two parties transacting the covenant of grace, and visibly united in that covenant." Edwards. So also Hopkins and Bellamy, "Sensible impressions are much more powerful than those which are made on the understanding, &c." Dwight.—“ The ends proposed in the institution of the Lord's Supper are, the enlargement and rectification of our views concerning the noblest of all subjects, the purification of our affections and the amendment of our lives." Id.-" Stript of all metaphorical terms, the action must mean that in the believing and grateful commemoration of his death, we enjoy the blessings which were purchased by it, in the same manner in which we enjoy them when we exercise faith in hearing the Gospel." Dick.—“ No man who admits that the bread and wine are only signs and figures, can consistently suppose the words, 1 Cor. x. 16, to have any other meaning, than that we have communion with Christ in the fruits of his sufferings and death; or that receiving the symbols we receive by faith the benefits procured by the pains of his body and the effusion of his blood." Id.-Christ's "doctrine is truly that which will give life to the soul." Barnes." To dwell or abide in him, is to remain in the belief of his doctrine and in the participation of all the benefits of his death." Id."The whole design of the sacramental bread, is by a striking emblem to call to remembrance, in a vivid manner, the dying sufferings of onr Lord." Id.

5. In the old Reformed view of the Lord's Supper, the communion of the believer in the true person of Christ, in the form now stated, is supposed to hold with him especially as the Word made flesh. His humanity forms the medium of his union with the Church. The life of which he is the fountain, flows forth from him only as he is the Son of Man. To have part in it at all, we must have part in it as a real human life; we must eat his flesh and drink his blood; take into us the substance of what he was as man; so as to become flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones. "The very flesh in which he dwells is made to be vivific for us, that we may be nourished by it to immortality." Calvin." This sacred communication of his flesh and blood, in which Christ transfuses his life into us, just as if he penetrated our bones and marrow, he testifies and seals also in the Holy Supper." Id. "I do not teach that Christ dwells in us simply by his Spirit, but that he so raises us to himself as to transfuse into us the vivific vigor of his flesh." Id.*—" The very substance

* Vitam spiritualem quam nobis Christus largitur, non in eo, duntaxat sitam esse confitemur, quod spiritu suo vivificat, sed quod spiritus etiam sui virtute carnis suæ vivificæ nos facit participes, qua participatione in vitam æternam pascamur. Itaque cum de communione quam cum Christo fideles habent loquimur, non minus carni et sanguini ejus communicare ipsos intelligimus

itself of the Son of Man." Beza and Farel.-"That same substance which he took in the womb of the Virgin, and which he carried up into heaven." Beza and Peter Martyr.-"As the eternal deity has imparted life and immortality to the flesh of Jesus Christ, so likewise his flesh and blood, when eaten and drunk by us, confer upon us the same prerogatives." Old Scotch Confession." That which is eaten is the very, natural body of Christ, and what is drunk his true blood." Belgic Confession."Flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone.... We are as really partakers of his true body and blood, as we receive these holy signs." Heidelberg Catechism.-"We are in such sort coupled, knit, and incorporated into his true, essential human body, by his Spirit dwelling both in him and us, that we are flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones." Ursinus." They that worthily communicate in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, do therein feed upon the body and blood of Christ-truly and really." Westminster Catechism.

All this the modern Puritan view utterly repudiates, as semipopish mysticism. It will allow no real participation of Christ's person in the Lord's Supper, under any form: but least of all under the form of his humanity. Such communion as it is willing to admit, it limits to the presence of Christ in his divine nature, or to the energy he puts forth by his Spirit. As for all that is said about his body and blood, it is taken to be mere figure, intended to express the value of his sufferings and death. With his body in the strict sense, his life as incarnate, formerly on earth and now in heaven, we can have no communion at all, except in the way of remembering what was endured in it for our salvation. The flesh in any other view profiteth nothing; it is only the Spirit that quickeneth. The language of the Calvinistic confessions on this subject, is resolved into bold, violent metaphor, that comes in the end to mean almost nothing. "If he (Calvin) meant that there is some mysterious communication with his human nature, we must be permitted to say the notion was as incomprehensible to himself as it is to his readers." Dick. "There is an absurdity in the notion that there is any communion with the body and blood of Christ, considered in themselves." Id.-" Justly does our Confession of Faith declare, that the body and blood of Christ are as really, but spiritually present to the faith of believers, &c. . . . . What blessed visions of faith are those, in which this precious grace creates an ideal

quam spiritui, ut ita totum Christum possideant.-Hanc autem carnis et sanguinis sui communionem Christus sub panis et vini symbolis in sacro sancta sua cœna offert et exhibet omnibus, qui eam rite celebrant juxta legitimum ejus institutum. Confessio Fidei de Eucharistia, exhibited by Farel, Calvin and Viret, a. 1537.

presence of the suffering, bleeding, dying, atoning Saviour! Then Gethsemane, and Pilate's hall, and the cross, the thorny crown, the nails, the spear, the hill of Calvary, are in present view!" Green." This broken bread shows the manner in which my body will be broken; or this will serve to call my dying sufferings to your remembrance." Barnes.

Let this suffice in the way of comparison. The two theories, it is clear, are different throughout. Nor is the difference such as may be considered of small account. It is not simply formal or accidental. The modern Puritan view evidently involves a material falling away, not merely from the form of the old Calvinistic doctrine, but from its inward life and force. It makes a great difference surely, whether the union of the believer with Christ be regarded as the power of one and the same life, or as holding only in a correspondence of thought and feeling; whether the Lord's Supper be a sign and seal only of God's grace in general, or the pledge also of a special invisible grace present in the transaction itself; and whether we are united by means of it to the person of Christ, or only to his merits; and whether finally we communicate in the ordinance with the whole Christ, in a real way, or only with his divinity. Such, however, is the difference that stares us in the face, from the comparison now made. All must see and feel that it exists, and that it is serious.

Under this view then simply the subject is entitled to earnest attention. Apart from all judgment upon the character of the change which has taken place, the fact itself is one that may well challenge consideration. We have no right to overlook it, or to treat it as though it did not exist. We have no right to hold it unimportant, or to take it for granted with unreflecting presumption that the truth is all on the modern side. The mere fact is serious. For the doctrine of the eucharist lies at the very heart of christianity itself; and the chasm that divides the two systems here is wide and deep. For churches that claim to represent, by true and legitimate succession, the life of the Reformation under its best form, the subject is worthy of being laid to heart. Only ignorance or frivolity can allow themselves to make light of it.

SECTION III.

FAITH OF THE EARLY CHURCH.

A STRONG presumption is furnished against the modern Puritan doctrine, as compared with the Calvinistic or Reformed, in the fact that the first may be said to be of yesterday only in the history of the Church, while the last, so far as the difference in question is concerned, has been the faith of nearly the whole Christian world from the beginning. It included indeed a protest against the errors with which the truth had been overlaid in the church of Rome. It rejected transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the mass; and refused to go with Luther in his dogma of a local presence. But in all this it formed no rupture with the original doctrine of the Church. That which had constituted the central idea of this doctrine from the first, and which appears even under the perversions that have just been named, it still continued to hold with a firm grasp. It is this central idea, the true and proper substance of the ancient church faith precisely, that created the difference between the Reformed doctrine and the modern Puritan. In the Reformed system it is present in all its force; in the other it is wanting. The voice of antiquity is all on the side of the Sixteenth Century, in its high view of the sacrament. To the low view which has since come to prevail, it lends no support whatever.

It is granted readily, that the view taken of the Lord's Supper in the early Church, as represented to us in the writings of the fathers, is by no means free from obscurity and contradiction. It is not from the infancy of the Church in any case, that we are to look for clear and satisfactory statements of theological truth. The fathers form no binding authority for the faith of later times in this view; although it does not follow immediately from such a concession, that we are at liberty to despise or overlook their authority entirely; just as little as it could be counted rational for a man in advanced life, to affect an utter independence of his own childhood, because it is found to have been characterized by all manner of imperfections and mistakes. Doctrines, in the Church, have their separate history. The life and power of the truth they express has been present from the beginning; but centuries have been needed to give them their proper form for the understanding. It constitutes then no objection whatever to an established article of the Christian creed,

the doctrine of the true and proper divinity of Christ for instance, or the doctrine of total depravity and free grace, that testimonies may be gathered from the earlier fathers, which seem to conflict with it, or at least to show it of uncertain authority. All such confusion and contradiction serve only to show, that the article in question had not at the time evolved itself for the consciousness of the Church into the clear theological form, in which it was subsequently held. The confusion impairs not on the one hand the credit of the doctrine, and brings no fair reproach upon the witnessing authorities in the case on the other. It is enough that we find them true to the inward soul and substance of the Christian faith; though they may fall short of its full and proper expression; while it must be regarded always as a fair test of the correctness of any later statement, claiming to be the expression required, that it shall be found to take up and preserve the substance at least of the same life that is presented in the earlier creed. Thus in the case before us, the weight and significance of the Lord's Supper are not to be measured precisely, by the terms in which we find it spoken of in the early Church. We need not be surprised either to meet with some confusion and contradiction, in the testimony furnished by the fathers on the subject of the ordinance, its nature and design. The doctrine of the eucharist, like every other Christian doctrine, has a history. Its history moreover has proceeded through error; and it must be allowed, that the principle of this error began to work at a very early period. All this is to be taken into consideration, when we carry our appeal in the present case to the first ages of the Church. But all this can never form a sufficient reason, for treating the authority of these ages with indifference or contempt. Allowing their testimony to be imperfect, confused, and not always consistent with itself; admitting too that as we advance into the fourth and fifth centuries, we are met with forms of thinking and speaking that look directly towards the great error of transubstantiation; we have still no right to assume that the Church in the beginning had no faith that could be counted real and substantial, in the case of the eucharist, or that this faith included in no sense the truth as it has been of force for the Church since. In the midst of all errors and contradictions, the early Church must have been in possession of the truth, here as at other points, at least in its essential power and life. Running through all, there must be a certain fundamental substratum, in which the true idea of the sacrament was always at hand, and which the Church is bound accordingly, through all ages, to respect in this light.

Now it is very certain that the early fathers do not teach either transubstantiation or consubstantiation. There is not a