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In as far as there are differences of opinion among the ministers of the Church on the subject of the sacraments, some among them must be in misapprehension of the doctrine which they ought to hold and teach. There must have been a failure somewhere to get the true sense of the Prayer Book, or of the Articles, or of both.

Such a supposition implies that there is a true sense, to which all are bound, and which all must be presumed honestly to desire to get, and hold, if they can; if not, to be ready to obey the convictions of their conscience, and abandon a post for which they are not competent, It is strange and mournful that this should not be at once and universally admitted. But it is not. ` Men justly in high esteem for intellect and piety, have been found who could somehow satisfy themselves with the persuasion that a sacred formulary of worship, of Christian instruction, or of religious profession, might have two senses, a larger and a narrower, a higher and a lower, a stricter and a looser, a (so-called) Catholic, and a (so-called) Protestant.

The obvious the necessary rejoinder to such an assertion is, that for any purpose, human or divine, a Liturgy, a Catechism, or an Article, that has two senses, may as well have two hundred, or none at all. It is no standard of truth, no statement of truth, no recognition of truth, no fit offering to Him who is THE Truth, nor from those who are required to "worship," as "in spirit," so also "in truth." It cannot be that we go before our GOD with an equivocation upon our lips, or teach our little ones a phrase of double-meaning to ensnare their

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that we agree at the altar or the font, in the pulpit, or when we take the solemn vow that admits us to the pulpit, in sounds and syllables, while our hearts and understandings disavow the hollow concord!

It has been said, that as prayers are not intellectual exercises, their precise signification is of less importance! that as articles are subscribed as terms of peace, any sense which the language can with any degree of plausibility be compelled to bear, may be accepted for the purpose!

These things were said a hundred years ago, by those who sought a domicile for the Arian heresy in the Church of England;* and (strangely enough!) in a succeeding generation, by those who strove, in a latitudinarian age,† to hinder Socinianism, avowed and covert, without and within the Church, from breaking down the barrier which subscription to the Prayer Book and Articles placed between its votaries and the establishment. But the impudent assailants and the weak defenders alike disgraced their respective interests, by resort to the worst subterfuge that has ever stained the corrupt and odious system of Jesuit morality. Their doctrine of diverse senses is Probabilism, in a slightly altered form and application. It is the claim of a license to use language in any sense which it is convenient to give it, for which any warrant can be obtained that it ever has been given, in any circumstances, by any one. It is the annihilation of

* See Waterland, case of Arian Subscription considered. Works, Vol. II.

+ Dr. Wm. Samuel Powell, defence of the Subscriptions required in the Church of England. Discourses &c. ed. Hughes. Disc. II.

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the distinction between truth and falsehood in utterance between man and man, and between sincerity and hypocrisy in man's approaches to his Maker.

I will detain you with no attempt at a refutation of this hypothesis of a double sense, my brethren. It is enough to have stated it, and to have called your attention to its true character.

What, then, is the sense of the Prayer Book, Catechism and Articles, in which they exhibit "the doctrine of this Church?"

It has been formally maintained, (and a confused no'tion of the kind seems to be not uncommon) that it is that sense in which they are generally understood the currently received meaning of the day.

The difficulty in presenting objections to this view, consists mainly in their number and variety. It is utterly untenable. By whom must the meaning be currently received? Not by all: because if all agreed in it, there could be no occasion for inquiry; and that is presupposed. By the learned, it has been said. But who shall determine the limits of that class? who collect its suffrages? who report its decision? And suppose a general agreement of a class, or of all men, in this age; shall that conclude the next? and shut out all further doubt, all room for reconsideration? In one respect it were well it did for most certainly the interpretation given such writings as those in question by general suffrage, would be increasingly erroneous from age to age. In proportion as a document is open to all, and all claim interest in its meaning and interpretation, there is danger of its

being gradually lowered in the current acceptation. This is the tendency of all language. It loses sharpness, clearness, depth in time. It is like a gem cut in facets exposed to long friction, by which with its change of form and bulk, it also loses polish and translucence. The language of the many is always less clear and significant than that of the cultivated few. The same words convey different notions to the intellectual thinker, and to the uneducated man of the world. A formulary of faith, therefore, can never be safely interpreted by the generally prevalent notion of its meaning. In proportion to its age, its language will have lost precision and significance; and the more general its use, the more that process will have been accelerated. It must be tested by an unchanging, not a fluctuating standard, an adequate, not an incompetent criterion: it is not the acquired sense that will serve our purpose; we want that which is fixed and full.

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Most of these reasons apply in refutation of another opinion that the sense of our formularies,—of any formularies to which assent is required as a test of beliefis the sense put upon them by the imposer.

Who is the imposer? The immediate agent the — examiner, ordainer, ordinary or judge? Then each such agent may have his own sense, and there may be as many varieties of sense as there are individual imposers. And those varieties continually shifting; and certain to deteriorate for the reasons already given.

If not the immediate agent, the Church collective must be the imposer. But is it the Church of this age only,

or of all ages back to the date of the formularies themselves? In either case, who is to collect, and who to report; the voices that make up the collective sense? The question becomes again-What is the sense of the Church and so resolves itself into the original inquiry. We sought to learn that sense from the formularies: and, to settle doubts about their meaning, we are referred back to the thing of which we were in search.

These two views are untenable. The sense of the generality is indeterminable; and worthless if it were not, unless the spirit of the age, in its determination to make the majority omnipotent, has also invested it with infallibility! The sense of the imposer is uncertain; unless the Church be the imposer; and then, is the very thing in question.

A third remains. There is a sense, fixed in proportion as it is carefully, full as it is successfully, ascertained; the sense of the compiler, or composer; the original, historical sense, that which was in the mind of those who first made and used the formularies, and which they meant that they should always have.

Our Liturgy, Catechism and Articles, have all been most deliberately prepared at the time of their first compilation, and most carefully revised at several periods since, both in the mother Church and in our own. Their deliberate preparation insures us that they had originally a well determined sense: their repeated revision, that that sense has been retained wherever its expression has not been modified. What Cranmer and Ridley meant, when they offered our forms of prayer, is

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