SERMON XVII.

THE SACRIFICE OF THE MASS,

"A BLASPHEMOUS FABLE AND DANGEROUS DECEIT."

HEB., x. 10.

"We are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all."

It is evident, from what has been already said in the preceding Sermon, that the Church of Rome has dealt most wickedly with the Holy Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ; having perverted it from its great design as a commemorative ordinance of the passion of Christ, and made it a means of the grossest idolatry. Never were words more wantonly wrested from their plain, palpable meaning, than those in which Christ instituted the Sacrament; and never did bold impiety more presumptuously set at nought a Divine command, than has been done in the giving the Sacrament in one kind only. For Christ, who had merely said of the bread, "Take, eat, this is my body," as if with an

eye to what priestcraft would afterwards introduce, said of the cup, "drink ye all of it." The wine there deposited was the chosen emblem of His blood, and to His blood, that is to His death, we owe our redemption. He, therefore, urged upon every disciple a particular application of it, and with peculiar emphasis made the reception of the sacramental wine binding, without exception, upon all his followers. If then, either of the signs may be dispensed with, after the solemn direction to receive both, it cannot be the cup. So that the divines of Trent, by tearing asunder what Christ joined together, have done wicked violence to His holy ordinance; and, by their mutilation of the same, have so thoroughly deformed, if not destroyed it, that since the time when the decree of 1414 began to be acted on, neither have the priests truly given, nor the people truly received, the blessed Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

This sacrilegious act followed the imposture of transubstantiation: and transubstantiation was made a doctrine of the Church to augment the power of the Clergy! In an ignorant age he must have been thought a being of a very superior order, who could, by a few words, change a piece of bread into a living human body; nay, into the very Divine Person of the Son of God.* And this, we

* It is remarked by Archbishop Tillotson, that hocus pocus, as applied to the sleight-of-hand tricks of jugglers, is nothing but a corruption of the words "hoc est corpus," by means of which the priest of Rome speaks away the bread, and puts in its place the body of Christ.

know, tends very much, even now, to overawe the mind of the poor enslaved Papist into a superstitious veneration for the man, who can, as he thinks, first make his God, and then, by giving it to him to eat, or by withholding it from him, save or ruin his soul for ever.*

The doctrine of transubstantiation cannot be too strongly spoken against, for it is not only a most stupid profanation of an awfully sacred rite, but it makes every one who follows it an idolator. He may shelter himself under the plea that he believes the wafer to be God, and therefore worships it. But we know that it is not God, and therefore his act is idolatry. Even he, on his own principles, cannot be sure that he is not guilty of this sin. He admits that if the wafer were not God, it would be idolatry to worship it: and how does he know that it is? It all depends (as he is taught) upon the intention of his priest; without which there is no consecration, and, consequently, no change: and, as that must be a secret from him who communicates, he can never be certain that God is the object to whom he pays his devotions. But even if he could so far renounce his senses as to bring

* I have before spoken of Popery as "modified Paganism;" but in its doctrine of the Eucharist it goes beyond all that Paganism, in all its absurdity, ever taught. An old Roman moralist, speaking of the folly shewn by the heathens in the choice of their objects of divine worship, was led to exclaim, "Was any man ever so mad as to take that which he feeds upon for a God!"—(Cic. de Nat. Deo.) But that which was too gross for Pagan worship has been adopted by modern Rome?

himself always to believe that God was (as he says) "transferred" to the wafer, that would not free him from the charge of worshipping an idol. The heathen who bowed before an image, under an idea that the Great Power was in it, were not excused; nor were the Jews, as I have before shewn you; nor is he. If ever there was an idolator, he is one; and his idolatry is the most irrational that can be conceived. Like the ignorant worshipper of a piece of a tree, the other part of which he has burned in the fire, he takes a piece of bread, which he knows will moulder and decay, and that he calls his God, prostrates himself before it, and seeks from it the blessings that can come from God only! How truly may it be said of him as it was said of the other, whose folly the prophet sarcastically describes, "He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand."*

This is not the day when we may keep back the truth from a feeling of deference to the prejudices of others. A mistaken liberality led our shortsighted politicians of 1829 to join the advocates of expediency in removing those land-marks of the nation's faith, which had heretofore kept us glo

* A proof of the shameful imposition and the pitiable credulity connected with the worship of this great idol, is to be found in the feast of Corpus Christi, which, we are gravely told, owes its institution, by Pope Urban, in 1264, to the circumstance of a female having declared that she saw, in a vision, the moon with a flaw in it, which, being interpreted of the Church, was said to signify the want of a festival in honour of the Holy Sacrament.

riously distinguished from the enemies of God's church, and safe from the evils, which, when they were with us, they plotted against us. But ever since that day, when Protestant England, forsaking her high principles, took back to her bosom the Antichrist, whom she had cast out, the tone of our Protestantism has been lowered: conciliation, concession, and an adjustment of differences, have been continually urged as a reasonable consequence of the admission of Papists to equal civil privileges statesmen have not hesitated to insult the religion of their fathers by professing their ignorance of the great difference between the doctrines of the Reformed Church of England and those of Rome : and at length (who would have thought it?) we have arrived at such a reckless disregard of Protestant truth, that not satisfied with the grant to the College of Maynooth, we have gone on to give thousands of the public money to the annual endowment of the Popish faith in our foreign Colonies!* But Popery and Protestantism may not thus be blended together. They are as distinct and opposite as light and darkness; and if we would avoid a repe

* The charge on the Treasury of New South Wales for the support of religion in 1841, is estimated, in an official document, as follows:

This is one instance out of many; and what will England say

to it?