12 JUNE 1875, Page 16

BOOKS.

MR. MAcCOLL ON SACERDOTALISAL*

WE do not profess to have read every page of this substantial volume. Indeed, the subjects discussed in it, though all of them, of course, closely allied, are so far miscellaneous and irregu- larly arranged, that the reader who does not happen to be deeply- interested in all the questions discussed in it, is encouraged, if not exactly invited, to select from its contents those subjects in which he feels the deepest interest. We have, however, read Mr. Mac- Coll's criticism on the Purchas judgment, not so much from any great interest in the subject discussed, as from a sincere curiosity to. understand the grounds of the exceeding indignation with which that judgment was received by the High-Church party. And this curiosity has been amply satisfied. Mr. MacColl has certainly made out what reads to us like a crushing case against the law of the Purchas judgment. Of course, there may be replies to his argu- ment of which we, who do not pretend for a moment to have- studied the subject for ourselves, know nothing. But assuming that Mr. MacColl has fairly represented the grounds assigned in that judgment for its decisions, and assuming also, as we have no doubt we may assume, that he has been accurate in, the citation of his authorities on the other side, we shouldi say that he has made out a triumphant case in favour of the- obvious and common-place interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric, which authorises all the ornaments sanctioned in the first Prayer-book of Edward VI., and that he has stopped up all the loopholes by which the authors of the judgment in the Purchas case sought to escape from that obvious and common-place inter- pretation. We are not going into the details of the question, an& we confess, for our own parts, that we exceedingly regret the fact that there is so strong a legal case in favour of the sacramental vestments. If anything would pull down the National Church, it would be the habitual adoption of anything like gaudy ' func- tion ' in the Church. Still the legal question and the ques- tion of policy have nothing to do with each other. It is the merest fair-play to the High-Church party to recognise what their rights are under the existing law first ; and then, if it be- desirable, we must alter that law, making the best compromise we can with them, or even, if it be necessary, overruling them. But it is one thing to carry a new law over their heads, and quite- another to strain the law adversely to them. And it is this last hardship which, as it appears, not merely to us, but to lawyers so entirely independent of ties with the High-Church party as Lord Coleridge and Lord Justice James—(who is, we suppose, the authority misdescribed by Mr. MacColl as "Mr. Justice James ")—has actually happened in the interpretation given by- the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the Purchas judgment to the Ornaments Rubric of the Prayer book. -Unless Mr. MacColl has either omitted very important elements of the question indeed, or has strangely distorted those that he has given us, he has certainly shown beyond the possibility of doubt that the Ritualistic party had in the undefended Purchas suit the scantest possible justice done to it. Mr. MacColl has apparently gone through the history of the Ornaments Rubric with great care, and he seems to us,—though the conclusion is quite against our own bias in the matter,—to have shown that at all the various epochs in Edward's, Elizabeth's, and the later reigns, including that of Charles II., when the Rubrics were re- considered and modified, it was understood by both parties, " Lawlessness, Saeerdotalion, and Ritualism, discussed in Six Lettens, addressed, br his Perntission, to the Right Hon. Lord Selborue. By Malcolm 11, cr?oll, M.A. London: J. T. Hayes.

—both the Church party and the Puritan party,—that the ornaments of Edward VI.'s first Prayer-book were adopted as the legal ornaments of the Church of England, not in the sense that all of them were always imposed as compulsory, but that all of them were regarded as legal and as the ideal ornaments of the Church,—this being, of course, to the Puritans, a serious grievance, against which they remonstrated in vain. We should be very sorry to see all these vestments again in common use; for besides the tendency to pettiness which this kind of ceremonial engenders, it would, we are sure, be the signal for a great lay secession from the National Church. But before we can reform the law, we must know what the law is which needs reform ; and the Ritualists themselves would, we are sure, feel much less aggrieved by a law carried over their heads than by a refusal to recognise that for the present, in their recourse to chasubles, albs, and copes, they have the law on their side.

For the rest, the chief interest in Mr. MacColl's book is, for us, its able and often eloquent discussion of the principles of Sacerdotalism and Ritualism, and of the sanction which, as he affirms, is given by the teaching of Christ to these principles. And to this point we shall confine the remainder of our criticism. As far as we understand Mr. MacColl, he takes up two, not perhaps inconsistent, but certainly very different, grounds in relation to Sacerdotalism, and does not clearly show us on which ground he really rests most. He first apologises for it on mystical and historical, and not on what may be called politic and utilitarian grounds. He writes thus :— " It is remarkable that the immediate occasion of the appointment of the Aaronic priesthood seems to have been the public acknowledgment of unworthiness made by the general congregation. During the patri- archal period the head of the family was also its priest; and even when the Law was delivered to the Israelites from Mount Sinai there was no regular priesthood to stand between God and His people. They were all regarded as a nation of priests until their own sense of unworthiness caused them to shrink back aghast from the awful privilege. The cir- cumstance is related by Moses as follows :=And it came to pass when ye heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness (for the mountain did burn with fire), that ye came near unto me, even all the heads of your tribes, and your elders ; and ye said, Behold, the Lord Our God hath shown us His glory and Flis greatness, and we have heard His voice out of the midst of the fire; we have seen this day that God cloth talk with man, and he liveth. Now, therefore, why should we (lie? for this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, then we shall die. For who is there of all flesh that bath heard the voice of the living God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have, and lived ? Go thou near, and hear all that the Lord our God shall say : and speak thou unto us all that the Lord our God shall speak unto thee ; and we will hear it and do it. And the Lord heard the voice of your words' when ye spake unto me ; and the Lord said unto me. I have board the voice of the words of this people, which they have spoken unto thee : they have well said all that they have spoken.' Accordingly Aaron and his sons were consecrated to the office of the prieathood soon after this incident, and they became the appointed mediators between Jehovah anal the general congregation. Still the people were not suffered to rest in this as a final and un- changeable arrangement. Their true ideal was always kept before them. They were reminded that, in spite of the Aaronic priesthood, they still continued ideally 'a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.' They were unworthy now to realise that high ideal; but they were not to lose sight of it, and to keep them in perpetual remembrance of it there were several rites of a sacerdotal character, such as the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb, in which the people at large were allowed to participate. So much as to the teaching of the Old Testament on the subject of Sacer- dotalism. Where is the evidence that it was our Lord's special aim to sweep away and render impossible' such teaching? On the contrary, if we are to believe the Gospel narrative, He ordained a certain order of men to occupy in the Christian Church a position and to fulfil functions analogous to those of the Aaronic priesthood. Once be- fore his death, and once after, He charged them with the following com- mission--'As My Father bath sent Me, even so send I you. And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoover sins ye remit they are remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye retain they are retained.'" Now we must remark on this that, considering the state of criticism on the Pentateuch, it would take a great deal more evidence than we have, to show that the ordinances in relation to the Aaronic priesthood were really revealed in any sense beyond this,—that they dated from the legislation of Moses, and probably represented his own deliberate belief as to what was then most expedient and desir- able. But even granting the divine revelation of these ordinances, it seems to us a strange thing that Mr. AlacColl should not see how strongly his own admissions tell against the hypo- thesis that the same sacerdotal functions were taken up and per-'i petuated under the brighter light of Christ's personal revelation of God. If the object even of the Judaic system was to remind the ; people of the true ideal,—namely, that they were not to be depend- ent on an order or a caste, but to communicate directly with God, what is more improbable than that the great day and crisis of the revelation should come without causing a further and greater step to be taken towards this ideal ? What was the revelation of God in Christ intended to do, if not to remove the fear which made the Israelites shrink from being their own priests? What can be a greater paradox than to maintain that with the great revealing act of the divine purpose, there came no new acknowledgment of the aim and object of all this rudimentary discipline, no comple- tion of the half-marred purpose of the revelation on Sinai, no ful- filling of the divine thought which, according to Mr. MacColl himself, was reserved behind these concessions to sinful and superstitious fears ? And then, as to his historical argument for the reinstitution of a separate order of priests by Christ, surely if the words quoted are sufficient to prove such an institution, the Roman Catholics have at least as reasonable a defence for their posi- tion that St. Peter was the official and divinely endowed head of the- whole Church. What can be less satisfactory than our Lord's words taken as an authority for setting apart a separate order of men? The words Mr. MacColl quotes were not said to all the eleven Apostles, but only to ten of them, so that Thomas did not receive the sacerdotal unction, if this ordination were needful for con- ferring it. As far as we can see, it was addressed to these ten Apostles not at all as a distinct order of men, but as representing the whole company of the Disciples or Church. As to the other occasion mentioned by Mr. MacColl, it is, we suppose, the one on which the Roman Catholics found their belief in the primacy of Peter ; and as far as regards the power then promised. there is no evidence that any but Peter was in- cluded in the words which promised it. Now is this the sort of historical evidence on which an institution of so technical a character as a priesthood could be sustained ? Clearly Mr. MacColl will need a vast deal of tradition or a great deal of un- certain inference from other passages in Scripture to make out that a special commission given to all the Apostles, and to all whom the Apostles might ordain for this purpose, and to none others, was created by the act of Christ with which these words. were associated. There is nothing of the care and the explicitness needed for the definition of a peculiar and exclusive institution, especially one apparently so inconsistent with the genius of Christ's teaching as this. The story of the ordination of the Aaronic priest-- hood in the Pentateuch is careful and explicit to the last degree, A& compared with vague words of this kind. If the salvation of mil- lions of souls is to depend on the due ordination of the man who pronounces the words of absolution,—as Mr. MacColl, we sup- pose, believes,—nothing can be more surprising than the complete vagueness in the original marking-out of the class which is to. have that power. You are leaving salvation a matter of mere haphazard, if you leave it to depend on so ill-defined a patent of right as this.

When Mr. MacColl goes to his secondary or political ground for a priesthood, we can enter into his position better ; but then on this lower ground,—the ground of expediency and constitu- tional order,—it is impossible to attach the same importance which he evidently attaches to the institution. It may be quite true, as he puts it, that, as a Chancellor of the Exchequer produces a budget by virtue of his office, and probably even a better budget by virtue of his office, than a very much abler financier who did not hold that office could produce, so a man who has been trained and properly inducted into the office of a priest or bishop may be better fitted for his duties, even though quite inferior as a man, than any outsider who had not passed through that training and discipline would be for the same duties. We may express that, if we please, by saying that there is a special grace given to every office filled by a man who asks God's grace to discharge its duties well,—a special grace for the soldier and the sailor, for the lower and higher officers of the Army and Navy, for the shopkeeper, the manufacturer, the landlord, the labourer, the literary man, the editor, and every other functionary of life. But when you have said this, you have not said that the special grace is dependent on certain accurately appointed external rites, without which it would not be received. It is quite certain that, according to the story in the Acts of the conversion of Cornelius, the gift of the Holy Ghost was received before the Gentiles had been even baptised by St. Peter, and without any "laying-on of bandit.' Unless you eke out the New Testament with a great deal of tradition indeed, you can get nothing like the doctrine of a special order of men created by particular external rites, and who, with- out those rites, would not have the appropriate grace. Those who contend for such a theory must base it on something much more explicit than the expediency of a certain external order of procedure, and the award of a particular grace to all who show faithfully their obedience to the laws of God's Providence. It is not contended, for instance, that an agricultural labourer or a literary man must go through a given ceremonial, besides learning Iris business, before he can earn the grace proper to an agricultural labourer or a man of letters. Mr. MacColl would admit this at -once ; but, he would say, no external rite has been prescribed by God for these functions, and one has been so prescribed for the priesthood. Very well; but this makes the whole question turn on the evidence that God has demanded these external acts of obedience in this particular case. Now our contention is that this evidence is in the highest degree, even on the showing of the sacerdotal party, ambiguous and vague. They can produce one or two sayings of our Lord's, one addressed to an individual apostle, the other to ten apostles,—neither saying containing .any clear definition of the limitation or extent of the power con- ferred,—on their aide, while there are one or two passages of -quite equal force which may be quoted against them. Then there is, as we think, the whole genius of the Gospel against them, and in favour of them nothing but the Judaic traditions which were undoubtedly carried on into the primitive Church, and which, as we believe, originated the sacerdotal customs of that Church. Surely for such claims as the High Churchmen make on behalf of the priesthood, they should have much more to show than this. When they insist on explicit obedience to a mere external rite as the condition sine guii non of divine help, they should be able to produce the explicit proof that that rite is really of divine origin, and that its meaning, limit, and all its conditions were accurately revealed by God. In the absence of such proof, we cannot believe that the privileges arrogated by the Ritualists to the priesthood, and without which the external conditions of sacra- mental grace would be wanting, can ever be regarded by clear- sighted men as anything more than the dreams of a caste who have been misled by the forms of an earlier, and ruder, and poorer faith.