ap It is universally known that since the period of the Reformation, the words altar, sacrifice, priest, have had a very limited plication, except among the members of the Roman Catholic Church. This Church having existed without change and without interruption since the apostolic age, it is but natural that her language should be that of primitive Christianity. Her faith, her government, her institutions are not of yesterday. We behold them now such as they have descended to us from the golden days of religion. Having never ceased to present on her altars that "clean oblation," which, as the prophet Malachy foretold, was to be offered under the new dispensation "from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof;" the expressions to which we have alluded, have always been in general use among her children, and are well understood in their proper and literal signification. When we advert to the sacrifice which the priests of the new law offer to the honor of the Almighty, this language is perfectly intelligible, because we are understood to speak of that holy and sublime offering, in which, according to the faith of the Catholic Church, Jesus Christ himself is the high-priest and victim. When we call the table at which the minister of God performs this solemn act of worship, an altar, we do not depart from the strictest propriety of diction; because we believe that on that table a true and real sacrifice, in the proper sense of the word, is offered to the Divine Majesty. When we designate the clergyman who exercises this high power as an instrument in the hands of God, by the name of priest, we are not more obnoxious to criticism; because we apply the term precisely in the signification that has always been assigned to it. But the case is very different with the Protestant sects. When the doctrine of Christ's real and corporal presence in the holy eucharist was repudiated in England, under the reigns of Edward and Elizabeth, the sacrifice which was an essential appendage of this belief was also abolished; the altars on which the immaculate Lamb had been offered, were set aside to make room for tables, and the title of priest was likewise relinquished, the minis ters of the Church by law established being designated by the name of parsons. Such was the terminology introduced by the Reformation: the real sacrifice, the real altar, the real priest having been discarded, the Lord's supper, the Lord's table, and the minister were substituted, as appropriate expressions to convey the new ideas or opinions that had taken the place of the ancient faith. It will be readily perceived that this was only following the dictate of common sense; for, to adhere to the old phraseology for the expression of sentiments infinitely removed from those which it had formerly conveyed, might have given rise to an intolerable confusion, and would, moreover, have been altogether unnatural. When, therefore, the belief of the real presence was abolished, its phraseology was likewise abolished among Protestants, and it requires no very extensive acquaintance with history to acknowledge that at one time the epithet of priest, far from being considered as an honorable title, was almost universally used in England among the reformed sects, in a scoffing and reproachful sense.* With the aid of these prefatory observations, the reader will not find it difficult to understand the merits of the discussion between Bishop Whittingham and Rev. Mr. Johns. The object of the bishop's two discourses on "the Priesthood in the Church," is to show that the clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church have a priestly character, and his effort to establish the proposition is evidently a very laborious one. The reasoning is very obscure and bears upon the face of it an attempt to prove something apparently much at variance with the admitted notions even of his own churchmen. As far as we have been able to judge, his argument may be reduced to the following heads. 1. The Jews had their priesthood, the office of which was to prefigure by typical sacrifices the propitiatory offering of Calvary. "To that," he says, "the Christian sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, in its memorial symbols, looks back; to that the priesthood of the law, in its ministrations of types and shadows looked forward See Bishop White's 5th lecture, towards the end. + Priesthood in the Church, p. 7. as yet to be revealed; and therein bore no character, held no function which a corresponding priesthood of the gospel, turning type into commemoration, shadow into symbol, might not hold." 2. "Ministerial intervention that sins may be forgiven is the essence of priesthood;" now "Christ's ministers have been sent to preach that men may believe,-sent, when they do believe, to remit their sins in baptism, and in the communion of the flesh and blood, which 'he who eateth' and 'drinketh' hath eternal life."" Therefore they have the character of priests, forming as they do "a priesthood in which sacraments take the place of sacrifice, and the open preaching of Christ crucified, that of the dim foreshadowing of the fact in legal types and symbols." "3. The ministers of the gospel are, to some extent, representatives of Christ, who says, "as my Father hath sent me, so I send you." But Christ's mission from the Father was to be our prophet, priest and king; therefore, as he is represented in his Church as prophet and king, he must be represented also as priest. Therefore the "priesthood of the Christian ministry is an essential part of its subordinate representative character." From this brief exposition of the reasoning which the bishop has so ingeniously constructed, it is plain that he has treated the question pretty much as a thesis in philosophy. The form of the whole argument is this: "the people do not call me a priest; but I think they ought to give me this title." We shall now examine with what plausibility he claims the distinction. Laying aside for a moment the examination of the theological errors which he has committed, we shall consider the question merely in a philological point of view, and we contend that it can be settled only by the practice of the Christian Church. Whether the Protestant clergy can be termed a priesthood, in the proper sense of the word depends upon the meaning which custom has assigned to the substantives, priest, sacrifice, &c. Words are mere sounds, the signification of which is not determined by indi * Priesthood in the Church, pp. 9, 12, 13. vidual fancy or speculation, but by the general usage of mankind. "Si volet usus Quem penes arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi.” Anteriorly to the establishment of Christianity, the Latin word humilitas, which now signifies humility, expressed a passive condition, a degraded state of the individual to whom it was applied. But when the example of our Saviour had ennobled and sanctified the spirit of self-denial, and made voluntary abjection a virtue, the word humilitas acquired a new signification, utterly unknown before that period, and perfectly unintelligible to the sensual views of paganism. It then was adopted to imply an active quality of the soul, a spirit of willing self-abasement that conforms our sentiments to those of Christ. The same may be said of the Greek word εκκλησια. Before the introduction of the Christian religion, it was used to signify an assembly of any description; subsequently its meaning became more restricted, and it was employed only to denote the Church or a temple for divine worship. Many other illustrations might be adduced to show, what reason itself proclaims, that words in common use must be understood according to their general acceptation. But what has always been understood by the word priest? The reader will take notice that the English language was not a product of the Reformation, and that the word to which we have alluded was introduced into its vocabulary, many hundred years before the lust of Henry VIII conceived any change of religion. This word was in universal use long before that eventful period; at a time when all who spoke or wrote the English language throughout the world, were members of the Roman Catholic Church. In those days the word priest signified a man who had been separated from the people by the ceremony of valid ordination, and had received the sacerdotal character as well as the powers which it implies, such as this character and these powers were then believed to have been transmitted from the apostles, and to be still extant in the Catholic priesthood. But it was then universally admitted that the individual who was invested with the sacerdotal character, received the power of offering sacrifice, and that the sacrifice which he was to offer in the eyes of the Church, was by excellence the eucharistic oblation, such as it has always been, and is still understood and offered by the vast majority of the Christian world, and is founded upon the acknowledged dogma that Christ is really, substantially, and corporally present on the altar after the ceremony of consecration.* Such was the notion implied by the word priest, and it has never ceased to retain this as its proper signification. As a proof of this assertion it will be quite sufficient to remark that no sooner was the Anglican schism effected by a rupture with the see of Rome and the substitution of new doctrines in the place of those which had been venerated for ages, than this title was withheld from the Protestant clergy in common parlance; because the word was not supposed to denote, in its proper sense, a minister of the reformed creeds. It is true, the expression has been retained in some passages of the Book of Common Prayer, but only in a wide and secondary sense;† not in its proper and *The Council of Trent (Sess. 22) thus explains the sacrifice of the new law: "Our Lord and God, although he was about to offer himself once, on the altar of the cross, to his Father, that on it he might operate our eternal redemption; yet, because by death his priesthood was not to cease, he, at his last supper, the same night in which he was betrayed (1 Cor. xi), that he might leave to his Church a visible sacrifice, such as the nature of man requires, by which the bloody sacrifice, once to be completed on the cross, might be represented; and its inemory might continue to the end of time; and its salutary virtue be applied to the remission of those sins which we daily commit-declaring himself to be the appointed priest forever according to the order of Melchisedec; he offered to his Father his body and blood under the appearances of bread and wine; and, under those appearances, delivered the same to his apostles, whom, at the time, he appointed the priests of the new testament. To them and to their successors in the priesthood, he gave command to offer the same, saying: Do this for a commemoration of me (Luke xxii). So the Catholic Church has always understood and taught." †The sense in which the word priest is used in the formularies of the Church of England, may be ascertained from the Latin Book of Common Prayer, which makes use of the Latin word answering to a Christian minister, not that answering to an offerer of sacrifice. This shows that the word, when applied to Protestant clergymen, was applied in a sense differing from that which had been usual before the Reformation. Hence it never passed into Common use. See Protestant Episcopal Pastor, pp. 24, 27. common acceptation; and notwithstanding the efforts which some Episcopal clergymen are using to reform the reformed language, it is a palpable fact which requires no argument to substantiate it, that at this day, in these very times, the term priest is not employed to designate a Protestant clergyman. Consult the forms of expression which are authorized in those countries where the English language is the medium of communication between man and man; examine the usages of England, Ireland, Scotland, and the United States. What do they understand by the term in question? Nothing more or less than a clergyman of the Catholic Church. St. Augustin refuted the sectaries of his age by referring them to the simple fact, that if any person inquired the way to a Catholic Church, no one would dream of directing him to a temple erected by an anti-catholic sect. Such also would be the case at the present day, and in reference to the question before us. If an individual wished to consult a Catholic priest, and not knowing the place of his residence, were to ask the first person whom he chanced to meet, where does the priest live, we know what answer he would receive. Who would think of pointing the inquirer to the parsonage of an Episcopalian clergyman? The residence of the Catholic priest would most undoubtedly be indicated, for the simple reason that he belongs to an order of men whom the English language denominates priests; the Protestant minister not being known to the community under that name. From the view we have taken of the subject, it may be logically inferred, that the Protestant Episcopal clergy have no right to the appellation of priests, in the proper sense of the term, or in other words, that there is not a priesthood in their Church. "On the subject of the priesthood," says A Layman, "it is obvious that but little should at present be said ;" and we much mistake the public mind, if this is not a very general opinion in reference to the priesthood which he would more particularly uphold. It is to be regretted that Bishop Whittingham had # *Letter to the Rev. Mr. Johns, p. 14. not the advantage of this prudent and wary counsellor, before he ventured upon his elaborate and reiterated disquisition, at the evident risk of awakening universal attention to the futility of his claim. We have showed that his pretensions are incompatible with propriety of language, and we shall moreover prove that, even independently of this consideration, they are utterly inconsistent with the radical error of his belief on the subject of the Christian sacrifice. But before we enter upon this discussion, we will place before our readers the testimony of some Protestant writers, by way of confirming the arguments in favor of our first proposition. To begin with the sentiments of the Rev. Henry V. D. Johns, whom Bishop Whittingham introduced to the people as "the representative of Christ,"* he uses the following language in alluding to the words altar, sacrifice, and priest. "To use these terms without such qualification (of a figurative sense) very distinctly expressed, leads to error and is at variance with the word of God and the institutions and principles of our Church." "The English word priest is used, in consequence of the meagreness of our language, as the translation of the two Greek words ιερευς and πρεσβυτερος, the former of which denotes an offerer of Jewish sacrifices, and the latter a Christian minister. I am no more a priest in the sense of the word objected to (s) than you are, my brethren, who are laymen, nor can I in the same sense offer sacrifice any more than In the accommodated use of this you can. language, you may offer sacrifices, as we gather from the words of the Apostles." "In like manner our Church uses the term 'altar,' when applied to the communion table, in the figurative or accommodated sense." . . . . "In the order for the administration' of the ordinance, the church calls it, not the sacrifice of the eucharist,' but the Lord's Supper, or holy communion.'" In treating the same question, the late Bishop White remarks: "I conceive so unfavorably of whatever may lead even by remote consequences, to creature worship, 6 *Priesthood in the Church, p. 28. The Prot. Episc. Pastor, pp. 14, 15, &c. as to give a caution against a notion which sometimes appears in writers, who were sincere, but inconsistent Protestants. The notion is that there is in the eucharist, a real sacrifice; that it is offered on an altar, and that the officiating minister is a priest, in the sense of an offerer of sacrifice. Under the economy of the gospel, there is nothing coming under the names referred to, except the fulfilment of them in the person of the High Priest of our profession. As to our Church, although she commemorates a great sacrifice in the eucharist, yet she knows of no offering of this description except in the figurative sense in which prayers and alms are sacrifices. She calls the place on which her oblation is made, not an altar,' but ' a table."" "And as to the minister in the ordinance, although she retains the word 'priest,' yet she considers it as synonymous with 'presbyter,' which appears from the Latin standard of the Book of Common Prayer."* In the lecture from which these words are quoted, Bishop White sustains his views by the following passage from Hooker: "Seeing that sacrifice is now no part of the Church ministry; how should the name of priesthood be thereunto rightly applied ?"+ This he states in the form of an objection on the part of his opponent. Hooker's answer is "Surely, even as St. Paul applieth the name of flesh unto that very substance of fishes, which hath a proportionable correspondence to flesh, although it be in nature another thing: whereupon, when philosophers will speak warily, they make a difference between flesh in one sort of living creatures, and that other substance in the rest, which hath but a kind of analogy to flesh: the apostle contrary wise, having matter of greater importance whereof to speak, nameth indifferently both flesh. The fathers of the Church, with like security of speech, call usually the ministry of the gospel a priesthood, in regard of that which the gospel hath proportionable to ancient sacrifices; namely, the communion of the blessed body and blood of Christ, although it hath properly now no sacrifice. As for the people, when they hear the name, it draweth no more their minds to any cogitation of sacrifice, than the name of a senator or an alderman causeth them to think upon old age; or to imagine, that every one so termed, must needs be ancient, because years were respected in the first nomination of both. Wherefore, to pass by name, let them use what dialect they will; whether we call it a priesthood, a presbytership, or a ministry, it availeth not: although in truth, the word presbyter doth seem most fit, and in propriety of speech more agreeable than priest, with the drift of the whole gospel of Jesus Christ." From the authorities just cited, and which are certainly entitled to the respect of Episcopalians, it is manifest that the title affected by Bishop Whittingham is not justified either by the language or the doctrine of his own religious formularies, and his triple argument to prove the "priesthood in his church," dwindles into fruitless sophistry. In the first place, he endeavors to establish this proposition by comparing the Christian ministry with the Jewish priesthood. But the Jews had a real sacrifice, and consequently it does not follow that, because they had a concomitant priesthood, there is one in the Protestant Episcopal church. 2. Ministerial intervention for the forgiveness of sins is the essence of priesthood," if, as we have seen, it includes the offering of sacrifice; but there is no such offering among the Episcopal clergy; therefore they form no priesthood. 3. If Christ's ministers are sent by him, as he was sent by the Father, this is to be understood either literally or figuratively; if figuratively, then it is plain that, even in the hypothesis that the Protestant clergy have any mission at all, they are not a priesthood in the proper sense of the word; if literally, it follows that, there being no sacrifice among them, they are not priests, and have no mission from Christ. In a future article we shall establish this point by another process of reasoning, which will show that the Church of Christ, from its very origin, has always recognized in the Eucharistic institution a true and real sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ, and that the true ministry of the Church is entitled to the honorable appellation of priestVOL. II.-No. 1. hood, because it possesses the reality which this title implies. This view of the subject will enable us to confute in globo the erroneous opinions on the subject of the Eucharistic sacrifice generally held by Protestants, and put forth in the four pamphlets which we have noticed. But before we bring these observations to a close, we feel bound to address a passing word to bishop Whittingham and the flock that acknowledges his jurisdiction. This gentleman undertakes to stigmatize in opprobrious terms the doctrine of the Catholic Church on the subject of the Eucharist, and ventures even to charge her with a practice which she disavows.* We shall not retaliate by the use of similar expedients: for we are proud to say that Catholicity has no need of such weapons to achieve her triumphs, and our object in these remarks is merely to rectify the errors which the bishop has committed. But we advise him to urge his claims hereafter in more measured language, and to remember that any unfair dealing in a man of his station in the world, cannot but detract from his respectability as a Christian and from his honor as a gentleman. His contemptuous allusions to the Catholic priesthood will necessarily appear in the public eye as falling with excessively bad grace from an individual, who is so easily convicted of having attempted to pilfer from that very priesthood its distinguishing and most glorious title. Such arguments as these moreover are less than nothing in the scale, when they are interwoven with a series of inconsistent and contradictory assertions. A few of these contradictions we shall briefly expose, while we challenge a satisfactory explanation of them. The bishop, speaking of the Catholic priesthood, says: "Such a priesthood the reformers found, claiming privileges, which it refused to test by the written record of its commission, and exercising those pri *Priesthood in the Church, pp. 20, 21. In the liturgy of the Cath. Church, (Canon of the Mass,) are these words: "and of all here present, whose faith and devotion are known unto thee, for whom we offer, or who offer up to thee this sacrifice of praise," &c: how then can bishop Whittingham call the mass "a worship offered not with, but for the people?" † Ibid. p. 21. 4 |