The offering on Calvary alone gave life and efficacy to all the sacrifices of Adam, of the patriarchs before and after the Flood, of the sacrifices of Abraham, and those who, in his day, still believed in the true God, in the sacrifices of the law promulgated by Moses.
Their sacrifices were but types and figures—substitutes for that which was to be accomplished in the person of the Messias; when that was once accomplished, it became the act of public worship, to be offered by man to the end of time.
The public worship of the new law is the sacrifice of Calvary, not renewed, not repeated—for “Christ dieth now no more”—but “shown forth,” made sensible.
The essential element of public worship is the death of the Man-God on Calvary; and under the new law, this must be shown in something higher and nobler than the types and animal sacrifices of the old law. It is the one sufficient act of worship, fulfilling all the intentions and designs of the ancient typical sacrifices—adoration, praise, thanksgiving, propitiation, and impetration. No public worship that does not directly connect itself with this great sacrifice can be at all a public worship acceptable to God.
The Almighty has certainly instituted a worship showing forth this death, and that alone will he accept.
Man cannot set up a public worship for himself. Worship is a debt which man owes to the Most High, and it is not for the debtor to fix the mode of paying that debt. In the discussion alluded to already, they frequently quoted the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman, but overlooked the great lesson of that whole incident. When that erring woman, pressed hard on her moral delinquency, changed the subject, with womanly adroitness, to the great religious division between the Jews and Samaritans, she asked: “Our fathers adored on this mountain; and you say that at Jerusalem is the place that men must adore”—meaning, evidently, “offer the sacrifices of the law.”
Christ answered: “Salvation is with the Jews.” The Mosaic church was the ark, and out of it there was no salvation. And yet the Samaritans had, according to modern ideas, every requisite. They had the law of Moses, and revered and followed it closely; they had priests of the sons of Aaron, won to their side; they offered all the sacrifices commanded by the law, and as the law commanded; and they had and exercised the right of private judgment in the matter of the place. And precisely this last point vitiated the whole, and made their sacrifices utterly worthless in the eyes of God. They did not conduce to salvation. To be in the way of salvation, they must be in communion with the high-priest at Jerusalem, and their sacrifices could not be vivified by man or angel. They were worthless. “Salvation was with the Jews.”
The essential element of public worship is, then, the sacrifice of Calvary; and the public worship of the new law must be connected with that act by divine institution. No institution devised by private [pg 327] judgment, however seemingly fit to human eyes, can have any real value. It is not for man to make, by his private judgment, a form of public worship that will avoid the sentence, “Salvation is not in it.” As the figurative sacrifices of the old law derived their value from divine institution as typical of Calvary, so the public worship of the new law must be connected with Calvary by divine institution.
Now, in the popular forms of public worship in our days, there is no essential element, either of divine or human creation, to connect it with Calvary. It is inferior even to the Samaritan worship, which Christ so decisively condemned. What claims, then, can it have?
The Catholic who is asked why he cannot attend a Protestant worship finds his answer here. “Why,” it will be said, “there can be no harm in it. Reading the Scriptures, singing psalms out of Holy Writ, and a moral explanation of some part of Scripture cannot but be good.” Even supposing the explanation to contain nothing contrary to faith, a Catholic cannot accept it. It is not of God's institution, and, as unauthorized and human, must be rejected of God. There was no detail in the Samaritan worship that a Jew could condemn, yet he had to condemn it as a whole; for, by God's institution, all this, done on Mount Sion, was acceptable to him and contributed to salvation; done elsewhere, was repugnant and availed not.