sists of two parts, an earthly and a heavenly; I think that by the earthly he understood not mere bread, but the material body of Christ; while by the heavenly he meant Christ's quickening Spirit: for he was contending against heretics who denied that our Lord was one with the Creator, and that the Word of God had assumed a true corporeal frame of substantial flesh and blood, and he uses the doctrine of the sacramental mystery as an illustrative argument against them.* But what becomes of this argument if the earthly part of the Eucharist is just that which it appears to be and nothing more? Waterland's interpretation of Irenæus on that point is, in my opinion, a perfect anachronism; it imputes to him modern immaterializing views, quite alien from the general frame of his mind; and is not an equal forgetfulness of the state of thought in those times evinced by his saying, that "the Christians despised the Pagans for imagining that Christ's body and blood were supposed to be literally eaten in the Eucharist ?" What the Pagans accused them of, and what they "rejected with abhorrence," was probably this, that instead of bread and wine they placed upon the table real human flesh and blood, and partook of it under the name of their Lord's body. Irenæus, who understood literally the saying of our Saviour, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine till I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom, need scarcely be supposed to have been more refined than modern Romanists on the subject of the Eucharist. Just in the same way Waterland modernizes Tertullian; just so he refines upon a sentence in that unrefined treatise De Resurrectione Carnis. Toward the end of an epigrammatic passage enumerating the benefits that ac to Fisher's argument against Ecolampadius in which the same view of the passage in Irenæus is taken. * Tertullian expresses this plainly. He "proves the truth or reality of the Lord's body and blood against the phantasm of Marcion by the sacraments of the bread and the cup." Advers. Marcion, L. v. cap. 8. He supports this assertion by referring to a "fragment of Irenæus, p. 343, concerning Blandina," which does not, I think, really support it. Contra Hæreses, Lib. v. cap. xxxiii. 1. He proves by the literal sense of Matt. xxvi. 29, the carnal resurrection of the disciples and millennial reign of Christ upon earth. Of course he takes Isaiah xi. vi. literally too. and presses into the service of his opinion of a future earthly Paradise every prophetic text about eating and drinking and sensuous delights that he can gather out of Holy Writ. crue to the soul through the body of flesh, and declaring, that as the flesh and the Spirit are fellow-workmen here, so they shall be partners in bliss hereafter, the ancient writer speaks thus: Caro corpore et sanguine Christi vescitur, ut et anima de deo saginetur. The Anglican Divine understands this "in a mystical and constructional sense," and for no other reason, apparently, than that any other would be gross and puerile. Yet who that reads Tertullian can imagine that he was not gross and puerile in his philosophy, however refined in the play of fancy and exercise of logic, unless he is predetermined to find him otherwise? Doubtless Tertullian thought, that the bread which our Lord held in his hand at the last Supper, was but "a figure of his body;" the bread in the Eucharist, I verily think, he took to be the material body of our Lord. The sixth chapter of St. John many of the ancients seem to have understood spiritually, because the meaning is expressly declared to be spiritual in the text itself (verse 63): and I think that the primitive Fathers always kept close to the text, though, when figurative, it sometimes led them away from the sense. Our divines have generally rejected transubstantiation as irrational and unspiritual. Any one who rejects it on this ground, yet holds the presence of the redeeming Spirit in bread and wine, strains at a gnat after swallowing a camel. "If on all sides it be confessed," says Hooker, "that the grace of baptism is poured into the soul of man, that by water we receive it, although it be neither seated in the water nor the water changed into it, what should induce men to think that the grace of the Eucharist must needs be in the Eucharist before it be in us that receive it ?"* * Can any one who reads what Hooker has written on this subject be fore and after the sentence I have quoted, in Bk. V. ch. lxvii. (pp. 445–51 of vol. ii. of Mr. Keble's ed.) imagine that he himself held what he describes as utterly vain and unnecessary, and which is out of analogy with his doctrine of baptism? Of all the doctrines which suppose a presence in the elements my Father thought transubstantiation the best, and would have agreed, I believe, with Mr. Ward in denying the charge of rationalism brought against it by divines of the school of Dr. Pusey. How does it explain the mystery a whit more than their own view? It does but affirm what that denies, that the bread and wine are gone without pretending to say how it neither rationalizes nor reasons, internally at least; but bluntly affirms a senseless prop osition without throwing a gauze veil over its face. But it was the ancient opinion that the spirit descended upon the water before it entered the soul of the baptized. It is not easy for a sensible man, like Hooker, to stick to ancient opinions on the subject of spirit. Yet Irenæus is an evar gelical writer when he is not theologizing, and loses sight of his Anti-Gnostic, which are often AntiPlatonic, metaphysics. Indeed he at all times leans with his whole weight upon Scripture and Reason, according to his notions of both, just as a Rationalist like S. T. C. may do now-adays. He seems to have no horror of rationalism at all, but looks as far into the internal consistency of things as he is able. Viewed in their place in the history of thought, these primitive writers are interesting and venerable. The attempt to make them practically our masters on earth in doctrine, under a notion that they received their whole structure of religious intellectualism ready built from the Apostles-this it is which anti-patricians of The attempt made by Mr. W. to reconcile it with our article, however, appears to me one of the most sophistical parts of the whole Tract Ninety Argument—which is saying a good deal. The article declares against "the change of the substance of bread and wine in the Supper of the Lord." Mr. Ward affirms that it speaks popularly, and hence does not conflict with the Romish metaphysique of the Eucharist, according to which the accidents of bread and wine remain while the substance is changed; it being assumed in his argument that to speak popularly, in the language of the plain Christian, who knows nothing of philosophy, is to identify accidents with substance so as to do away with the latter entirely. Now not to mention the gross improbability, that the framer of the article was ignorant of, or had no respect to the metaphysique, of the doctrine current in the schools of Rome, and controverted in the schools of the Reformed,-it is surely quite wrong to say, that the unmetaphysical man means nothing more by an object of sense than its sensible qualities. It is true that he identifies the qualities with the substance, but yet he has the idea of substance too. The notion that a thing is only a congeries of accidents, is the notion of the idealizing philosopher in his study; while the idea of a substrate or support of accidents is common to all mankind, and indeed is an original form of the human intellect. This is admitted in the reasonings of Ber keley, Schelling, and every other Idealist. By the substance of bread the plain man means not the mere qualities of bread, but a thing which has those qualities: he means the bread itself with all that belongs to it. Mr. Ward pretends to considerable knowledge of the nature and history of thought—and, I believe, not without reason; but he did not show his knowledge of it by this argument. Indeed he is rather apt to use his logical skill and metaphysical acumen for the purpose of cleverly confounding a subject instead of making it clear. my Father's mind contemn. Belief in the phoenix was no sign that the early Christians were incapable of receiving a spiritual religion; but surely it is one among a hundred signs, that their intellectual development of it might be incorrect; that they had reflected but little on the nature and laws of evidence. I believe that the whole of the opinions which my Father expresses on the Eucharist* may be reduced to this, that both transubstantiation and Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation may be so stated as not to involve a contradiction in terms; but that neither doctrine is necessary, that there is no real warrant for either in Scripture, and that the spiritual doctrine of the Supper of the Lord involves a different statement. The gift and effect of the Eucharist he believed to be "an assimilation of the spirit of a man to the divine humanity." How he sympathized with one who fought against the old sensualism appears in his poem or the dying words of Berengarius. But Berengarius certainly taught a presence in the elements, for he said that the true body is placed on the table. To the imperfection of light vouchsafed in that day my Father seems to refer in the last lines of his poem : The ascending day-star with a bolder eye That my Father, though an ardent maintainer of the Church as a spiritual power, organized in an outward body, co-ordinate with the Spirit and the Scriptures, did not admit the ordinary mysticism on the subject of Apostolical succession, seems clear from this passage from some of his manuscript writings, dated 1827. "When I reflect on the great stress which the Catholic or more numerous Party of Christians laid on the uninterrupted succession of the Bishops of every Church from the Apostles, the momentous importance attached by the Bishops themselves at the * Remains, V. pp. 65, 84, 188, 219, 220, 224, 225, 227, 245, 293, 382. The Romish dogma involves the supposition that a sensible thing can be abstracted from its accidents. This may not be false logic and yet may be false philosophy. The substance of the material body could do nothing for our souls: the substance of the divine humanity can be present to our souls alone. So it seems to many of the faithful. first general council to this unbroken chain of the spiritual lightning, ever present to illumine in the decisions and to scathe in the anathemas of the Church-when I read, that on this articulated continuum which evacuated the time which it measured, and reduced it to a powerless accident, a mere shadow from the carnal nature intercepting the light, a shadow that existed only for the eye of flesh, between which and the luminary the carnal nature intervened, so that every Bishop of the true Church, speaking in and from the Spirit, might say,' Before Peter was, or Paul, I am!'*-Well!-Let all this pass for the poetry of the claims of the Bishops to the same Spirit, and, consequently, to the same authority as the Apostles, unfortunately for the claim, enough of the writings of Bishops, ay, and of canonized Bishops too, are extant to enable us to appreciate it and to know and feel the woful difference between the Spirit that guided the pen of Tertullian, Irenæus, Epiphanius, &c. and the Spirit by which John and Paul spake and wrote! Descending into the cooler element of prose, I confine myself to the fact of an uninterrupted succession of Bishops in each Church, and the apparent human advantages consequent on such a means of preserving and handing down the memory of important events and the steadfast form of sound words,-and when I find it recorded that on this fact the Fathers of the Nicene Council grounded their main argument against the Arians, &c., I can not help finding a great and perplexing difficulty in the entire absence of all definite Tradition concerning the composition and delivery of the Gospels." He then goes on to suggest a solution of this perplexity. Noscitur a sociis is a maxim very generally applied: we trust and love those who honor whom we honor, condemn whom we * After describing Episcopal succession as a "fixed outward mean by which the identity of the visible Church, as co-ordinate with the written Word, is preserved, as the identity of an individual man is symbolized by the continuous reproduction of the same bodily organs," as, more than this, not merely one leading symbol of permanent visibility, but a co-efficient in every other," my brother says, "Yet it must be examined according to this idea. I dare not affect to think of it, in order to render it intelligible and persuasive to faithless and mechanical minds, as of a mere physical continuity, by which the spiritual powers of the pastorate, are conveyed, like a stream of electricity along a metal wire." My brother had never seen the passage from Father's MS. Remains which I have given in the text when he wrote this, and I believe it to be a perfect co-incidence. VOL. III. my D |