What I have just asserted concerning these five sacraments in general, is particularly true with respect to the sacrament of penance. For what does this consist of? and what is the preparation of it, as set forth by all our councils, catechisms, and prayer-books? There must first be fervent prayer to God for his light and strength; next an impartial examination of the conscience, to acquire that most important of all sciences, the knowledge of ourselves: then true sorrow for our sins, with a firm purpose of amendment, which is the most essential part of the sacrament. After this there must be a sincere exposure of the state of the interior to a confidential, and at the same time, a learned, experienced, and disinterested director. If the latter could afford no other benefit to his penitents, yet how inestimable a one is it, to make known to them many defects and many duties, which their self-love had probably overlooked! as likewise his prescribing to them the proper remedies for their spiritual maladies! and his requiring them to make restitution for every injury done to each injured neighbor! But we are well assured, that these are far from being the only benefits, which the minister of this sacrament confers upon the subject of it: for it was not an empty compliment which Christ paid to his apostles, when, "Breathing on them, he said to them; Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whose sins you shall remit, they are remitted, and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained." John, xx. 22, 23. O sweet balm of the wounded spirit! O sovereign restorative of the soul's life and vigor! best known to those who faithfully use thee, and not unattested by those who neglect and blaspheme thee !* It might appear strange, if we were not accustomed to similar inconsistencies, that those who profess to make Scripture, in its plain, obvious sense, the sole rule of their faith and practice, should deny extreme unction to be a sacrament, the external sign of which, anointing the sick, and the spiritual effect of which, the forgiveness of sins, are so expressly declared by St. James, in his epistle, v. 14. Martin Luther, indeed, who had taken offence at this epistle, for its insisting so strongly on good works,† rejected the authority of this epistle, alleging that it was "not lawful for an apostle to institute a sacrament.‡ But I trust that you, dear sir, and your conscientious society, will agree with me, that it is more incredible that an apostle of Christ * See the form of ordaining priests, in Bishop Sparrow's Collect. p. 158; also the form of absolution, in the Visitation of the Sick in the common prayer. Luther, in his original Jena edition of his works, calls this epistle "a dry and chaffy epistle, unworthy of an apostle." See Luther, in his original Jena edition. should be ignorant of what he was authorized by him to say and do, than that a profligate German friar should be guilty of blasphemy. Indeed, the Church of England, in the first form of her common prayer in Edward's reign, enjoined the unction of the sick, as well as prayer for them.* It was evidently well worthy the mercy and bounty of our divine Saviour, to institute a special sacrament for purifying and strengthening us at the time of our greatest need and terror. Owing to the institution of this, and the two other sacraments, penance and the real body and blood of our Lord, it is a fact, that few, very few Catholics die without the assistance of their clergy: which assistance the latter are bound to afford, at the expense of ease, fortune, and life itself, to the most indigent and abject of their flock, who are in danger of death, no less than to the rich and the great : while, on the other hand, very few Protestants, in that extremity, partake at all of the cold rites of their religion; though one of them, the Lord's supper, is declared, in the catechism, to be 66 necessary for salvation." It is equally strange that a clergy, with such high claims and important advantages, as those of the Establishment, should deny that the orders of bishops, priests, and deacons, are sacramental, or that the episcopal form of church government, and of ordaining the clergy, is required in Scripture. In fact, this is telling the legislature and the nation that, if they prefer the less expensive ministry of the Presbyterians or the Methodists, there is nothing divine or essential in the ministry itself, which will be injured by the change; and that clergymen may be aз validly ordained by the town-crier with his bell, as by the metropolitan's imposition of hands! Nevertheless, strange as it appears, this is the doctrine not only of Hoadley's Socinian school, as I have elsewhere demonstrated, but also of those modern divines and dignitaries, who are the standard of orthodoxy. Thus are the clergy of the English church, as well as all other Protestant ministers, by their own confession, destitute of all sacramental grace for performing their functions holily and beneficially. But, we know, conformably with the doctrine of St. Paul, in both his epistles to Timothy, 1 Tim. iv. 14, 2 Tim. i. 6, and the constant doctrine of the Catholic Church, as likewise of all other ancient churches, that this grace is conferred on those who are truly ordained and in fit dispositions to receive it. We know, moreover, that the per suasion which the faithful entertain of the divine character and * See Collier's Eccles. Hist. vol. ii., p. 257. † Dr. Balguy, Dr. Hey, &c. The Bishop of Lincoln's Elem. of Theol. vol. ii. pp. 376, 396. § See Letters to a Prebendary, letter viii. grace of their clergy, gives a great additional weight to their lessons and ministry. In like manner, with respect to matrimony, which the same apostle expressly calls a sacrament, Ephes. v. 32, the very idea of its sanctity, independently of its peculiar grace, is a preparation for entering into that state with religious dispositions. Next to the sacraments of the Catholic Church, as so many helps to the holiness and salvation of her children, I must mention her public service. We continually hear the advocates of the Establishment crying up the beauty and perfection of their liturgy; but they have not the candor to inform the public that it is all, in a manner, borrowed from the Catholic missal and ritual. Of this fact any one may satisfy himself, who will compare the prayers, lessons and gospels in these Catholic books, with those in the Book of Common Prayer. But, though our service has been thus purloined, it has by no means been preserved entire: on the contrary, we find it, in the latter, eviscerated of its noblest parts; particularly with respect to the principal and essential worship of all the ancient churches, the holy mass, which, from a true propitiatory sacrifice, as it stands in all our missals, is cut down to a mere verbal worship, in The order for the morning prayer. Hence our James I. pronounced of the latter, that it is an ill said mass. The servants of God had, by his appointment, SACRIFICE, both under the law of nature and the written law; it would then be extraordinary, if under the law of grace they were left destitute of this, the most sublime and excellent act of religion which man can offer to his Creator. But we are not left destitute of it; on the contrary, that prophecy of Malachy is fulfilled, Mal. i. 11: In every place, from the rising to the setting of the sun, sacrifice is offered and a pure oblation; even Christ himself, who is really present and mystically offered on our altars in the sacrifice of the mass. I pass over the solemnity, the order, and the magnificence of our public worship and ritual in Catholic countries, which most candid Protestants, who have witnessed them, allow to be exceedingly impressive, and great helps to devotion, and which, certainly, in most particulars, find their parallel in the worship and ceremonies of the old law, ordained by God himself. Nevertheless, it is a gross calumny to assert that the Catholic Church does, or ever did, make the essence of religion to consist in these externals; and we challenge them to our councils and doctrinal books in refutation of the calumny. In like * Dr. Rennel calls the church liturgy "the most perfect of human compositions, and the sacred legacy of the first reformers." Disc. p. 237. manner, I pass over the many private exercises of piety which are generally practised in regular Catholic families and by individuals; such as daily meditation and spiritual reading, evening prayers and examination of the conscience, &c. These, it will not be denied, must be helps for attaining sanctity to those who are desirous of it.-But I have said more than enough to convince your friends, in which of the rival communions the means of sanctity are chiefly to be found. I am, dear sir, &c. JOHN MILNER. DEAR SIR * LETTER XXI. TO JAMES BROWN, ESQ. ON THE FRUITS OF SANCTITY. THE fruits of sanctity are the virtues practised by those who are possessed of it. Hence the present question is, whether these are to be found, for the most part, among the members of the ancient Catholic Church, or among the different innovators, who undertook to reform it in the 16th and 17th centuries? In considering the subject, the first thing which strikes me is, that all the saints, and even those who are recorded as such in the calendar of the Church of England, and in whose name their churches are dedicated, lived and died strict members of the Catholic Church, and zealously attached to her doctrine and discipline. For example, in this calendar, we meet with a Pope Gregory, March 12, the zealous asserter of the papal supremacy,† and other Catholic doctrines; a St. Benedict, March 21, the patriarch of the western monks and nuns; a St. Dunstan, May 19, the vindicator of clerical celibacy; a St. Augustin, of Canterbury, May 26, the introducer of the whole system of Catholicity into England; and a venerable Bede, May 27, the witness of this important fact. It is sufficient to mention the names of other Catholic saints, for example, David, Chad, Edward, Richard, Elphege, Martin, Swithun, Giles, Lambert, Leonard, Hugh, Etheldreda, Remigius, and Edmund; all of * I must except King Charles I. who is rubricated as a martyr on Jan. 30 : nevertheless, it is confessed that he was far from possessing either the purity of a saint or the constancy of a martyr; for he actually gave up Episco. pacy and other essentials of the established religion, by his last treaty in the Isle of Wight. Many Protestant writers pretended that St. Gregory disclaimed the supremacy because he asserted against John of Constantinople that neither he nor any other prelate ought to assume the title of Universal Bishop; but that he claimed and exercised the supremacy, his own works and the history of Bede incontrovertibly demonstrate. which are inserted in the calendar, and give names to some or other churches of the Establishment. Besides these, there are very many of our other saints, whom all learned and candid Protestants unequivocally admit to have been such, for the extraordinary purity and sanctity of their lives. Even Luther acknowledges St. Anthony, St. Bernard, St. Dominic, St. Francis, St. Bonaventure, &c., to have been saints, though avowed Catholics, and defenders of the Catholic Church against the heretics and schismatics of their times. But, independently of this and of every other testimony, it is certain that the supernatural virtues, and heroical sanctity of a countless number of holy personages of different countries, ranks, professions, and sexes, have illustrated the Catholic Church in every age, with an effulgence which cannot be disputed or withstood. Your friends, I dare say, are not much acquainted with the histories of these brightest ornaments of Christianity; let me then invite them to peruse them, not in the legends of obsolete writers, but in a work which, for its various learning and luminous criticism, was commended even by the infidel Gibbon; I mean The Lives of Saints, in twelve octavo volumes, written by the late Rev. Alban Butler, President of St. Omer's College. Protestants are accustomed to paint in the most frightful colors, the alleged depravity of the church, when Luther erected his standard, in order to justify him and his followers in their defection from it. But to form a right judgment in the case, let them read the works of the contemporary writers, an à Kempis, a Gerson, an Antonius, &c.; or let them peruse the lives of St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Laurence Justinian, St. Francis Paula, St. Philip Neri, St. Cajetan, St. Teresa, St. Francis Xaverius, and of those other saints who illuminated the church about the period in question. Or let them, from the very accounts of Protestant historians, compare, as to religion and morality, Archbishop Cranmer, with his rival, Bishop Fisher; Protector Seymour with Chancellor More; Ann Boleyn with Catharine of Arragon; Martin Luther and Calvin with Francis Xaverius and Cardinal Pole; Beza with St. Francis of Sales; Queen Elizabeth with Mary Queen of Scots; these contrasted characters having more or less relation with each other. From such a comparison, I have no sort of doubt what the decision of your friends will be concerning them in point of their respective holiness. I have heretofore been called upon to consider the virtues and merits of the most distinguished reformers;* and certainly we have a right to expect from persons of this description fin * Reflections on Popery, by Dr. Sturges, LL. D. &c. |