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The structural, theological, and even verbal likeness between columns I. and II. is obvious at a glance, as is also the unlikeness of the third column to both. And the broad distinction is, that on the one hand there is an act of oblation and consecration, attended by other acts of worship, besides the oral reception of the Communion, in the Latin and Anglican rites; whereas, on the other hand, the act of communicating is the one and only intent of the Puritan order; while the one element common to all three, the recitation of the Institution, is in the Directory-as, indeed, in other Puritan forms—studiously dissociated from any action with or over the bread and wine. That is to say, the former are what S. Ambrose, and those of his day, meant by the word Missa, when they applied it to the Holy Eucharist; while the latter is little more, at best, than the long-abolished agape, or religious club-feast, of ancient Christendom.

It will be seen, on comparison of the Sarum and Caroline offices, that out of the nineteen factors set down in column I. they have fifteen in substantial and often exact verbal agreement, though varying somewhat in order, as is also the case with the several parts in all distinct liturgies. Their chief points of structural difference are the addition of the Decalogue to our present rite, and the condensation of 8, 12, and 14 in column I. into the single 6 of column II., while of course there is a good deal of verbal change, but nothing which can even disguise the practical identity, as to essentials, of the two rites.

As to the Prayer of Consecration itself, we have of course the right to claim that it should be read not only in the light of that of 1549, so highly lauded in the very Act of Parliament which substituted the Book of 1552, but also by that of the Liturgies of the Scottish and American Churches, with which the Church of England is in perfect intercommunion.

The trustworthiness of Dr. Lushington's dictum, 'that the Mass is gone, root and branch,' may be readily tested in this way; and, indeed, it is not unworthy of mention that when this learned judge was acting as assessor to Archbishop Sumner, in condemning Archdeacon Denison, one of the latter's friends obtained for him in court an explicit condemnation of a proposition respecting the Eucharist, as untenable in the Church of England, which happened to be, though he did not know it, an extract from Lancelot Andrewes.

As regards the mode of interpreting such a document as the existing Communion Office, no reasonable doubt can

arise. The Church of England makes incessant appeal to the ancient Christian Church of the first five centuries, in Prayer-Book, Canons, Articles, Homilies, and in such Acts of Parliament and other civil documents as the following (which may perhaps be held by some persons as more weighty and authoritative evidence than any ecclesiastical formularies) :25 Henry VIII. c. xxi.; 34 & 35 Henry VIII. c. i.; 1 Edward VI. c. i. ; 2 & 3 Edward VI. c. i.; Proclamation of 1548; Answer to Princess Mary, 1551; 1 Elizabeth, c. ii.; Proclamation against Sectaries; Queen's Declaration, 1569; Proclamation for Uniformity, 1604; 13 & 14 Charles II., &c. And that the two doctrines of the Real Presence and of the Eucharistic Sacrifice prevailed universally throughout the ancient Church does not admit of serious dispute; still less that they have been not merely acknowledged, but vigorously asserted, by all the greatest names in Anglican theology. We can find, it is true, denunciations of the Liturgies of the Eastern and Western Churches amongst the less eminent, learned, and respectable Reformers, just as we can find like attacks on baptismal regeneration, as a 'soul-destroying' doctrine and unknown to the Church of England, amongst the more illiterate Evangelicals even still, though nothing like so many as twenty years ago, and a like denial of the lawfulness of private confession, despite the explicit language of the Prayer-Book and Canons.

But a few citations from men whose praise is in all the Churches will not be out of place. We do not propose to construct a long catena, but just to pit some of the most famous writers of Anglicanism against one anonymous contributor to a recent number of a Review, undertaking, as we have seen, to lay down the law for the Church of England, and, as it would seem, doing so in the Nonconformist interest, by assailing the essential doctrines of that Church.

We will take, first, two eminent men, because singled out by the Reviewer himself as supporters of his own views, and will cite them simply to illustrate his position-already made untenable by Edmund Burke-that unlikeness to the Roman Church, even where that Church is in accord with early Christianity, is and ought to be the distinguishing characteristic of the Church of England; and, in giving certain positive extracts from their writings, we are not to be misconstrued as though we intended to conceal or deny the existence of negative expressions, directed against popular Roman teaching, which may also be found in their works :

ARCHBISHOP BRAMHALL.-'The Roman Church is not a Pro

Yet

testant Church, nor the Protestant Church a Roman Church. both the one and the other may be homogeneous members of the Catholic Church. Their difference in essentials is but imaginary.— (Works, vol. ii. p. 86.)

"The Holy Eucharist is a commemoration, a representation, an application of the all-sufficient propitiatory sacrifice of the Cross. If his [Bishop of Chalcedon's] Sacrifice of the Mass have any other propitiating power or virtue in it than to commemorate, represent, and apply the merit of the Sacrifice of the Cross, let him speak plainly what it is. Bellarmine knew no more of the Sacrifice than we.'-(Vol. ii. p. 88.)

'Abate us Transubstantiation and those things which are consequent in this determination of the manner of the Presence, and we have no difference with them on this particular.'-(Vol. ii. p. 211.)

'It was not the erroneous opinions of the Church of Rome, but their obtruding them by laws upon other Churches, which warranted a separation.'-(Vol. iii. p. 572).

BISHOP COSIN :- -'I cannot see where there is any real difference betwixt us [and the Church of Rome] about this Real Presence, if we would give over the study of contradiction and understand one another aright. Maldonatus (De Sacr. p. 143), after a long examination of the matter, concludes thus at last with us all:— "For we do not hold this celebration to be so naked a commemoration of Christ's Body given to death, and of His Blood there shed for us; but that the same Body and Blood is present there in this commemoration (made by the Sacrament of Bread and Wine) to all that faithfully receive it: nor do we say it is so made a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, but that, by our prayers also added, we offer and present the death of Christ to God, that for His death's sake we may find mercy; in which respect we deny not this Commemorative Sacrifice to be propitiatory. The receiving of which Sacrament, or participating of which Sacrifice, exhibited to us, we say is profitable only to them that receive it and participate of it; but the prayer that we add thereunto, in presenting the death and merits of our Saviour to God, is not only beneficial to them that are present, but to them that are absent also, to the dead and living both, to all true members of the Catholic Church of Christ.”—(Notes on the Common Prayer.)

We might extend quotations of this kind to many pages, but will content ourselves with one more, taken from one of the most eminent and moderate of English divines in the seventeenth century, Henry Hammond, whose Paraphrase on the New Testament and Practical Catechism are still living and standard works, and who was a sturdy champion of the Church of England against Rome, as well as against Geneva and Zürich :

'I must confess, I should not have begun the list as he doeth, that "all Roman Catholics believe and reverence the Sacrifice of the

Mass as the most substantial and essential act of their religion: all Protestants condemn and abhor it;" when 'tis visible that the Protestants of the Church of England believe and reverence, as much as any, the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, as the most substantial and essential act of our religion, and doubt not but the word Missa, "Mass," has fitly been used by the Western Church to signify it, and herein abhor and condemn nothing but the corruptions and mutilations which the Church of Rome, without care of conforming themselves to the Universal, have admitted in the celebration'-(Preface to Despatcher Despatched.)

And we will close this part of our rejoinder with another extract, taken from the writings of Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of S. David's, a man whose powerful intellect and vast learning were universally confessed, and whom his wildest opponent has never suspected of being other than hostile to the advanced High Church School in the Anglican body:

"The Church of England. . . has dealt with this subject in a spirit of true reverence, as well as of prudence and charity. She asserts the mystery inherent in the institution of the Sacrament, but abstains from all attempts to investigate and defend it, and leaves the widest range open to the devotional feelings and the private meditations of her children with regard to it. And this liberty is so large, and has been so freely used, that apart from the express admission of Transubstantiation, or of the grossly carnal notions to which it gave rise, and which, in the minds of the common people, are probably inseparable from it, I think there can hardly be any description of the Real Presence which in some sense or other is universally allowed, that would not be found to be authorised by the language of most divines of our Church, and I am not aware, and do not believe, that our most advanced Ritualists have in fact outstepped those very ample bounds.— (Charge in 1866, pp. 97, 98.)

Nor has this been the mere esoteric doctrine of a few recluse divines, buried in volumes known only to erudite scholars. On the contrary, every manual of Eucharistic devotion for lay use which achieved real popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testifies to these same facts; as, for example, Dr. Edward Lake's Officium Eucharisticum, which went through thirty-one editions between its first issue in 1677 and its comparatively recent reprint in 1846; the old Companion to the Altar, which had reached its seventeenth edition in 1738, and was often subsequently issued with special licence from the Crown; and Bishop Thomas Wilson's Lord's Supper, which had reached its thirtysecond edition from 1736 in 1807, and which is still in steady demand. These are only the more salient examples of a copious devotional literature, differing singularly little in tone

and spirit from the more old-fashioned books formerly in use amongst English Roman Catholics, except so far as the dissimilarity of structural arrangement in the Latin and English rites compelled some variation, and are sufficient proof that if a Puritan can boast that the Mass has indeed disappeared from the Church of England, his vaunt holds good only in the same sense as that of a republican under Hadrian or Severus, who should have dilated on the fact that the Eternal City had bowed to no king since she drove out the Tarquins.

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So far, then, as the Quarterly Reviewer has staked his case on the rejection of Apostolical Succession and of the 'Mass' -understanding by that word--as did the compilers of the Prayer-Book of 1549, the acknowledgment of the Presence, Adoration, and Sacrifice in the Eucharist, confessed as legally tenable in the Church of England even by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council itself-he has not taken much by his motion. And it is not a little curious that if he had availed himself of the one really plausible argument for fastening the epithet Protestant' on the Church of England, namely, that it is part of the official title of that daughter Church in the United States with which she is in full communion, there is the awkward fact that both Apostolical Succession and the Eucharistic Sacrifice are formally expressed in the American Prayer-Book with an explicitness which leaves nothing to be desired. Nay more, as regards this very title of 'Protestant Episcopal,' there is at this moment a powerful agitation on foot in the United States for its abolition, and that not by reason of any great influence of Ritualism, which is but a small factor as yet in America, but desired by moderate Churchmen simply because of the practical mischief which an even seeming classification under such a very dubious and discredited category as Protestantism is found to do to a Church which has to make its way, with no prestige of social establishment, against a multitude of warring sects. And, if we be not misinformed, the chief objection mooted against the proposed change is not theological at all, but legal, on the ground of the difficulties which might arise before the civil courts in respect of a multitude of trusts that have been created under the present designation. How the Protestant idea has failed in the United States as truly, though perhaps not so visibly and indisputably, as in Continental Europe, is shown by Dr. Ewer in his powerful Conferences,

1 Catholicity_in_its_Relationship to Protestantism and Romanism. Six Conferences. By the Rev. F. C. Ewer. New York, 1878. A work which we heartily commend to all our readers, and not less to the readers of the Quarterly Review.

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