The words of the lecturer following his exposition of the doctrine are not at first sight intelligible. "We may be pardoned, then, if we ask what then is our Lord to us personally?" It is very difficult to see how the hidden presence of our Lord under the sacramental veils is any obstruction to our personal relation to him as our Saviour. How does this presence derogate from the fact that he died for each of us on the cross, and is ever living in heaven to make intercession for us? Our adoration of his sacred body and precious blood under the forms of bread and wine does not hinder our meditating upon his passion and death upon the cross, or raising our mental eye to his glorious form at the right hand of God. The author appears to imagine that his sacramental presence must destroy his natural mode of existence and reduce him to a passive, helpless state of being in the host. But this is only because he fails to conceive the Catholic doctrine that our Lord is present both in heaven and also in the host at the same time, though in two different modes. He says, "He is present with us, we adore that presence, but he is passive and lifeless in the hands of a priesthood. No sign or word comes from the pix. When the church is in travail over a new doctrine, recluse and learned men busy themselves in vast libraries in order to catch the consensus of Catholic tradition. A believer may be excused, if, like Mary, he cries out, 'They have taken away the Lord, and I know not where they have laid him!'" Strange language this from a member of the communion of Andrewes, Hooker, Taylor, Pusey, and Hobart! Has the author ever read their glowing words respecting this same theme? Is he familiar with the doctrinal books of his own church? Taken away the Lord, when he remains perpetually in our tabernacles awaiting the visits of those true believers who pass hours in sweet communion at the foot of the altar, conversing with him as with the friend and spouse of their souls? When he is given to them in communion and his sacred body rests in their bosoms, kindling there the flames of a sacred love often equal to that which glows in the seraphim? Let the reverend doctor read the lives of the saints, and ask them if the Lord is silent when they converse with him in the blessed sacrament, or let him even ask the ordinary pious Catholic that question. He does not indeed break the silence of his hidden state by words audible to the bodily ear, but he speaks far more efficaciously to the heart in a way which is unintelligible to cold rationalism, but perfectly well known to faith inflamed by love. The divine eucharist was not instituted as a medium for communicating light to the church concerning revealed truths. Christ teaches and rules the church by the Holy Spirit, and not by his human voice. It is his will that study, meditation, and counsel should be the means by which the prelates and doctors of the church obtain the light and assistance of this divine Spirit. Dr. Harwood is not pleased with this arrangement; but as the Lord appears to have determined definitely that it must be so, we are afraid that his suggestions will not be attended to. At all events, he may console himself with the reflection that he has discovered an entirely new objection to the Catholic doctrine.
We have unwittingly passed over one other objection, namely, that the doctrine of the eucharistic sacrifice destroys the idea of communion. The eucharist does not cease to be a sacrament by being a sacrifice. If there is communion among Episcopalians through a reception of bread and wine, it would seem that there might be also communion among Catholics in receiving the true body and blood of Christ. If the Protestant Episcopal liturgy is a common prayer, certainly the Catholic liturgy is equally one, though it is also a sacrifice. Moreover, there is, in the strictest sense, communion in the very act of offering the sacrifice. The priest, though consecrated by a heavenly grace and commissioned by the divine authority of our Lord, is consecrated to minister for the people, in their name and as their representative. He offers up the sacrifice for the people, and they offer sacrifice to God through him, which is signified in the mass by the action of the deacon, who, as the representative of the laity, holds the pixis in his hand at the offertory, and placing his right hand on the foot of the chalice, recites with the priest the prayer, Offerimus tibi, Domine, calicem, etc. We will not attempt to prove the truth of the Catholic doctrine of the mass, since the author does not directly attempt to disprove it, but will drop the subject here, and proceed to notice what method he proposes to follow in refuting the two grand Catholic doctrines of the papacy and the mass.
The reverend doctor takes a review of the condition of Protestantism as in contrast with that of the Catholic Church, in which we are happy to be able to concur with him as well as to commend the graphic power of his description. He then briefly indicates three ways of proceeding: one by tradition, one by tradition and Scripture together, and one by Scripture alone, which he selects, reserving the right to appeal to tradition when it is convenient. We will let his language speak for itself:
"As searchers after truth, we must acknowledge some standard and appeal to some recognized authority. Without this we must follow either our own mental bias, or else become the prey of every man who shall be bold enough to declare that he has and holds the truth of God. I fear very much we have lost sight of this need of appeal to a recognized standard of truth and duty. We are, in this new age, building apparently on the sand; or it would seem that what we had supposed to be rock, on which many were building, has become pulverized, and as the sands shift under the power of the stream, multitudes believe to-day what they did not believe yesterday, and to-morrow they may believe nothing at all.
"I touch here a serious evil which is doing more harm to our Protestantism than any direct assaults of Romanism. We seem to be under some spell. Our spiritual ideas are resolving themselves into a series of dissolving views; and all because the mind has not the proper nutriment to impart health and vigor to our religious feelings and convictions. Upon every account it becomes us to recognize the fact that in religion we must have an actual, definite standard of appeal. This we must find either in sacred Scripture or in tradition, or in both combined. If we accept the tradition of the church as law, we might as well abandon the contest with Rome, because the traditions gradually, as they gather force and headway in time, revolve around the papacy. The traditions in the long run have made the papacy; they are its chief support to-day. To accept them bodily, in mass, is to appeal to actual Christendom—to the historic church—as to a standard and law, and not as to a witness of truth. It is to acknowledge the identity of Christian truth and the Christian Church visible. This brings us again to Romanism, or this is the postulate of the Roman Catholic apologist.
"If to-day I ask what is truth? and if I allow every church or sect to answer, I am stunned by a confused and unintelligible noise. If I allow one church to answer, and only one, in the midst of the crowd of churches, by my procedure I submit myself, in advance, to that one church. But if I allow none to answer for me, and I recognize, nevertheless, a divine historic revelation, I am compelled to go to sacred Scripture in order to learn what God requires me to believe. Shall we take the sacred Scripture fashioned by Italian workmen? or by Greek, or by Anglican, or by German, or by American workmen? No; but the text in its purity and simplicity. Here we must take our stand whensoever we come to the question of what it is necessary to believe in order to be a Christian; whensoever, in a word, loyalty and the obedience of faith are required or even considered.
"I do not mean, however, to deny and repudiate utterly the traditional principle. Christianity is historic. As a social interest, as an organized spiritual fact, it comes to us from the past. We cannot dismiss this past of Christian life and history, any more than we can dismiss the past of our civil life and institutions. The new generation, as it succeeds the old, does not build again from the foundations. A. U. C. represented a fact to the Roman citizen which he never could forget. We measure time in the world's history by the letters A. D. We date our public documents in the United States from the declaration of our independence. We do not create the state anew; we administer it as an existing fact. So in religion. Many things, many words, institutions, and the like have come to us from the past, which we accept and use as a matter of course. We baptize infants, we observe the first day of the week, we use the imposition of hands in ordination and confirmation, we employ the words sacrament, trinity, incarnation, etc., in theology. This is an illustration of the recognition of a traditional principle which is inevitable. We do not, therefore, maintain that we must have a sure and certain warrant of Scripture for all that we may observe and do as Christians, because it is impossible to be confined to the written word under all circumstances, and during all ages. Much is left the conscience and judgment of individuals and of particular churches; but when we come to faith, to what it is necessary to believe as Christians, we must adhere firmly to the Bible, and never for a moment allow any one to impose upon the conscience any thing, as requisite to a true reception of the Gospel, which is not contained therein, nor may be proved thereby.
"This, then, is our standard of appeal. Logically and morally it is the right and only standard of appeal in the discussion, especially of the claims and teachings of any and of every church whatsoever. If this be not the tribunal to which we must go, then we must have recourse to the dictum of a church, and then, as we have seen, we allow a church to be its own standard of appeal. Consequently, when Rome proclaims her infallibility, we must allow her claim. When the Church of England disowns infallibility, we may or may not accept her disclaimer. If we do not accept it, then we prove her to be fallible, to be mistaken articulately in respect of her own quality and prerogative. We are reduced to absurdity.
"We are forced back to sacred Scripture, and in the interests of Christian truth we are compelled to take our stand here. And I declare in all completeness of conviction, that with the Bible in our hands we are triumphant against the doctrine of the supremacy of the pope, and of the sacrifice of the mass. This is to be triumphant against Romanism."
Dr. Harwood is sagacious enough not to follow the example of the generality of his Episcopalian associates, which the Presbyterians have been lately seduced by their evil genius into following, that is, to appeal to the first six councils. He probably agrees with the author of Liber Librorum and Dr. Stanley, that in A.D. 200 we find the thing he is opposing and anxious to escape from, existing. "How, then, came such an institution into existence? For nothing can be plainer than that about a hundred years after the death of John it appears, although in any thing but apostolic garb. All is altered." "No other change," says Dean Stanley, "equally momentous has ever since affected its fortunes; yet none has ever been so silent and secret. The church has now become history, the history not of an isolated community or of isolated individuals, but of an organized society, incorporated with the political systems of the world."... "Hard is it to see in such a church any thing but a profound mystery of God, a mystery of spiritual evil, a mystery of iniquity."[61] Dr. Harwood feels it to be necessary to take refuge in the obscure period between the year 100 and the year 200 as in a chasm separating historical from scriptural Christianity. It is very easy to make a theory concerning the silent, sudden change which took place during this century, and then, clearing history by a bound, to land in the New Testament. Once there, with full liberty of private interpretation, which means freedom to interpret it by the light of any philosophical theory or preconceived opinions one may choose to adopt, Dr. Harwood thinks he is safe, and able to defend himself to the end against Romanism. He imagines that we are unwilling and unable to follow him there, and meet him—or rather the champions of his cause—on their own chosen ground. "In conclusion, we will ask you to remember that the Roman Catholics have never liked our appeal to Scripture. They do not like it to-day any better than they liked it three hundred years ago." If the doctor thinks we are afraid of the Scriptures, or in any way distrustful of our ability to prove our doctrines from it, he is extremely mistaken. We have always been ready to enter into that part of the argument, and we maintain specifically respecting the two grand doctrines of the papacy and the mass that they can be fully and satisfactorily proved from Scripture, as in point of fact they have been proved, to mention no others, by Mr. Allies and Cardinal Wiseman. We object to the demand that Scripture should be the only source of appeal, not because we are afraid that we shall be defeated by scriptural arguments; but because the demand is unjust, and the assumption on which it is founded is baseless. We demand that the subject shall be discussed in all its bearings, on all its grounds, by the light of all the knowledge that is attained from every source. We deny the ability of our adversaries to establish the authority of Scripture without first assuming Catholic principles, and we deny their logical and moral right after using these principles in establishing Scripture, to throw away or burn their ladder by denying or ignoring these same principles when it is a question of establishing the sense of the Scripture, explaining or integrating its statements. If we are to shut out of our minds all the ideas of Christianity which are extraneous to the literal statements of the New Testament, to take the attitude of learners searching after truth, and to get from the naked text without other interpreter than itself the sense that is in it, we have a difficult task of doubtful issue before us. John Locke, who was probably as capable of doing this impartially as any Englishman can be, tried it, and proclaimed as the result of his studies that only one idea is demonstrably revealed in the New Testament, namely, that Jesus Christ is the prophet of God to whose teaching and precepts obedience is due. As to his actual teaching and precepts, he could only find probability, concluding, therefore, very justly, that there is no system of doctrine or code of precepts clearly binding upon all alike, each one being left to the guidance of a probable conscience only.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to read the New Testament without spectacles. For our own part, we are quite sure that the New Testament contains more or less explicitly all the principal and many of the minor Catholic doctrines, and that the sense given by the church is the one given by true exegesis and criticism. Yet we will not venture to say how far we should be able to see this without Catholic spectacles. We are quite sure that Dr. Harwood also has a pair of spectacles, and cannot lay them aside if he would. We find in point of fact, that ordinarily persons who believe in the Bible and read it all their lives, whether Episcopalians, Presbyterians, or even Unitarians, are seldom startled out of the belief they have been taught, and convinced of some different interpretation, merely by reading it. It is evident, therefore, that any one exposition made of Christianity from the simple text will never be a demonstration in the view of all candid, sincere persons. There will always be various interpretations having more or less probability, and unity will never be reached. Besides this, the degree and extent of inspiration will never be settled, or the limits between the human, transitory element and the divine, unchangeable element become fixed. The result will be that we must fall back on philosophy and a system of rationalism. Let it be conceded that the ideas in the mind of each sacred writer when he wrote are clearly apprehended, it will be impossible to secure perfect submission even to the teachings of inspired men, when the principle of church authority has been cast to the winds. This is the reason why, even at the outset of an argument, and before we are entitled to cite the authority of tradition as divine to one who denies it, we refuse to permit the case to be argued on the scriptural ground alone, even though both parties admit the divine authority of Scripture. We desire to do something more than to make a good case, and to establish our interpretation as even the more probable or the most probable. We desire to prove it to a demonstration which does not leave even a slight probability on the other side, through which an adversary may creep. We wish to have the question adjudicated and decided, so that it may be clear and indisputable that God has revealed and commands all men to believe and obey the Gospel of his Son as a distinct and positive law of faith and practice, and not as a mere theory. We are not afraid, however, that we cannot get the best of it, in a discussion of the text of the New Testament, conducted on the same principles that we should apply to an ancient manuscript about whose contents we have no extrinsic light whatever. Those who come nearest to this cold, critical impartiality are men who possess the intellectual keenness necessary to see into ideas as they are, without having any motive to misrepresent them. One who is indifferent as to the question what the sacred writers thought and intended to say, because he considers their teaching as equivalent only to that of Socrates or Confucius, and who is qualified to examine critically the New Testament, will at least attempt to state impartially what impression it has made on his mind. And that statement will throw some light on the question, What does the text clearly and unmistakably signify by itself, apart from ideas on the same subject-matter which are derived from Christian tradition? One person of this kind, Mr. Samuel Johnson, of Lynn, Massachusetts, who is a leader among the Bostonian free-thinkers, in an article which appeared in The Radical gave his opinion that the doctrine of the papacy is clearly contained in St. Matthew's Gospel. The infidel Jew Salvador, in a work whose name we do not now remember, but which we have attentively read, declares that the Roman Catholic religion is the genuine religion of the New Testament, and that Protestantism is a total misconception of Christianity; an opinion we have ourselves personally heard expressed by a well-informed and zealous Israelite of our acquaintance. We do not care to press these testimonies too far; but at all events they indicate, in connection with the fact that so many learned students of the Bible, both Protestant and Catholic, interpret it in a manner quite different from that of Dr. Harwood's school, that it does not on the face of it clearly and unmistakably pronounce in his favor or against us.
We insist then, further, that even conceding Dr. Harwood for a moment in possession of the ground on which his belief of the divine authority of the Scripture stands, he is bound to admit all the light that ecclesiastical history throws back on its text, as he himself partially but inconsistently admits, and as all Protestants have ever done so far as it suited their purposes to do so. We may illustrate this by a parallel case. A Christian discusses the text of the Old Testament with a Jew. If the Jew should insist on sticking to the text, and interpreting the prophecies exclusively by biblical criticism, the Christian could justly insist that the facts of the life of Jesus Christ and the history of Christianity must be considered. The Jew himself would not fail to cite all kinds of historical facts not prejudicial to himself against an infidel, as manifesting the sense and fulfilment of the prophecies. Let the Jew shut his eyes to the miracles proving the divine mission and miraculous conception of Jesus, and he can very plausibly explain the famous prediction, "Behold the Virgin (ha almah) shall conceive," etc., as signifying. "Behold this young woman"—that is, one standing by and pointed out by Isaias—shall conceive and bear a son. So, with all the Messianic passages of the Old Testament, as one may see by consulting Rabbi Leeser's English translation, with notes, published at Philadelphia. Now, it is a perfectly fair and conclusive argument against a Jew to show that the history of Jesus, established on merely human faith, presents such a correspondence to the prophecies of the Old Testament that it must be regarded as their fulfilment. Although the Old Testament alone might not reveal Jesus to his individual reason, yet in the light of his life it is shown that these ancient Scriptures testify of him. It is not competent for him to allege his Scripture as a complete and finished revelation, rejecting every thing which is not clearly visible on its face; for we can show him that his Scriptures point out the glorious son of David's royal daughter as the one who will carry out the dispensation of Moses to its consummation.
It is precisely the same case between us and Protestants. We point to the church as presenting historical facts and verities corresponding to the somewhat obscure predictions or other declarations of the Scripture, and manifesting their significance. We show how all that can be learned from the New Testament by itself is in harmony with what the church proclaims herself to be, and declares true Christianity to consist in; and we show the Scripture presupposes, provides for, and points toward the church. If we take all those passages which relate to the divine eucharist, and place beside them the traditional teaching and practice of the church, we see them at once lit up with meaning and irradiating our minds with the true and Catholic doctrine. One is the explanation of the other, and the historical existence of the sacrifice of the mass confronted with the language of the Scripture demonstrates that it must be the thing which the sacred writers meant. We take the prediction of our Lord to St. Peter, "Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church." One who knows nothing about the Catholic Church might easily be persuaded that our Lord meant no more than this: "Thou art firm like a rock in thy faith, and upon such a firm faith I will establish all the elect who are an invisible society known to me, and these Satan shall never be able to overcome." But when that stupendous, world-subduing might of Peter's see which overawes even Dr. Harwood is contemplated in history as it emerges from the obscure dawn of the Christian era, and goes forward through all time conquering and to conquer, its plain correspondence to and fulfilment of the literal significance of our Lord's words proves conclusively that he meant this, and nothing else. We do not intend, however, to go into this argument any further, as Dr. Harwood does not profess to argue the point himself. All we aim at is, to show that the argument must be conducted on the ground of history as well as that of Scripture. And here we desire to call attention to an admirable article by President Woolsey in the same number of the New-Englander, in which Dr. Harwood's lecture was first published, on the Church of the Future, which exhibits with rare ability the very idea we are insisting upon, that the true Christianity is the genuine historical Christianity.
The only true issue which can be made is respecting the genuine, historical development of the Christian idea. Dr. Harwood and his school cannot escape from this. If, therefore, the champions whom he summons to the controversy respond to his call, they will be bound to demonstrate historically that the papal supremacy was a purely human invention substituted for the authentic constitution which the apostles gave to the Christian church. This Dr. Harwood thinks can be done. "If the pope be that rock, we can find by the lights of history the strata and the law of its structure. We observe it acquired shape and size—and there is a hammer which can break it in pieces." If there is such a hammer, we wonder that it has not yet been found and wielded. In our opinion, the enemies of the papacy have already said every thing which can be said on their side of the question. We are at a loss to know how history can be made to give up any thing new on the subject, any thing which has not been already thoroughly sifted and discussed. We are perfectly willing that our adversaries should try again to look up or manufacture a hammer with which to try the effect of their blows upon the Rock of Peter. We think they will find that they are undertaking a herculean task. One thing only we must be permitted to observe, that any one who undertakes this controversy ought not to ignore and pass by what has already been written by Catholic controversialists. It is not fair that the discussion should be always beginning de novo, and Catholic writers be required to repeat all the labor of their predecessors. If Dr. Harwood, or any one else, is disposed to attempt our demolition, let him first master all the arguments and evidences which have been already adduced on our side, give a distinct answer to them, and rebut the answers which we have already made to anti-papal arguments. Whoever does this with competent learning and ability, will no doubt receive due attention; but until this is done, it will be quite sufficient for us to challenge a refutation of the works of our champions which hitherto have remained unanswered, and which we confidently affirm to be unanswerable.