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LECTURE II.

ROMISH AND TRACTARIAN CLAIMS AND PRETENSIONS

"In vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.”—Matthew xv. 9.

Almost in every age of the world, the visible Church has had a twilight, of which the text seems to be the characteristic epitome. The Antediluvian Church apostatized from the sublime and spiritual truths of the primitive faith, and lapsed into all the darkness of the traditions of men. The Patriarchal Church passed through precisely the same process, and ultimately plunged into the same degeneracy. The Jewish Church, unwarned by the beacon-lights of the past, terminated at the advent of our Lord, in exactly the same condition; it being true, of the great mass of the visible community in that age, that they had lost all perception of those pure and spiritual truths, which alone elevate, sanctify, and renovate the Church that holds them, and had precipitated both priest and people into that miserable and wretched superstition, which overshadowed the whole land during the days of our Lord, and prevented Judah from seeing in him the Messiah. And it seems as if the same analogy were destined to be illustrated still, in a considerable section of the Protestant Church: thousands teaching, as the doctrines of the Articles, as the doctrines of the Liturgy, but above all, as the doctrines of Scripture, the traditions and commandments of men.

Last week I laid before you a succinct compendium of the leading principles of the Romish Church upon one hand, and the avowed and most characteristic tenets of the Tractarian party, or Romish followers and approximators, on the other hand. This evening I propose, in dependence on divine grace, to examine some of the assumptions and pretensions of the Romish Church and her Tractarian adherents, reserving for next week those which I may not be able to overtake and discuss to-night.

I. The first to which I would turn your attention, is the boasted splendour and beauty, which are put forward as the invariable characteristics of the Roman Catholic ritual. I have visited the most beautiful cathedrals throughout Belgium and Germany. I have gone at all hours, to listen to their sublime and gorgeous ritual; of which, I must confess, the Tractarian approximations are extremely miserable imitations; and I do feel, if it were not that I am painfully aware of the fearful principles that lurk beneath, I should be charmed, fascinated,

and arrested by the sublimity of their music, the impressiveness of their ritual, and the tout ensemble of a richly-decorated service.

If to fascinate the eye with the most exquisite paintings, if to charm the ear with the master strains that have emanated from the genius of the most illustrious composers, if to provide for the sinell the ascending incense, with its curling clouds,-if these be the main ends of a Church, the Church of Rome has attained those ends in an eminent degree. But, if the true end of a Church--if the great scope of all religion is, to raise men to the likeness of God, to make the creature feel and realise fellowship with the Creator, to render the lost and degraded the partakers of the divine nature, to enable men on earth "to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God," and in heaven to reap the rewards of grace, then I assert, and I am prepared to demonstrate, that the Romish Church, instead of answering these great and solemn ends, has done the very opposite. It has plunged into the grossest apostacy in principle, and produced the direst immorality in practice. In fact, the true description of the gorgeous splendour of the Romish Church is a very painful, but a very plain one. I have read of the homes of the Italian bandits, that out of the spoils of orphans and the plunder of widows, their beautiful palaces and halls have been erected; and we have all heard of the syrens' music, that charmed the unwary traveller to destruction. Both, I venture to assert, meet their most appropriate antitype in the ritual, the beauty, and attractiveness of the Romish Church. Her music is that of the syrens, that lures to ruin; her architectural beauty is that of the Italian bandit's hall, constructed out of the spoils of a dishonoured God, and degraded souls. Her whole structure presents precisely, in a moral view, a fac simile of the Egyptian temples of old there was the most imposing architecture without, but the gods within were the filthy creatures of the Nile, and the vegetable products of its mud.

After all, let me submit it to your just and reasonable perceptions does Christianity really stand in need of additional splendour to its ritual, or of material ornament to its lessons? I conceive, that there is something in the simple gospel so majestic, something so transcending all that pencil of the painter or pen of the poet can delineate, that it strikes me Christianity is adorned the most, when it is found to be adorned the least. Would you ever think of taking a few drops from a phial of otto of roses, in order to add to the perfume of the rose you had just gathered on a May morning, wet with the dews of heaven? If that splendid monument of human genius were here, the Apollo Belvidere, a statue of marble, unquestionably the product of the chisel of one of the most illustrious of ancient statuaries, would you applaud the taste of that man, who should propose that the mercer's, and the hatter's, and the shoemaker's shops should furnish ornaments, with which to deck it? Would you not say-there is something in the almost living lineaments of the form so noble, something in the contour and proportions of the marble so beautiful, that the richest clothing of man would deform, not dignify, dim, not augment ts pure and simple glories. So is it with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is so beautiful in itself, that all accessions of material

beauty serve but to conceal or mar it. The Rose of Sharon is so fragrant, and its tints so lovely, that it needs not the streams of the Isis, or the filthy waters of the Tiber, either to add to its perfume or to heighten its colours.

Let me lay bare the true cause of this rage for adding outward and material ornament to the gospel of Jesus. It is founded on a fact, confirmed and illustrated by almost universal experience throughout the history of the Church of Christ, that just in proportion as the spiritual glory of a Church departs, she begins to heap up and attach to herself material and worldly ornaments. When the beauty made up of " mercy and truth meeting together, righteousness and peace kissing each other," is extinguished on her altars, the painter, and the poet, and the musician are summoned to her aid, to present son. substitute for the lost and departed glory. And hence, in the Churc of Rome, (to use the language of Robert Hall, not more beautifu than just,) religion is like death, surrounded with the splendid trappings of the tomb. This is the true description of the Tractarian and the Romish ornaments, which are piled successively upon their ritual, their faith, and their worship, that having ceased to draw their beauty from above, having forgotten that "the king's daughter is glorious within"-not without, they feel constrained to ransack Aaron's wardrobe and the heathen Flamin's vestry, in order to add the trappings and the ornaments of an exploded ritual to that beautiful worship, the inscription on the length and breadth of which is "God is a spirit, and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth."

II. Another pretence, put forward on behalf of the Church of Rome, and also of those who follow in her wake, is, that there are many good men, the advocates and maintainers of the principles of both. Unquestionably, as I stated last week, there are; and it would indeed argue, that Satan had lapsed into an unusual blunder, instead of pursuing succesfully the subtle tactics by which he has always been characterised, if he were to put forward Popery merely by bad instruments, or to promote the principles of semi-Popery by men of questionable or blasted reputation. Satan always selects the choicest instruments, to accomplish his iniquitous designs. Reason and Scripture, however, make it not to be wondered at, that there have been many good men in the Church of Rome. There has been a Fenelon, signalised by the moral glory that reposed on his temper, and irradiated his walk; there has been a Martin Boos, distinguished even for the faithfulness with which he preached the everlasting gospel in the midst of Rome; nor can I omit the celebrated Pascal, whose writings may be perused with profit by the most spiritually minded Protestant. But it is to be observed, that these men were Christians, not in consequence of their creed, but in spite of their creed; that in the ratio of their faithfulness they were persecuted; and they are only standing proofs that there is a power and a penetrating glory in the truths of the gospel, which the overshadowing despotism of Rome has not been able entirely to annihilate, and which all the proscription of its councils has not succeeded in utterly extirpating.

This fact, that there are good men in the Church of Rome, is only one of those analogies, which characterise the whole marred and dismantled world of which we are members. There is not a height on the loftiest Appenine, on which there is not some blossom which the winter frosts have not nipped, some floweret which the hurricane has not blasted. There is no desert without an oasis. And so, there is not a Church or a communion under heaven, in the bosom of which there are not here and there some witnesses that God has not utterly forsaken it; thereby presenting the very ground on which Protestants can address hundreds in the Romish Church in the language of the Apocalypse-" Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues."

III. It has been alleged, that there are many truths in the Roman Catholic system. So, doubtless, there are. There are truths in Deism throughout all its shades; there are some truths even in Mahometanism; and it would be strange, if there were not here and there some unextinguished truths in the vast mass of doctrinal corruption, by which the Church of Rome is at this moment crushed. But then, I allege, that these truths are depressed, if not wholly subverted as to their practical effects, by the overflowing corruptions of heresy and error. Suppose that a tumbler of water were now placed in my hand, and suppose I let fall into it only six drops of pure, unadulterated prussic acid, and then requested you to drink the water. Your reply would instantly be, "No, I object to do so, it is poison." Suppose I were to answer, "There are ninety-nine parts of pure fountain water, and only one hundredth part of prussic acid mixed with it;" you would naturally say, "Yes, but the deleterious effects of the acid are so intense, that all the wholesome properties of the water are thereby neutralized." So it is in the Church of Rome. Suppose it proved, that there were ninety-nine parts pure and primitive Christianity in the Romish faith; the additional part, coming from man's corrupt heart, and concocted in man's depraved imagination, is so deleterious, that it makes void the everlasting gospel, and like the Galatian "other gospel" sends immortal souls to eternity with "a lie in their right hand."

IV. The next assumption of the Roman Catholic Church, put forward with great plausibility, and constantly on the lips of Roman Catholics, is, that they are the ancient Church, and that we Protestants are an upstart and modern sect. If by this statement it is meant that the principles of Popery are ancient, I do not for one moment dispute it. I believe that Popery, in its principles, is coeval with the fall of man; indeed, I believe, with Luther, that every man is born with a pope in his heart. Popery, in fact, is an indigenous plant; it luxuriates in the congenial soil of the corrupt heart; it needs no fostering, no paternal and nourishing care; it will bloom, and flourish, and spread, if just let alone. But truth is an exotic; it belongs to a lovelier, even a celestial clime; it needs to be ever watered by heaven's pure dews; it requires to be touched by the rays of heaven's unsetting sun; and it is only amid the tending and the care of a mother, the anxieties and

the watchfulness of a nurse, that Christianity is kept alive, and growing in the heart of a lapsed and God-estranged world.

Popery, I have said, is coeval in its principles with the fall. By way of illustrating this, I will make a statement, which I suspect will appear to you in the light of a paradox: it is, that Adam was a Papist before he became a Protestant. When Adam fled from communion with God, and tried to wrap himself in the fig-tree leaves to conceal his nakedness, and constitute a robe that would be a title to the lost favour of God; when he ran from the face of Heaven, and sought shelter amid the bowers, the parterres, and the yet undismantled arbours of Paradise; -the man, in that act, presented the perfect type of the Roman Catholic Church. Her safety is still in shelter from the searching eye of God; her raiment is in the "filthy rags of human righteousness, and of the merits of canonised saints. Her security lies in the secresy in which she can conceal herself from that God, who pronounces of all human righteousness, that it is "rags;" of all human wisdom, that it is folly; and of human life itself, in its best estate, that it is only vanity. But when the glorious Gospel sounded amid the ruins of Paradise, and Adam's heart drank in the soul-inspiring accents, "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head," and when Adam turned his face upon that very God from whom he had fled, and approached him with bended knee and broken heart, and called him "Father!" our great progenitor, in that act, he presented the bright type of the Protestant Church.

In the very next generation we see the same Popish principles brought into practical development; for the fact is, there are two successions that have never lost a link,—the succession of Papists or self-righteous sinners on the one hand, and the succession of Protestants or true believers on the other. Cain was, in principle, the first Roman Catholic priest; and Abel, in principle, was the first Protestant martyr. This will be seen, if you bear in mind the definition of the sacrifice of the Mass in the Church of Rome, that it is an unbloody sacrifice (that is, a sacrifice without shedding of blood), and after this, the definition of our sacrifice in the Protestant Church, that "without shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins." Now, when Cain was about to offer a sacrifice to God, he pursued some such course as this: he selected the loveliest flowers that bloomed in his garden; he gathered the most delicious fruit that grew upon its trees, not yet blighted by the fall; he brought that fruit and those flowers together, wove them into an amaranthine garland, laid it on the altar of his God, and then knelt and said, “O Lord! I devote these flowers and fruits to thee; thy smiles gave them all their beauty, thy breath gave them all their fragrance; I acknowledge thee, in this act, to be my Creator and my providing and protecting God." There he stopped: but when Abel was about to offer his sacrifice, his course was not the same. selected the loveliest, even the spotless lamb from the fold, he plunged the knife in the throat of that lamb, and shed its blood, and having laid it on the altar, he said, "O Lord, my God! with my brother Cain, I acknowledge that thou art my Creator; with my brother Cain, I acknowledge that thou art my preserver; but beyond him, and what he has fatally lost sight of, I acknowledge, O my God! that I am

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