certain places by an appeal either to the circumstances of the moment when what is described took place, an examination of the context, or a search into other parts of the Scripture bearing upon the same subject. The language of Constantine, at the Council of Nice, is emphatic "The Books of the Evangelists and the Apostles, and the Oracles of the Prophets, plainly inform us what apprehensions we ought to have concerning Divine matters; therefore, laying aside all hostile discord, let us decide the questions that are brought before us by the testimony of the divinely-inspired writings." And yet these very Fathers, who thought so healthily of the use of the Scriptures, were the first instruments placed by the Church between the people themselves and the Bible. They were for centuries the final appeal in controversy, the supreme authority, although those who put them in this false position might have read in their works their protest against such an act. St. Augustine, speaking of the writings of himself and the Fathers, said: "This sort of literature is not to be read under the necessity of believing, but with the full liberty of judging ;"* and in another remarkable passage he says of the Fathers: "Every reader or hearer of the Fathers has free power of judgment by which he may approve of whatever pleases him in their writings, or reprove whatever offends." Again: "We therefore venerate the testimony of an old, more pure, and more learned antiquity; but in such a manner that we do not submit ourselves to the yoke of servitude, and believe whatever any one may interpret or teach from the Fathers; but, using the liberty into which we are called by Christ, we judge of all writings by the canonical Scriptures, and whatever we find agreeing with that authority we accept with reverence and praise." That is the language of a noble spirit imbued with true Christianity, not a whit different from Wiclif, who, nine centuries afterwards, when he set about giving the oracles of God to his benighted countrymen in their own tongue, declared: "Seeing the truth of the faith shines the more by how much the more it is known, it seems useful that the faithful should themselves search out or discover the sense of the faith by the Scriptures in a language which they know and understand. He, therefore, who hinders this, or murmurs against it, does his endeavour that the people should continue in a damnable and unbelieving state;" and he appeals himself to Augustine: "The laws, therefore, which prelates make are not to be received as matters of faith, nor are we to believe their words or discourses any further or otherwise than they are founded on the Scripture, since, according to the constant doctrine of Augustine, the Scripture is all the truth; therefore the translation of the Scripture would do this good, that it would render priests and prelates unsuspected as to the words of it which they explain." He finished the translation of the Bible and Testament, though, in all probability, he was assisted in it by others, and by doing so gave to Eugland what had been long kept from it-the first complete version of the Bible in the native tongue. It is the repeated assertion, though historically a false one, that August. de Trinit., lib. ii. + August. cont. Donat., c. 3. August. cont. Crescon., c. 31. we owe our Christianity to monks and popes, and only recently it has been asserted that when Augustine landed in England not a single native was a Christian, and this by one who goes on to describe the directions given by the Pope who sent Augustine as to his treatment of native bishops.* It would be more true to assert that the reason why England never had a complete translation of the Scriptures until the fourteenth century is due to the fact that the Augustinian foundation, although it did convert the Pagan Saxons, and in that did immense good, yet it also brought the Church of the country under Papal dominion, and that power has always been most adverse to a circulation of the Scriptures. In the year 1080, the King of Bohemia wished to have the offices of the Church translated into Sclavonic; but he was told by Gregory that he knew not what he asked, and that the Word of God to be revered must be concealed. In 1229 the Council of Toulouse decided that no layman should have the books of the Old and New Testament-only a "Psalter, a Breviary, and the Hours of the Virgin." Then, when the Reformation came, and Tyndall and Luther began to translate the Bible, the monasteries awoke first to the danger; and an inspection of the statutes passed by the different Orders at that time will show how jealous they were of these translations.† Fourteen years rolled by, and Rome, palsied to her centre, rallied her forces together to make a combined stand against heresy at Trent. In that Council it was decreed that the version known as the Vulgate was the only authentic version, that the Church alone had the right of determining the true meaning of Scripture, and it ordered the Scriptures to be taken from the people in every place where they could be found. In the struggle which ensued to preserve the Bible, it is estimated that more than a million and a quarter lost their lives in about half a century. The French massacres, in three months, swept off 100,000 people; Julius VII., in seven years, was the means of sacrificing 200,000; the Jesuits, in forty years, 900,000; in the Netherlands 30,000 were put to death by the Duke of Alva; and in thirty-six years the Inquisition, that blot on monkery, destroyed 150,000 souls. It was with the blood of the martyrs the Church of Christ was built up on Paganism, and with the same blood was it rebuilt upon corruption. The next important act of Wiclif's life was his vigorous attack upon the doctrine of transubstantiation. We shall endeavour to show that, although he reduced the doctrine very much, yet he did not go so far as to totally deny it. This doctrine of the actual bodily presence of Christ in the sacrament, his very flesh in the bread and his very blood in the wine, not figuratively but substantially, so that the recipient takes not mere bread and wine as a remembrance, but eats of the very body and drinks of the very blood of Christ, was first mooted in the middle of the ninth century by Paschasius Rad *Montalembert, "Moines de l'Ouest."-Augustine. (See Appendix B.) +Statut. Cap. Gen. Ordinis Cisterc., ann. 1531, in Martene's Thesaurus Anecdot., tom. iv., col. 1643, B. bertus. He was at once met with vigorous opposition, at the head of which was Rabanus Maurus, who was joined by nearly all the respected theologians of the times; but though the controversy ceased the doctrine quietly made progress, and in the year 1007 it was again made a subject of contention by the declaration of Berengarius against it. The only opponent of any consequence he met with was Lanfranc; he was cited frequently before Papal authorities, but managed to elude them by continual recantations; however, he died peacefully in his bed, cherishing the same opinion. The matter went on, still being a subject of controversy, and it was not formally made a dogma of the Church, nor was the term "transubstantiation" canonically adopted till the fourth Lateran Council, 1215, under Innocent III. The first appearance of the word "transubstantiare occurs in a letter on the "Sacrament of the Altar," by Stephen, Bishop of Autun, early in the twelfth century, circa 1129; the words are, "Panem quem accepi in corpus meum transubstantiavi." In the Confession of the Synod of the fourth Lateran Council, the word is made canonical by the following sentence: "There is only one universal Church, beyond which no man can in any way be saved. In which Jesus Christ is himself the priest and sacrifice, whose body and blood are really contained in the sacrament of the altar, under the form of bread and wine, being transubstantiated, the bread into the body and the wine into the blood, by Divine power."+ When once established it led to many ridiculous ceremonies. The idea of the real presence lent a mysterious awe to the consecrated elements, and they began to devise means for administering the wine so that none might be spilt; and we find Gregory II. ordering the use of one cup, for "it was not fitting that there should be two or three cups on the altar."+ The one cup being too large, they used a "fistula." From the end of the eleventh century the practice of dipping the bread in the wine used for children was extended to others; this was forbidden in different councils,§ but it was retained in England until forbidden by the Council of London, 1175. The cup was occasionally withheld from the laity altogether. The first who advocated depriving them of it was Rudolphus, Abbot of St. Trudo, and later, in 1140, Robert Pulleyn; but before the time of Bonaventura it was not the universal practice of the Church. They were in great perplexity as to whether the souls of the people might not be imperilled by this step, and a furious discussion was raised as to whether the sacrament was effective if the body only was in the bread and the blood in the wine; and they consoled the people with the notion that if they took the body of Christ in the bread, they must take his blood also, which drove them to the necessity of admitting that the body was also present with the blood in the wine, and this produced the necessary inference that the priests took, in two forms, the body and blood of Christ, both being present in the bread and both in the wine. But this was not the catastrophe of transub The fact that the first dispute arose out of an assertion of the doctrine, and not a denial, proves that it could not have been the universal belief of the Church. "Transubstantiatis pane in corpus et vino in sanguinem potestate divina." Gregory Epist. 14, ad. Bonif. § Conc. Braccarensis, 675, and Clarmontan, 1095. Gieseler's Ecc. Hist., vo. ii. stantiation, for in the thirteenth century the custom arose of worshipping the sacred elements, and a festival in their honour, first observed in the diocese of Liege (Festum Corporis Christi), was incorporated with the general festivals of the Church by Urban IV.; then after his death it was suspended, but was permanently re-established in 1311 by Clement V. We have said that this doctrine was first mooted in the ninth century, so that if we appeal to the works of the Fathers we shall expect to find a very different version of the sacrament of their day. First of all, we must notice that the adoption of the words "altar” and "priest" in the Christian ritual led to the ideas of a sacrificer, and then to the sacrifice of the Eucharist. The word "priest" is, strictly speaking, only a word of honour. Fathers of families and princes have been called priests; the leaders of the old philosophies were also called priests.* Ovid called a poet a priest of the Muses, and a Professor of Civil Law had the title given him by Justinian. Lord Bacon has also pointed out that the defective translation of the two words TрeσẞUτéρov and iepevs by the word priest has led to confusion-the one being only a minister, whilst the other in Scripture use means a sacrificer. Then, as regards the word altar, the Apostle Paul shows clearly the distinction, and that there was no necessity for an altar in a Christian church, there being no sacrifice. When he speaks of the Jewish altar in 1 Cor. x. 18, he calls it " θυσιαστηρίου;” but in verse 2, when he compares with it what had been substituted for it in the churches of Christianity, he calls it distinctively a table— " the table of the Lord”οὐ δύνασθε τραπέξης Κυρίου μετέχειν. 66 The testimony of the Fathers is clear upon sacrifices. Justyn Martyr said that prayers and thanksgivings were the only sacrifices of Christians, and that the Christians of his time used to bring with them bread and wine for the Lord's Supper to be taken "in memorial of the suffering which the Son of God suffered." Eusebius says: "Christ made a sacrifice unto his Father for our salvation, giving command to us to offer remembrance instead of a sacrifice." + St. Ambrose is emphatic-"Do we not offer daily? We offer but as making remembrance of his death. Not a sacrifice like a priest, but what we offer is as a record of a sacrifice." Chrysostom also calls the Eucharist a "remembrance of a sacrifice," "avaμvnois Tês Ovσias."§ St. Augustine sums up the whole matter in a sentence-" The sacrifice of flesh and blood before the coming of Christ was set forth by the victims as a similitude: in the suffering of Christ the sacrifice was in very truth completed, but after the ascension of Christ it is celebrated as a sacrament of remembrance, sacramentum memoria." || He elsewhere says that very often a sacrament, from being a similitude of the thing called to mind, takes the name of the thing itself. ¶ But we will leave the Fathers and go to the words of One who was higher than they; and I think we can find in the words of our Lord himself a contradiction to the theory that when he said, "This is my body," and "This is my blood," he meant that in those two matters Diogenes Laert. Proem. were his very body and blood. First of all, we remark in passing, that our Lord at the institution of the Supper, when he partook himself of the consecrated elements, after he had uttered the words, "This is my body," and "This is my blood," added in the next sentence whilst the cup was still in his hands, "But I say unto you, that I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's kingdom." Would he, if he had really meant the vine to be his very blood, have immediately spoken of it as the “fruit of the vine ?"* But we proceed to give his own answer to the doctrine of transubstantiation. When the Jews asked him, after he had declared himself to be the bread of life, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" he continued the allegory, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." Then, even his very disciples began to be amazed, still understanding him to mean literally his real body and blood; and Jesus, noticing it, hastens to explain his words: "Doth this offend you? It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life." Eating of the flesh and blood, then, is to be understood spiritually. Finally, we may add the testimony of St. Paul, Heb. x. 8. He explains why there is no sacrifice necessary now to Christians, since Christ has been sacrificed once for all. "When he said, Sacrifice and offering, and burnt offerings, and offering for sin, thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure therein, which are offered by the law. Then said he, Lo! I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first (i.e., the old sacrifice), that he may establish the second (i.e., the sacrifice of Christ, as it is explained in the next sentence) by the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all." He then declares that through this sacrifice we have remission of sins; but there can be no necessity for any more sacrifice, for "where remission of these is there is no offering for sin." And again, "If we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins." What becomes of this wanton theory, which has been set up as a great instrument of superstition by men, in contradiction to the plain teaching of the Gospel, and the emphatic declaration of Christ himself and the reasoning of the apostles? Does it not verge upon blasphemy to assert, in the face of their statements, that by the consecration of the priest the real body and blood of Christ can be called down from heaven? In all If Christ really meant that the bread became his very body and the wine his very blood, it was the only miracle he ever performed where the spectators had not visible proof of what he said. his miracles there was a visible change effected-the dead man lives -the disease vanishes-the sick man becomes healthy-the lame walk -the blind see-the dumb speak-the water becomes real wine; but Since writing the above, I have found a notice of this fact in the works of Clement of Alexandria, who, like others of his day, advocates the memorial view of the sacrament, and produces the above incident against the material presence.— Pæd, lib. ii., c. 2. |