that bread and drink that cup of the Lord unworthily, and are 'guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord.'" As taught in that Church, it has three distinguishing features-Universality, i.e., binding on all; Periodicity, i.e., to be practised at stated times, especially as a preparation for Holy Communion, Marriage, and other Sacraments; and, Formality, i.e., with due method and solemnity. "When the Confession has all these features about it, i.e., when it is recognized by the parties practising it as universally necessary to salvation (or, at least, to the soul's wellbeing); when it is offered and received regularly at stated periods; and when it is practised after a certain prescribed rule and method, and with ecclesiastical formalities, it is then Auricular Coufession in full blossom. And in cases where it has the two latter features without the first, -where it is not distinctly recognized as necessary to salvation or spiritual health (in which case of course the priest himself would have to practise it as well as the penitent), but at the same time is carried on periodically and habitually as a normal practice of the spiritual life, and offered and received in set form and with the circumstantials of a religious ordinance,-it is easy to see that in such cases it is tending in the direction of full-blown Auricular Confession, and only wants a little more development to become that. If it is once admitted that there is a very large number of persons who find stated periodic confession to a priest, made in due form, to be extremely helpful to their souls and very conducive to their growth in grace,-we may be sure that the erection of such a practice into an ordinance more or less indispensable is not very far off. And this we must not disguise from ourselves is the condition of affairs at which we, in the Church of Englaud, have now arrived." So far from considering this practice harmless and salutary because mainly inculcated among the the Dean continues :-"Young peoyoung, ple are to become old, and their moral and religious character will be stereotyped in youth. The girls of this generation are to be the mothers of the next; and who knows not the influence which a mother, if she pleases, can exercise in the formation of the religious character of her children? But even supposing that the class from which the recruits of the English Confessional are drawn were not in itself an influential class, or a class which could ever be expected to leaven public sentiment, is it not a serious fea

ture of the case that some of our devoutest clergy, men of learning, ability, and the highest possible character, do openly and avowedly inculcate this sort of Confession, if not as absolutely indispensable to the forgiveness of sin (which for the present, at least, they disavow), yet certainly as very conducive to the health and well-being of the soul, and devote a considerable portion of their time to the hearing of it? That the practice recommended and enforced by them has already gained a good foothold in our Church is clear from the books of devotion which are circulated freely among us, books which undoubtedly contain passages of great beauty, and parts of which are very conducive to edification, while in other parts an attempt seems to be made to venture as near as possible to the margin of Romish error, and sometimes the barrier which separates us from the Roman Church and its corruptions seems to be overleapt altogether."7

We are then shown a "Form for Sacramental Confession," which, as might be expected, is almost verbatim that used by the Romanists, although found in a manual of devotion for members of our own Church, of a description becoming widely used amongst us. Well, then, may our author say after this :-"We must not disguise from ourselves that Auricular Confession is becoming an established practice in the Eng. lish Church."

The Dean then asks, while discussing the point of Formality, upon what authority is this practice being revived? and offers, as the only possible answer, the words in the First Exhortation to the Communion, and in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick, carefully showing what a violent wrench must be applied to either of these passages to make them an encouragement to habitual auricular confession.

All our readers, we think, will agree with the Dean in his estimate of the enervating effect of the practice upon the soul:-"Then as to the periodical recurrence of auricular confession, which is a very dangerous feature of the system, perhaps its most dangerous feature, because such a recurrence must in some measure keep the soul in its inmost resorts and confidences hanging upon man instead of God, and make its piety a hothouse plant, weak and sickly, not manly and vigorous,-where is such a practice even hinted at in the Prayer Book? There is 7 Sce Appendix, Notes D. and E.

not the faintest indication in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick that the special Confession which the patient is to be moved to make, has been, or ought to have been, the regular practice of his life hitherto. And in the Communion Service we find no sort of intimation that the coming to the discreet and learned minister is to be resorted to as a normal practice of the spiritual life. It is merely a remedial measure recommended by way of meeting a temporary emergency. And let me add that this temporary emergency is not stated to be sin (though of course it may involve more or less of that), but the incapacity of a person, assumed to be well-disposed in the main, to quiet his own conscience. Scruples and doubtfulness of conscience are spiritual weaknesses and infirmities rather than sins."

But what support does Formal Confession find in Holy Scripture? Of all the passages-and Dr. Goulburn is the last man to wish to see any of them deprived of the smallest weightto which our Church appeals in support of the Divine commission of her Ministers, not one favours the doctrine of Auricular Confession as defined above. "While Absolution is an ordinance of God, there is not a word in Holy Scripture to indicate that private Confession is." And nothing but unfair exegesis can father the custom of formal Auricular Confession upon any passage or passages of Scripture. We cordially advise our readers to study for themselves that part of the Dean's argument in which he recapitulates the practice of the Early Church in this matter, and if they will also take the trouble to study the authority which he uses, Bingham (Antiquities, Books xviii. and xix.), he will have no difficulty in seeing how widely we are departing from the early purity of Christianity in countenancing the practice under discussion. Very ignorant must those revivalists be, who, in the wise allowances made for special cases of conscience in our Prayer-Book, see any affinity to the distorted and cruelly exaggerated practice of the Roman Church :- "Most wise, considerate, and loving," says the Dean, "is this provision, which our Church has made for consciences either burdened or perplexed, or both a provision which we rejoice to have in our Prayer-book, and the withdrawal of which we should feel to be a very serious flaw-a provision which it is much to be wished that many more persons would avail themselves of, as we

are assured that it would greatly conduce to edification. But to regard secret Confession to a priest as a Divine Institution, obligatory upon men's consciences, or even to make it a chronic devotional exercise, under the impression that it is very healthful to the soul, and a condition of profitable communion, this is a thing so totally different in kind from what the Prayerbook and our best divines do recommend, that it is hard to see how the attempt to confound the two things is otherwise than disingenuous and dishonest."

The part of the chapter in which Dr. Goulburn traces the desire for habitual private confession and absolution, is full of deep insight into the workings of the human heart, and illustrates admirably how every perversion of doctrine and discipline has its root in truth. So now he shows how this craving for the support of an arm of flesh is only the natural consequence of one of the profoundest wants of our being. It sounds so reasonable; it looks so salutary, that no wonder thousands are ready to follow the misleading guide; and to those who are disposed to do so, we trust these wise and gentle warnings will come with power:-" But for all its seeming, it is wrong in principle, and for that reason, when worked out, has been found to be fatally mischievous in results. It is wrong in principle, and has a fundamental flaw in it, because it is solemnly said in God's Law-'What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: THOU SHALT NOT ADD THERETO, nor diminish from it '; and this whole system of Auricular Confession and Penance is plainly an addition to God's Word; it is a teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. The utter and absolute silence of God's Word upon any such system as that now described, is itself the most eloquent condemnation of it. We need say no more than this in repudiating it :-'I look into my Bible, and I do not find it there.' For, powerful as must be the leverage of such a system upon the human conscience, -affecting deeply the condition of the souls submitted to it, as it must affect them (for such a practice never can be morally indifferent),—would it not be found in the Bible, if the leverage were for good, if the system were really salutary?”

The concluding part of the chapter is fraught with solemn, earnest expostulation addressed to those who have been subjected to the taint of this pernicious teaching. "Young men and

young women, beware of this yoke which it is sought to impose upon you, however specious the arguments by which it is recommended, and however devout, able, and learned the advocates may be, who would persuade you to submit to it!" "When private formal Confession to the priest is pressed upon you as a divine ordinance, as a normal practice of the spiritual life, and an essential preliminary to a profitable Communion, then say with the Shunamite's husband,- Wherefore should I go to him to-day,' when there is no ordinance to be administered by him, no ecclesiastical function to be discharged, when 'it is neither new moon nor sabbath?' Ah! wherefore indeed? Is not the High Priest, who can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, tenderer, wiser, more loving than any human priest can be? If, by His constantly-accruing mercy and grace you are enabled in some good measure to discipline yourself, and are gaining a growing control over evil tempers and appetites, is not this walking alone better ten thousand times than walking on crutches?"

In concluding our notice of this part of the work, our readers will pardon us if we set side by side the golden-mouthed Orator and Bishop of the fourth century, with the devout and eloquent Divine of our Church in the nineteenth. First, then, for St. Chrysostom :-"I beseech you make your confession continually to God. For I do not bring thee into the theatre of thy fellow servants, neither do I constrain thee by any necessity to discover thy sins unto men; unfold thy conscience before God, and show Him thy wounds and ask the cure of Him. . And He says to thee, I do not compel thee to go into the public theatre, and take many witnesses. Confess thy sin in private to Me alone, that I may heal thy wound, and deliver thee from thy grief!" Let us now listen to the heart-stirring appeal of the modern Divine. "What! shall Auricular Confession be (as some, even in our own Church, pretend) a practice essential to our spiritual health and well-being, a practice without which we cannot long keep straight, or go on right, -and shall we suppose that the wise and tender Father, who loved us so affectionately as to give His Son for us,-the Good Shepherd who gave His life and shed His blood for the sheep, and watches over them with a solicitude of which the strongest parental anxiety for a child is a very dim and

poor figure, the Holy Comforter, who in the sacred Word hath revealed to us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, and surely hath kept back nothing that was profitable to us— have not made it known to us for our guidance and our good, have left for the discovery of man a beneficial and salutary practice of devotion, and which was certainly never recognized as obligatory by the Christian Church for the first ten centuries of her existence? It is inconceivable. The very supposition is an impeachment of God's care, of Christ's love, of the Spirit's wisdom." "If, then, thou art conscious of sin, and wouldst have Absolution, come into the Church. Confess yourself as to that particular in the General Confession to Almighty God, with full purpose of amendment of life. Remember that the true Scapegoat, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world, is in the midst of the two or three gathered together in His name. Confess thy sins, as it were, over Him, laying the sin upon His devoted head, that He may bear it away. Then listen intently, devoutly, believingly, to the announcement of pardon, or to the prayer for pardon, which His authorized minister makes over thee in His name. Take it to thy bosom, hide it in the folds of thy heart-that pardonit is thine; as much designed for thee, as if there were none others kneeling at thy side to share it with thee. And thou shalt arise with a brightened conscience and a relieved heart, as an overcast sky is brightened, and a leaden landscape relieved, by 'clear shining after rain." "

SECT. 4.-THe Doctrine of Sacrifice. We now come to the more important portion of the work, which treats, 1st, on the Doctrine of Sacrifice; and 2ndly, on the Eucharistic Sacrifice-the Christian Peace-offering for Thanksgiving.

The fourth chapter, which we next proceed to consider, is preliminary to the fifth. In it the author qualifies his readers to approach the great question of Eucharistic Sacrifice, by first offering a summary of the doctrine of sacrifice in general, as set forth in the Levitical Law.

A few words at starting are devoted to the use of the term "Altar" as applied to the Lord's Table, and although this is never clearly called an altar in Holy Scripture, the Altar of Burnt-offering is called "the Table of the Lord," as for example in the verse from Malachi

which heads the chapter, "Ye offer polluted bread upon Mine altar; and ye say, Wherein have we polluted Thee? In that ye say, The table of the Lord is contemptible." "The idea involved in the passage," the Dean tells his readers, "is one common to heathenism, as well as Judaism; that the God, who is the object of men's worship, Himself partakes of the food which is offered upon His altar, and consumed by the sacred fire that burns thereon. In accordance with this idea, the word 'altar' is exchanged for a phrase, which more clearly indicates Jehoval's participation in what is offered to Him; it is called the table of the Lord.' St. Paul did not originate that expression. He found it in the inspired Scriptures of the Old Testament. The altar of burnt-offering had been called the table of the Lord' by Malachi, just as by Ezekiel the altar of incense had been called 'the table that is before the Lord.' And himself speaking by the Spirit of God, he applied it to the table at which among Christians the Holy Supper is celebrated. 'Ye cannot,' he says, 'be partaker of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils.' 10 Thus a name, originally belonging to the Jewish altar, is borrowed by the Apostle to designate a Christian board of Communion. This would be surely rather a hazardous mode of proceeding, and one which might lead to erroneous inferences, if in no sense whatever the board of Communion were an altar."

After thus tracing the Old Testament use of the word "table "" as a synonym of altar," and pointing out the thread of connection which it affords between the Commemorative sacrifice of the New Dispensation and the prospective sacrifice of the Old, our author ably and clearly discusses its use in the Book of Common Prayer. He shows that though the use of the term "altar

was unquestionably lawful and agreeable to Christian antiquity, yet the compilers of the book did not consider it expedient, in consequence of the abuse which it had so long sustained at the hands of the Romish Church, to adopt it; a caution which, for the reasons then existing, the Dean considers is no longer necessary. Before we come to the doctrine itself of which the term "altar" is the indication-that of Eucharistic sacrifice,-another preliminary question has to be considered; for before we can answer the question-In what sense is the 10 1 Cor. x. 21.

Mal. i. 7.

9 Ez. xli. 22.

Eucharist a sacrifice ?—we must ask, what is a sacrifice? Now Dr. Goulburn well defines the idea of sacrifice, as "man offering to God something acceptable to Him, in the way either of self-dedication, or grateful acknowledgment, or finally of expiation." He then proceeds to set forth the three classes of sacrifices in which these three ideas were embodied. "It is a very common (but very crude) notion, that all sacrifice is of a propitiatory character, and directed to the expiation of sin. Those who have studied the various offerings prescribed by the Levitical law will take a larger view of the subject. They know that, although the law prescribed sinofferings and trespass-offerings, the characteristic idea of which was expiation, yet that it prescribed also other varieties, burnt-offerings, meat-offerings, peace-offerings. In short, as we have already seen in a former chapter, there were three distinct ideas attaching to the three great classes of offerings, the Burnt-offering, the Peace-offering, and the Sin-offering. The first was that of self-dedication ;-man offering to God the acceptable sacrifice of himself, his soul, his body, and all that is his. This was the idea of the burnt-offering. The second was the idea of thanksgiving ;-man offering to God the acceptable sacrifice of a grateful acknowledgement, in return for His mercies. This was the idea of the Peace-offering. The third was the idea of expiation ;-man offering to God an atonement for sin; an acceptable sacrifice to the justice and holiness of God, as the two former were acceptable to His love in Creation and His love in Providence."

The next step of the argument is to point out the inability of fallen man of himself to offer any one of these three forms of sacrifice acceptably to God. The whole passage in which this is affirmed is beautifully expressed, and well worth a thoughtful perusal. It thus concludes: -"In short, the Fall, incapacitating man as it docs for perfection, has made every offering, which he lays upon God's altar, if judged in itself and by itself, 'polluted bread.' God, in virtue of the purity of His nature, cannot accept that which is polluted; and man is polluted through and through, in every department of his complex being-in spirit, soul, and body -by sin."

Our author then shows, in what will probably be regarded as the ablest part of his whole treatise, how these several forms of sacrifice were all

fulfilled in the person of the Redeemer :-" God sent His Son into the world, to be born of a pure Virgin, and so to take upon Him a pure and untainted human nature, in which, as the sun is reflected in the pure dewdrop, and all the glories of the prismatic colours displayed, might be manifested all the perfections of the Only Begotten of the Father. He, and He alone, of all that ever lived, rendered to God every sacrifice which can be demanded from man. His self-dedication was absolutely perfect, and therefore absolutely acceptable. Hear Him making the vow of self-dedication, when He says, on coming into the world, 'Lo, I come to do Thy will, O God.' He gave Himself up to God,His heart all aflame with love and zeal,-and thus offered the Burnt-Offering. He gave Himself up to men, to teach them, to labour for them, to bleed, to agonize on their behalf, and thus offered the Meat-Offering. Amid all His labours for man, and His buffetings and contradictions from man, He was continually lifting His eyes to heaven, and blessing His Father for all His dispensations. 'In the midst of the church will I sing praise unto Thee," was one of His purposes, fore-announced before His Incarnation, fulfilled in His life on earth, and even now in the course of fulfilment. And thus He offered the Peace-Offering for thanksgiving. Finally, He was implicated, as having made Himself one with us (not indeed in sin, but) in sin's worst and heaviest penal consequences. The second Man, the Lord from Heaven, died under a cloud, to expiate the sins and shortcomings of the first. Not only was the form of physical death, which He underwent, most cruel and most ignominious, but some mysterious anguish, which, partly from that familiarity with sin which so blunts our sensibilities to it, partly from the circumstance that the relations of sin are beyond the reach of our faculties, pressed down His human soul in the last hour, and seemed to shut out, what was to Him the last ray of comfort and hope, the light of His Father's countenance. And thus He offered the Sin and Trespass-Offerings."

Thus was the Lord's sacrificial office on earth accomplished; "and now," asks our author, "what does He? He has passed upwards into the heavenly temple, not made with hands, and has become, as the Epistle to the Hebrews ex

1 Heb. x. 5-9. and Ps. xl. 6-8. Heb, ii. 12, and Ps. xxii. 22, 25.

presses it, 'a minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man.' If He be a 'minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle,' He must have a ministration to fulfil, priestly functions to discharge. What are they? It is absolutely necessary to right apprehensions of the subject that we should seize this point."

The Sin-Offering, made once for all, He still pleads, and as our Great High Priest, stands within the veil of the supreme Holy of Holies, ever living to make intercession for His people. His Burnt-Offering and Meat-Offering-representing His Sacrifice of self-devotion both to the Will of God and to the good of man-being completed as soon as he expired, cannot be repeated again. But, like the former, though made once for all, may be, and is, pleaded by Him now. He asks that it may be remembered on behalf of, and imputed to, His people-that God, regarding them through the medium of Christ, may see Christ's righteousness in them." Thirdly, what does He at present as regards His ThankOffering? This, unlike the others, "admits by its very nature of being offered continually-of being protracted through the ages of eternity." But not until the descent of the Holy Ghost had restored to the Christian Church the presence of an absent Saviour, and established a perpetual connection between the Ascended Head and His members upon earth, were "things in a condition for the great 'Sacrifice of peaceofferings for thanksgiving,'-a Sacrifice to be made in the sanctuary of Heaven by the great Minister of the Sanctuary, the echoes of it being caught up in every Communion Feast ('this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving') which is celebrated in the Church upon earth.” 4

And thus the Dean gathers up the observations of this important preliminary chapter :"Let us settle it in our minds that there is and can be no true priest, in the highest sense of that word, but Christ; and that there is and can be no other offering but His (whether of self-dedication, or of expiation, or of thanksgiving), which is in the least degree acceptable to God independently and on its own ground. None,whether in Gospel times, or in the times of the Law. We will not run away with the very com

8 Hebrews viii. 2.

4 This subject will be found very fully treated in Part XII. Sect. 2, by the late Dr. Biber on "The Sacrificial Worship of Christ's Church on Earth."