
"I think," said Miss Roscoe, as they were chatting together after tea, "we shall be guilty of no offence against any law of our statute-book if we go together to the Dissenting chapel this evening, as we have no service at church."
"I shall not object," said Mr. Roscoe, "to your going; but if I go, now that I have appointed an evangelical curate to do duty at church, a report may be raised that I am going to turn Dissenter. This would most likely operate to my prejudice. However, I intend to hear the sermon, which I can do very easily by walking in the garden alongside the chapel, where I have of late heard many of Mr. Davis's sermons, and have more than admired them; I have felt them."
"My uncle! you progress in liberality rather rapidly. I hope this is not a sign that you will soon be taken from us; choice fruit sometimes gets prematurely ripe."
"O no. I am not meet for heaven as yet. But now that I begin to know and feel the real power of the truth on my heart, I shall throw off the mantle of bigotry; it never sits gracefully on a true believer in Christ. One faith ought to produce one spirit—the spirit of love and Christian fellowship. We shall all be one in heaven, and why not all one on earth?"
The text for the evening sermon was part of the 29th verse of the 34th chapter of the prophecies of Ezekiel—"A plant of renown." After a concise exposition of the prophecy, Mr. Davis remarked, "It is not my intention to give you a lecture on the future restoration of the Jews to the land of their fathers, but rather to fix your attention on that glorious One who is announced in my text under the beautifully appropriate image of a plant of renown. That it refers exclusively to Jesus Christ I shall take for granted, and the following is the leading question I mean to discuss—What is the primary cause to which his pre-eminent distinction and celebrity may be attributed? That there are some subordinate causes which have contributed to it, I readily admit, such as his miracles, his teaching, and the moral grandeur and social loveliness of his character; but these, though brilliant and imposing, are not enough to account for the unparalleled celebrity which he still maintains in universal estimation. For suppose, after performing the miracles which he did perform, and after conveying the knowledge of spiritual truths which he did convey, and after developing the character which he did develope, he had suddenly disappeared, like Enoch or Elijah, doing nothing more in behalf of man, what an impenetrable cloud of mystery would hang over the design of his appearing on earth? We should, in that case, be reduced to the necessity of believing that the greatest, the wisest, and the most benevolent being that ever appeared in the human form, came and went away without accomplishing any purpose commensurate with the moral grandeur of his character, or the vastness of his resources for practical utility. He would flit before our imagination as a wonderful being, but a being of no essential importance to us. His history might live in our recollection without exciting an emotion of gratitude or of love, or it might pass from our recollection without our sustaining any perceptible loss, proving a vast brilliant mirage in the dreary desert of humanity; or, like some splendid night-dream, leaving at the dawn of morning its romantic incidents feebly and uselessly imprinted on the fancy. If, then, his splendid miracles, his sublime revelation of spiritual truth, and his unique character, blending in equal proportions the perfections of divinity with the excellencies of unfallen humanity, are insufficient to account for his unfading and ever-increasing celebrity, and for the absolute dominion he holds over the thoughts, the admiration, and the supreme affection of his disciples, of every tribe and every grade of the intellectual and social world, to what other cause are we to attribute it? To what other cause! to his death, and the relation in which he stands, by virtue of his death, to the great family of man. He came to give his life a ransom for many; his life he gave, laying it down of himself; he suffered, the just for the unjust; he died for us.