alms, prayer, praise, self-surrender, are all spoken of as sacrifices of the New Testament; and inasmuch as these religious exercises all find a place in the Holy Communion, and all culminate there, the Act which embraces all these in itself must be sacrificial.

But is the Eucharist itself, apart from the devotional exercises with which it is connected, of a sacrificial character? We entirely believe so. We have already seen that the Bread and Wine (which are the materials of the Sacrament) are spoken of, before their consecration, as "oblations," which GOD is besought mercifully to accept. In the American Office they are again offered to GOD, after the hand of the Priest has been laid upon them, in the following terms: "Wherefore, O Lord and heavenly Father, according to the institution of Thy dearly beloved Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, we, Thy humble servants, do celebrate and make here before Thy Divine Majesty, with these Thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto Thee, the memorial Thy Son hath commanded us to make." There is a very precious lesson in this second offering of the Bread and Wine in a new character, which we could not willingly forfeit. When they are first presented, it is simply as offerings made out of our substance towards the Divine Service. But by the imposition of hands they are set apart to signify (and in the case of the faithful to communicate the virtue of) the Body and Blood of our Blessed LORD, and by presenting them to GOD as symbols of that Body and Blood, we plead with HIM (by a significant action) the merits of Christ's Death. The Holy Eucharist, be it remembered, is a memorial of the Lord's Death, made not simply to man and for man's behoof, but made also before GOD's Divine Majesty, to remind Him (if I may so say) of all that

His Son, in our nature, underwent and suffered for us. In prayer we often verbally allege to Him Christ's sufferings as a valid plea for mercy and grace. In the Eucharist we allege the same thing in action. And in this second Oblation of the Elements the allegation is explicitly made: "We do celebrate and make here before Thy Divine Majesty, with these Thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto Thee, the memorial Thy Son hath commanded us to make; having in remembrance His blessed passion and precious death, His mighty resurrection and glorious ascension; rendering unto Thee most hearty thanks for the innumerable benefits procured unto us by the same." A certain Christian sect, the members of which appreciate fully the attractiveness of the Ritual, have felt so deeply the pathos and beauty of this solemn memorializing of God by the presentation of the Consecrated Elements, that the presentation is always made by them in the course of Morning and Evening prayer, even when there is no Communion. A certain portion of the Bread and Wine is reserved for this purpose, and at a certain period of the Service, placed in silence upon the Holy Table.. Our Church does not perform this action, except in connexion with, and as part of, the Communion Office. But it may be asked (and it will be anxiously asked by some), "Is the sacrificial character of the Eucharist maintained or implied in Holy Scripture?" We quite believe so. We believe that a full recognition of this sacrificial character is virtually contained in the text; that any candid person, studying the argument of this inspired passage, will not be able to resist the conclusion that the Communion is sacrificial. The Apostle is dissuading the Corinthian Christians from participating in meats that had been offered to idols. He does this by

reference to a principle well known and admitted among the Jews-that those who ate of a sacrifice, part of which had been offered to God, were sharers with the Altar. The part consumed upon the Altar was the Altar's share; and the Altar represented God, who in sacrifice was supposed to hold communion with the worshipper by a participation of common food with him. Apply this principle, then, to the idol-sacrifices, which are consumed by the heathen worshippers, after they have been presented to the idol. As heathendom is under the dominion of Satan, who is the ruler of the darkness of this world, it is to him and his angels-in short, to devils -that heathen sacrifices are really (albeit unconsciously) offered. The idol, the mere image of wood and stone, is in itself nothing; but it represents the Devil, who is behind it, and is upholding the great system of idolatry in the world. By eating of an idol-sacrifice, then, a man becomes sharer of the Devil's board, and hath a fellowship with devils. Now, asks the Apostle, is there not a gross and grievous inconsistency, obvious to common sense, in a man's seeking to share both the Lord's Table and the Table of devils? In the Holy Communion, the Christian shares with the Lord. In partaking of the meat offered to idols, he shares with the Devil. "Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy," by dividing our participation between Him and devils-sharing first of His Board in the Christian assembly, and then sharing of the Devil's Board at some heathen entertainment, a few hours afterwards? Such is manifestly the tenour of the argument.-But does it not virtually imply that the Lord's Supper stands to Christians in the place which idol-sacrifices and Jewish sacrifices held respectively to heathen and Jewish worshippers? Deny this altogether;

maintain that there is no analogy between a Jewish sacrifice and the Holy Communion, and that there is no such thing as sacrifice competent to worshippers under the Gospel; and do you not cut away the ground from under the Apostle's argument? Whereas admit (what indeed no one would think of denying, except from controversial prepossessions) that the Lord's Table is the Christian Altar, and that the act of Communion is a really sacrificial act, bringing us into communion with Christ, as the eating of idol-sacrifices brought men into communion with the Devil, and as the eating of Jewish sacrifices brought men into communion with the Covenant God of the Jews; and the argument then becomes clear and consistent, and the practical deduction from it inevitable.

The truth is, that the sacrificial character of the Eucharist would be generally recognized by all thoughtful persons, who take the Scriptures as their guide, if it were not feared that the admission would be in favour of the Roman view of the Ordinance. It is a great mischief, uniformly attending upon perversions of the Truth in one direction, that they ensure perversions of it in the other. The Roman Church, 1200 years after Christ, invented the monstrous figment of Transubstantiation, in virtue of which it is pretended (to use the language of our thirty-first Article) that "the Priest" in the Communion doth "offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt." So horrible a blasphemy (for in truth it is nothing less) has very naturally made Protestants altogether suspicious of the application of the term "Sacrifice" to the Lord's Supper; and it is commonly supposed among them that to invest the Ordinance with any such character would

be to obscure the great Offering of Calvary-that "perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction," which was once made "for all the sins of the whole world," and which most assuredly can never be repeated. It is asserted also, and generally received as indisputable, without much reflection on the reasonableness of such a view, that the Old Dispensation had sacrifices continually recurring, which were in truth propitiatory; but that the New is distinguished from the Old by the circumstance that the performance of sacrifice by worshippers is abolished, and that the only sacrifice recognized by the Dispensation is that offered by the Eternal Priest. But there is here a large amount of fallacy and confusion of thought, which it will illustrate our subject to disentangle. There is none other satisfaction for sin, then, but the Sacrifice of Christ alone. You cannot make this assertion in terms stronger than the Scriptures warrant. There is no other transaction in Heaven or earth, which can wash away a single stain of sin, or relieve a single burdened conscience, or open a door in Heaven for grace and mercy to stream forth upon guilty man, but merely and exclusively the meritorious Death

of Christ. I say, no other. No other transaction, whether under the Law or under the Gospel. The Lord's Supper is utterly powerless to produce these great effects. But neither could the legal offerings produce them. Their incompetence is expressly stated by the Apostle: "It is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins." And what is said of the blood of bulls and goats applies with equal force to any religious transaction whatever, the agents in which are human worshippers and human priests. Oh, that we could see this truth as God sees it! The most