Project Canterbury

From The Works of the Rt. Rev. Charles C. Grafton (Volume 1),
edited by B. Talbot Rogers, New York: Longmans, Green, 1914

Christian and Catholic


CHAPTER IX
SACRIFICE

LISTENING to the common tradition preserved in our race, we find it bearing witness that sacrifice in some form, not necessarily with blood-shedding, has been from an unknown antiquity a recognized mode of man's approach to his apprehended Deity. It is found in the non-Semitic as well as the Semitic races. It has ever, and everywhere, been regarded as a typical act of religion.

Naturally we ask, what is the origin and significance of this religious function? We have to admit that, so far as history goes, the answer is lost in the mist of the unveiled past. We can only gather up the scattered hints, and from what we know of man, make our surmises as best we may. Man, finding himself in the presence of powers before which he felt his impotence, powers awful and gigantic, manifested in silent orderly rise of tides, bellowing clouds, upheaving earthquakes, volcanic fires or majestic march of sun and stars, may have been led to make offerings to the deities his imagination personified them to be. It was a natural anthropomorphic conception. The sense of fear and the desire for protection, not unlikely, are, then, the primeval motives of his action. The social and ethical may have come later. The gods of the race's childhood were gods of the mountains and valleys, of the rivers and the clouds, of the sun in the heaven, of the vivifying forces of nature on earth. Powerless before them in their destructive potency, man's instinct of self-preservation cried within him, "Give the god something. He is angry, let us appease him; he is protecting us, make him an offering." The conception of what would be acceptable would be determined by their conception of his character. Thus by some external act man's apprehensions or gratitude may have expressed themselves in varying forms of offering to the unseen.

Possibly, with his developing ethical perceptions, the desire for friendly intercourse came to add a further element to his oblations. Nature has her beneficent as well as her terror-striking aspects. Earth and sea and sky are swathed in beauty, and nature's storehouse is full of pleasurable gifts. All things develop and live in reciprocal action. Nothing lives apart, but is dependent on other lives. The song of nature is of union and love. Not abnormally, then, the concept of some kind of fellowship with the energies which were man's companions began to find expression. The sense of kinship follows close to the primitive one of dependence. So along with the gift there comes to be associated the desire for mutual recognition. The two parties to the sacrifice partake together of the offering. The participation in a common meal becomes a function of the sacrificial rite. The manner and matter of it may differ. The offerer may thus pour a portion of the wine upon the ground as a libation to his god. The Greek hero may spread his feast at which the gods attend. The Jew, beneath the shelter of the tabernacle tent, may partake of the peace offering he has made. The heathen temple of a more costly construction becomes a banqueting house. However degraded and degrading its orgies, the basic conception was that of a mutually recognized fellowship. Thus the germinal religious instinct began its development in man. It was as yet unfettered by locality. The woods were God's first temples. The sacrifice required no specially constructed altar or ritual. But what begins in something primarily crude is often found to have an unexpected depth and capacity of development " It is a testimony of the unity which underlies and binds together the gradual unfolding of thought and life " in the story of the universe.

An interesting question here arises whether, originally, any official or representative in a priestly capacity was necessary. As sacrifice was an offering of the individual man to God, we might suppose it so began. Abel and Cain are said to have offered sacrifices. But man is a social being; Montesquieu said, " He is born in society and there he remains." If in the earliest stages of his existence he is not a member of a tribe, yet he must needs be of a family. The instances in the Old Testament in patriarchal times represent him as the father, and acting in an official capacity as head and representative. Thus we read of Job and Noah and Abraham and Jacob building altars and offering sacrifices. They are all fathers, and the heads and so priests of their family. As the tribal condition develops we find the rulers and judges, like Gideon and Manoah and Samuel, making offerings to God. In the enlargement of tribal to the fuller corporate national life, King Solomon prepared sacrifice at the first temple's dedication. It is the developed corporate conditions of mankind that demands for its religious functions official representation. So we find also among the non-Semitic nations, in Babylon and Egypt and elsewhere, an order of priesthood developed along with the national life. Among the Jewish people priesthood came by commandment of God to belong to a family, that of Aaron. It thus became hereditary. It was continued by the law of natural descent from the high priest Aaron, just as in the Gospel the priesthood is continued by the law of a spiritual descent by an Apostolical succession from the .high priest Jesus Christ. As the one was exclusive, so it foreshadowed that the other was to be. The one, as of earthly descent, had no assurance of permanence. The other partakes of the abiding character of Him who liveth a priest forever.

Conformably to the developed religious national needs the sacrifices established became necessarily of a twofold character. They were the expression of the nation's corporate life and also of the individual's relation to God. The two great feasts of the Passover and the Day of Atonement were the religious expression of the nation's gratitude to God for its deliverance and for the maintenance of its covenanted relation to Him. The other fourfold sacrifices express the individual's varying attitude to the Almighty. The whole burnt offering told of the duty of man's entire outward and inward consecration, the peace offering, of the reconciliation and established communion between man and his Maker, the two sin offerings, of man's penitence, proffered reparation, and of God's forgiveness, and man's restoration to covenanted privileges.

Providentially directed sacrifice had now become organized and a priesthood established. But all developments are attended with their dangers, all elevations with their temptations, all gifts of God with their possibilities of misuse. The magnificent equipment of worship with which God had endowed the Jew, was exposed to the subtle degradation of ceremonial formalism--a degradation so subtle and potential as to evacuate of all its worth the efficacy of sacrificial worship. God had, in His loving wisdom, revealed to Moses a worship patterned after the unseen verities of heaven. It was a worship beautiful, choral, liturgical, ritualistic, sacrificial; but unless the heart, mind, and will of the worshipper entered into and went with it, it was valueless. Sacrifice, to be pleasing to God and efficacious to man, must be no mere outward gift. God was not to be placated by ten thousands of burnt offerings or rivers of oil or wine. More valuable than the hecatombs of animal sacrifices was the sacrifice of the broken and contrite heart. So, while God established the Levitical sacrifices, through the prophets He declared with intensifying emphasis the need of the interior sacrifice; for the sacrifice to be acceptable and profitable the inward and the outward must coalesce.

This brings us to the further development of the law of sacrifice as it is presented in Christ. All Christians look to Him as fulfilling in His own person its highest conceptions. He fulfils its Levitical, ordained, outward expression and its prophetically required inward spirit. By manifold types the Levitical ceremonial foreshadowed the blood-shedding and sacrifice consummated on Calvary. The evangelical prophet, commonly known as Isaiah, in words which have profoundly moved the heart of Christendom, has given us His inward life. He was to make on the cross the offering of the bloody sacrifice typified by the Aaronic ritual, and also was to be the Man of Sorrows acquainted with grief, who makes His soul an offering for sin. If the Levitical order depicts one who, after the order of Aaron, fulfils the legal ritual, the prophets foretold His interior self-oblation.

We find this conjunction of the inward and outward proclaimed in the New Testament. In the epistle to the Hebrews, the Holy Spirit represents Christ as the victim, whose blood is shed on earth, entering as the high priest within the Holy of Holies. Just as the high priest of the Jewish order carried and sprinkled the blood of the sacrifice in the most holy place, upon the mercy seat, so Christ entering within the veil carries and presents the blood that has passed through death to the Eternal Father. The blood so presented, not only meritoriously pleads, it is the source of our new life. For His life-giving blood is living by its connection with His divinity. By virtue of its union with His own Eternal Spirit, it becomes the medium of communicating to our soul and spirits purging of conscience and spiritual life. In the same epistle which declares His priesthood and sacrifice of blood, we learn also of the interior offering of His will, by which will we are sanctified.

The Apostolic writers also bring out this coalescence of the inward and outward in Jesus Christ.

S. Paul, guided by the Holy Spirit, gives us the forensic and legal aspect of His sacrifice who, as the second Adam and as a propitiation, achieved on the cross redemption for us. S. John, who pillowed on Christ's breast, reveals His interior life and His self-consecration: "For their sakes I consecrate myself."

Thus in our Lord we discern the dual action, His inward oblation and its outward manifestation.

Moreover, Christ was a priest after two orders; He was a priest after the order of Aaron, and after the order of Melchisedek. After the first He offers Himself with shedding of blood on the cross. It is His own offering. Speaking of His life He says, "I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again." On the cross we behold Him offering Himself to God, the Holy to the Holy, in perfect and loving obedience. There He offers Himself, obedient unto death, in reparation for the sins of the humanity with which He has identified Himself. There, perfect love, consummated in the supremest act of penitence on our behalf, reconciles man to his Maker. There He makes a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. There He is seen exercising His triple offices of Priest, Prophet, and King. As Priest for the guilty He intercedes: "Father forgive them." As King He opens to the penitent the kingdom of heaven: "To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." As Prophet He consoles and reveals the principle of the Church's unity. It is to be one by the bond of divine charity, which shall unite its members together and unite them in Himself. "Son, behold thy Mother; Mother behold thy son."

As priest, after the order of Melchisedek, He offers Himself in the upper chamber. It was the new temple taken by virtue of His prophetical insight and divine sovereignty. It was built thus without sound of axe or hammer, but by the word of His power. Here we behold Him eternal in His generation, unique in His office, consummating the life-long, freewill offering of Himself. "Now when Jesus knew that His hour was come that He should depart out of this World unto the Father, . . . and knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands and that He was come from God and went to God; He riseth from supper and laid aside His garments" (symbolical of putting aside the glory He had with the Father before the world was) "and took a towel and girded Himself" (as having taken and girded His divine nature with our humanity), and with the water He had Himself poured out, took the soiled feet of His disciples into His own hands and washed and wiped them with the towel wherewith He was girded. Then presently He proceeded to bless and break the bread, saying, "This is my body which is being broken for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for many." Like Melchisedek He brings forth bread and wine, and making them what His Word declares them to be, offers Himself as a freewill sacrifice to God. The action in the upper chamber and on the cross are parts of the one great sacrifice. The inward and outward perfectly coalesce. Our great high priest embraces and fulfils the requirements of the Levitical law and the inward spiritual oblation of the Prophets.

We have come now to see, in this its highest expression, the personal element that enters into religious sacrifice. It is not to be the gift of something to God, but of the person along with the gift. Regarding, then, religion as the bond which unites man to God, sacrifice appears to be the outward act by which it expresses itself. It is an established means of worship and man's communion with Deity. It is the revealed way by which the creature acknowledges his position towards God, and offers himself along with his gift to Him. It is also the ordained means by which God, accepting the gift, returns, according to the creature's spiritual condition, a gift according to his needs. It is this reciprocal sacramental action between God and man by means of sacrifice that has been so popularly overlooked.

Regarding it in this large sense we shall expect to find it in all dispensations. And we do so. We find it existing in paradise, and under the law, and in the kingdom of grace, and in glory.

In paradise the creature man was in an innocent state, consequently the form of his sacrifice expressed this condition. The ordained matter of the sacrifice was the tree of knowledge. The tree was symbolical of man's innocence. There it stood, waving its green banners, choral with the symphony of winds and birds, beautiful with its buds and flowers, fragrant with the incense of dew and blossoms, glorious in the sunshine and with the stars for its vesper lights. It was typical of man's dual, animal and spiritual, nature, having its root in the earth but reaching, in its aspirations, heavenwards. By abstaining from its fruit man offered it up in sacrifice to God, and offered himself along with it. For it tested and called into action his whole nature. It called for a bodily act of self-denial, and so touched his animal nature. It affected also every department of his intellectual and moral one. He was by his memory to keep in mind that it was that tree, however undistinguished from the others. It called for the sacrifice of his reason. He was to obey the divine command, although there was no apparent reason for his obedience. It was a command based on a mystery which he could not fathom, but which his heart could accept. By his obedient act of abstinence, he united himself to the offering, and so doing God designed to give Himself back to the creature. Man would give himself to God, God would give Himself to man. By outward gift of the tree of knowledge man would submit himself to God; by the returning gift of the tree of life, God would bestow a fuller gift to man.

The same principle is seen under the patriarchs. The changed character of the sacrifice denotes the changed relation of man to God. Disobedience having separated man from God, he must offer a sacrifice which shall symbolize his separated condition. By sin he has lost grace, and has come under a law of death. Instead of the tree, beautiful with life and fragrant with blossoms, for one offering, there must now be the slaying of the victim and the cry of pain. It symbolizes his condition. It is an acknowledgment of his transgression and the righteousness of its penalty. But offered in humble faith to God, God will correspondingly give to man certain temporal and covenanted blessings vouchsafed by his feeding on the offering, and the pledge of a promised Redeemer.

When at length Christ comes the same law is discernible. A new form of sacrificial worship is established. In the kingdom of grace we offer the Holy Eucharist. We break the bread and bless the cup which signifies the breaking of the holy body and the outpouring of the precious blood. By this sacramental action we set forth before the Eternal Father the saving act of Calvary. We proclaim in the spiritual body of Christ the mystery of the Lord's death till He comes. And what we offer God gives us back to feed upon.

While Christ had but one body, and that which is present in the sacrament is one with His glorified body (for the body which Christ has now is the same He took of the Blessed Virgin and which hung on the cross and rose from the dead), the action represented and pleaded on our earthly altars is the act performed on earth. Into heaven, Christ, as the high priest, carried the living blood sprinkled upon Himself as the Mercy Seat. "The Mercy Seat or Capporeth was the golden lid which covered the sacred ark, and upon which the blood of a bullock or goat was sprinkled at the yearly feast of expiation. This lid covered not only the ark, containing the law, butl the law itself. The blood of the appointed victims only becomes propitiatory when it is on the Capporeth." Christ, as the "propitiation," is identical with the Capporeth, which signifies Christ sprinkled with His own blood. So He in Himself is the Hebrew "Capporeth" or Propitiation. The offering of the Church on earth is one in substance with that in heaven, but it symbolically sets forth and pleads by the breaking of the bread and the consecration of the wine the sacrificial action made on Calvary.

The Church in her sacrificial worship thus offers and presents to God Christ as her representative and head. The whole body of the Church in heaven and earth unitedly does this in one continuous action. Moreover, the individual members of Christ's body offer themselves to God in union with the sacrifice with which, by participation, they are united. What they corporately offer to God, that God gives back to them individually. The Eucharistic sacrifice is thus a theandric, a reciprocal God and man, action and the ordained form of Christian worship.

In the condition we call that of "glory" there is no mystical, symbolical immolation as in the Eucharist, no actual one as on the cross. But there the Church perpetually offers itself up to God through Christ its high priest and head, and the Almighty gives Himself back in ever-flowing streams of life and blessing through the Incarnate God. The necessary condition of secured sinlessness, and so of an eternally advancing felicity, depends upon this perpetual reciprocal activity. The tree of life is on either side of the river. The law of communion with God is ever the same. Sacrifice is the eternal law of the creature's life and the ordained means of communion with deity. It is a necessity of religion, and there is no complete religion without it. For it is on man's part an expression of his condition and duty to God, and on God's part a gift, through or associated with the offering, to man. It is, in the relation that man has with God, what the vivifying law of exchange is in nature. Nothing lives to itself alone. Each must give of its life for other life, and, in giving, enrich its own. Earth and air and sea and sky live in this loving fellowship. They are ever imparting to one another, and receiving a responsive benefit. The sea yields itself to the sky's warm smile, and the sky returns its gift with showers. The strong mountain shelters the valley, the valley holds up its cup of moisture for the mountain to drink. The angels by service pour back their lives into the divine fount of life, and from thence wells forth to them responsive tides of bliss. Sacrifice is aligned to this law of relationship, and so is as lasting as the relationship between God and man.

To this Protestantism is apt to reply that our Lord made an offering for man once for all, and that He having fulfilled the prophecies concerning the Messianic sacrifice, sacrifice forever passed away. We must eagerly respond that, when this objection springs from a sincere desire to guard the all-sufficiency of Christ's atoning, piacular, vicarious sacrifice, we can but honor it. It cannot be too sacredly guarded. His sacrifice was efficaciously offered for the whole race. It was, by virtue of the divinity of His person, of infinite value. It needs no supplementing, and nothing can be added to it. It was all-sufficient and complete in itself, and by it God and man were reconciled. We can do nothing, and nothing is of any virtue, apart from it. But it does not follow from this that sacrifice has ceased and is no longer an element of worship. The Church worships with a sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving as she presents to God her blood-sprinkled Redeemer and Lord. She worships as she, in obedience to the divine command, makes and offers the memorial of Christ's death. Her children worship as they make, what was done once for humanity, available by participation for their own individual needs and sins.

It is only an impoverished Protestantism that, having lost its full Christian heritage, fails to discern it. The testimony given by the consciousness of united Christendom is overwhelmingly in favor of the retention of sacrifice. The Russian and Greek communions, with their one hundred and fifty millions of members, the Roman, with its two hundred and fifty, and the Anglicans, all in their inherited liturgies, have retained sacrifice. In the American book of common prayer it is, in the communion service, most explicitly stated. After the consecration of the sacred elements, the priest, standing, and so in the priestly position, makes an oblation of them to Almighty God. He says, "We Thy humble servants do celebrate and make here before Thy Divine Majesty, with these Thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto Thee, the memorial Thy Son hath commanded us to make." "The Holy Eucharist," says Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, in his Commentary, "partakes of the character of a sin-offering and of a peace-offering. In that blessed sacrament there is both an oblation to God and there is a participation by man. In it the meritorious blood of Christ which was shed once for all on the cross, ... is re-presented and pleaded before God. And in it the blood of Christ is sprinkled on the souls of all penitent and faithful receivers." The testimony in favor of sacrifice is practically universal. Churchman and non-churchman both bear witness, one positively, the other negatively. For Protestantism having lost the priesthood necessarily lost sacrifice, and the real objective presence of Christ's body and blood in the Eucharist and their Christian consciousness cannot bear witness to something they do not possess. Their negative testimony, therefore, confirms that of the vast majority of Christians who, possessing the priesthood, have retained belief in the real presence of Christ's body and blood and the sacrifice of the altar.

If, then, we consider what the whole Church, East and West, taught before the rise of Protestantism, we see that all but a small fraction of Christians held to the practice of a sacrificial worship. To apply here our rule of faith, we cannot believe, if Christ was a teacher sent from God, He could have so badly taught His followers, that almost all should, on so vital a matter, have been led into error. What the Holy Spirit, speaking through the common Christian consciousness, declares, must be true, for the Spirit of truth cannot be a liar. The worship of God by sacrifice is thus proved to be the Gospel method, and the Eucharist the ordained Christian sacrifice.

But how are we to meet the argument, based on Scripture, that Christ once for all offered Himself a sacrifice for sin.

It may help us to understand this if we recall the fact that there was, in the former dispensation, a division between the sacrifices. Some sacrifices were for individual offerings and others were of a corporate character. God, as we know, deals with us both as individuals and in our corporate capacity. In the latter He deals with us as a nation or a race. We find Him thus delivering, by the paschal meal and the blood sprinkled on the door-posts, Israel's first born from death, and the nation from Egyptian bondage. Its yearly memorial was a national act of renewed gratitude to God, and a pledge of God's continued protection to the nation. God also established the nation in a covenanted relation to Himself when Moses took the blood, part of which had been offered on the altar, and with the other portion sprinkled it on the people, saying, "Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you." And year by year, on the day of atonement, by its special sacrifices was the nation reconciled and the covenant on God's part renewed.

We can now see from the relation which the day of atonement and its sacrifices bore to the Jewish nation, what is the relation of the atonement made on Calvary to the Christian Israel. On the Jewish holy day, the whole regular order of the daily temple sacrifices stopped. The whole ecclesiastical machinery, so to speak, ran down. The high priest put off his glorious vestments, the regular daily offerings could not be made. The whole nation, as a nation, must first be reconciled to God. When that work was accomplished, then the priests resumed their functions and the power to offer the daily sacrifices was restored. These were the representatives and extension of that one great yearly sacrifice on the day of atonement on which they legally depended for their efficacy. Thus the day of atonement did not make worship by sacrifice to cease, but, on the contrary, enabled it to go on. In like manner Christ offered Himself on the cross. He offered Himself for the race as an entity. His act need not and cannot be repeated. It was unique. He was "once offered to bear the sins of many." "This man offered one sacrifice for sin," the one sacrifice by which God and man were reconciled. By it the race, in its corporate capacity as a race, human nature as a nature, man regarded as man, was brought into a restored relationship with God. This work once accomplished can neither be repeated nor added to. It is complete. The seal of our Lord's word rests upon it. "It is finished." But as the day of atonement, which reconciled the Jewish nation, did not cause the worship by sacrifice to cease, neither does the atoning act which reconciled mankind. As the Jewish atonement restored to the nation the privilege of offering its daily sacrifices, so that made by Christ gave to His people the right of offering the more acceptable gospel sacrifices. And that sacrifices were to continue, S. Paul tells us when he says that the "heavenly things," that is the members of the new Christian dispensation, should, in contrast with the members of the former one, "be purified with better sacrifices." Chiefest and most acceptable among them is that our Lord ordained when He said to His Apostles, "Offer this as a memorial of Me." We do not, therefore, by the Eucharistic sacrifice, deny the uniqueness or all-sufficingness of the one sacrifice of the cross, nay, we establish it.

The Eucharist is the gospel sacrifice and it is a sacrifice of fourfold aspects. It is a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, for in the canon the priest asks God to accept it as such. It is also a sacrifice of prayer or the calves of our lips. "We pray that we and all Thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins and all other benefits of His Passion." It is a sacrifice of ourselves. "We offer ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto Thee." The Church also offers and presents Him, her Head, and pleads His death and merits for herself and her children. On the cross Christ died for humanity; by the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice we as individuals plead, and appropriate that sacrifice to ourselves. Once the command concerning sacrifice was "touch not," now it is "offer"; once it was "eat not," now it is "eat and live."

While it is a truth that Christian worship must be expressed by sacrifice, yet it is also true that sacrifice is not the only revealed mode by which man is to approach God. There have ever been two ordained modes of approach, viz., by word only, and by act. In Paradise we find both; man offers by sacrificial worship the tree; he also communes with God represented as abiding with man in the garden. So under the law, the synagogue and its worship developed along with that of the temple. So in the Christian Church, along with the great gospel sacrifice, came the development of the divine office. The Anglican Church has preserved in her prayer-book both the two divinely appointed forms, that of synagogue worship and that of the temple. The higher, the more important and efficacious is the sacrifice of the altar. There Christ, always abiding in the midst of His Church, in a special way manifests Himself. The bread becomes His body, wine becomes His blood. He veils His glory under sacramental forms, and the whole Church in heaven and earth, with angels and archangels, unites in jubilant worship. She presents Christ as her Head, and presents herself, in Christ, before Almighty God. It is the worship of the Church in the Church by the Church. It is an act performed, not in the domain of nature, but in that of Christ's mystical body. It is neither governed by any known physical laws, nor can it be sounded by human metaphysics. From first to last everything connected with the Blessed Sacrament and the holy sacrifice belongs to the spiritual order of the new creation. The Church and Altar by their consecration have become incorporated into it, and are covenanted meeting-places between God and man. The priests are spiritual officers set apart and empowered by the Holy Spirit for their work. The faithful are not mere ordinary natural beings, but are spiritually endowed persons and living stones of the spiritual temple. Christ's body and blood which are present are now in a glorified condition, and emancipated from that of His visible earthly state. By the words of Christ and the Holy Spirit the earthly elements are transmuted into the heavenly realities. By faith we spiritually partake, to our body and soul's health, of the spiritual food of the body and blood of Christ. By spiritual but real incorporation into Christ, the whole body of the faithful rises into the divine fellowship and progresses in its union with God.

It was not a copy of heathen rites or a survival of Jewish traditions that led the Church to make her sacrificial offering liturgical, choral, symbolical. Her illuminated vision had caught sight of the heavenly service and the Divine Spirit taught her to mould her liturgy after it. In the Gospels the Church was only in an inchoate and formative preparatory condition and our Lord said little about its worship. But when the Church had been formed and led out from Judaism, as of old Israel had been led out of Egypt, then as God took Moses up and showed him the things in heaven, which were to be the pattern of the tabernacle, so He took up S. John, and the glory of the worship, with its lights and incense and anthem and antiphonal choirs and musical instruments and priestly hierarchy and devout prostrations and song of the redeemed and prayers of saints and dazzling splendor of throne and circling rainbow and the shining sea, became a directory for the Church. She learnt from heaven itself how to worship God in spirit and in truth.

No churchman but would emphasize the supreme importance of the inward spirit to all that is outward. But it is well to remember two things: that the inward will not be elevated by stern repression of the outward, as Quakerism unwisely thought, and that no concessions to the world or sectarianism will ever win their members to the Church. True to her heavenly guidance, the Church must hold fast to her inherited faith and worship. To a general daily revival of the Eucharist, the victory of the Anglican Church will be given. But for it to avail, the offering of the inward and the outward must coalesce. There must be an enthusiastic revival of the spirit of entire consecration. Men and women must give themselves to God with the same devotion as men lay down their lives in battle for the sake of their country. They must become living sacrifices in union with that of Calvary and the Altar.


Project Canterbury