Cross on which the Great Sacrifice was offered up as the Christians' altar, yet the Apostles could not have spoken of eating of the cross. The Christian feast is at the Eucharist."

Putting these things together, it is obligatory upon us to explain this "altar" as the Tрánea Kupíov, the Table of the Lord-unless we find in other parts of the sacred volume some overwhelming considerations against such a way of taking it.

But, on the contrary, we find considerations which would lead us to adopt such an interpretation. First, it is remarkable that the ancient Prophets in speaking of the worship of the times of the Messiah, always describe that worship by sacrificial images. I do not here allude so much to Malachi i. 11, (" in every place incense shall be offered unto My name, and a pure Mincha,") though writers as old as Justin Martyr and Irenæus have interpreted this place of the Eucharist, and writers as anti-Romanist as Mede have upheld the same view. I rather allude to the places which I quote in a succeeding chapter of this book, from Jeremiah xxxiii. 15-22; and Malachi iii. 3, 4.

If there be any prophecies of Messianic times, these are such; and yet in them the pure worship of the future is described under sacrificial terms. There is the Eternal Priest-King of the house of David, and there are the "Priest-Levites" under Him, which are also by the same covenant" 'never to fail," and who are to "offer burnt offerings, and to kindle meat-offerings, and to do sacrifice continually."

Again: Isaiah Ivi. is preceded and succeeded by chapters urdoubtedly containing visions of Messianic times, and in it we have a prophecy of the sons of the stranger being brought to God's holy mountain, and made joyful in His house of prayer-their burntofferings and their sacrifices accepted on God's altar.”

Similarly, in the latter chapters of Ezekiel (ch. xlvi. xlvii.), the details of sacrificial worship are in close connection with imagery which denotes the wide-spread healing influence of the Gospel. So again, the last part of Zechariah seems to project the details of sacrificial worship into the times of the New Covenant. (See also Isaiah xix. 21; lx. 7.)

It seems to me impossible to suppose that this sacrificial imagery can be interpreted of verbal offerings of prayer and praise, because these were common to the Mosaic and the Christian dispensations alike. The pious Jew brought his prayers and praises as well as his lambs and goats (1 Sam. i. 12, 13: 1 Kings viii. 15-62

2 Kings xix. 14, 15, 16; Isa. xxxviii. 20). It must look to the celebration under the new and better state of things of some public ecclesiastical rites, or rather rite, resembling the old sacrifice in its impetratory or pleading character, and in its close relation to the One true Sacrifice.

Again, I would add to the above another consideration which, though it would prove little by itself, yet in connection with what I have just adduced seems very significant of the will of God, and this is that the Psalms seem to be written for Christians rather than for Jews. They were claimed by Christian Apostles as the inheritance of the Church, and were used in public worship in Apostolic times (1 Cor. xiv. 26), and yet this Book is full of sacrificial allusions with reference to the service of God. ("I will offer in His dwelling an oblation with great gladness," Ps. xxvii. 7; "That I may go unto the altar of God," xliii. 4; also, Ps. xx. 3, xxii. 29, xxvi. 6, 7, 8, li. 19, lxvi. 13, cxvi. 13, 14, cxxxii. 8, 9, 16, cxxxv. 19, 20.)

Again, if the Sermon on the Mount be intended for the guidance of Christians-and all Christians derive from it the use of the Lord's Prayer-then we have the altar assumed to be the perpetual centre of Divine worship. (Matt. v. 23.)

2. But, in the second place, we have in the one strictly prophetical Book of the New Testament a glimpse of heaven and its worship (Rev. viii. 3, 4, 5), and there we find an altar, not of burnt-offering, but of incense; and the incense which was burnt on this altar ascending upwards in connection with the prayers of the saints, and so not, of course, identical with those prayers.

An altar, then, is assumed to be the centre of the ritual of heaven.

Now, the same reasoning which would make it wrong for us to call the Table of the Lord an altar would militate against the inspiration of the Book which assumes that there can be such a thing as an altar in heaven. If the altar in heaven was rightly so called, because incense was offered on it with the prayers of the saints, must we not call that an altar on which we exhibit and set forth, under His own appointed forms, the Sacrifice of the Death of Christ?

The elements in the Eucharist have, on the lowest view, a far closer relation to the thing signified than incense can possibly have: why, then, should we give the name of altar to the thing in heaven, and resolutely deny the same to the corresponding thing ou earth?

P

No matter how figurative the heavenly vision be, unlawful images would not be used, even in a figurative scene.

Now, though each of the foregoing considerations by itself would perhaps be insufficient, yet taken together they show that it is in accordance with the mind of the Spirit to apply sacrificial terms to some rite of the New Testament; provided of course that Christ has instituted a rite to which sacrificial terms can be applied in some heavenly and spiritual sense, i.e., in some sense answering to the heavenly and spiritual nature of the dispensation.

But let the reader particularly remember that I am not adducing these considerations to prove that there is such a rite, or that it must be sacrificial, but to show that certain sacrificial terms which seem to be applied to the great rite of the Church are really applied to it, and that there is no reason for us, in the one case (Heb. xiii. 10) to go out of our way to get rid of the application of the terms in question to the Eucharist, and in another case (Luke xxii. 19) to deny their sacrificial meaning.

It is, then, obligatory upon us to understand the words, "we have an altar," as the Church till Puritan times has understood the assertion, in fact, as such a Puritan even as Richard Baxter has understood them, for he says, "The ancient Christians used them all [the names Sacrifice, Altar, and Priest] without exception from any Christian that ever I heard of. As the bread is justly called Christ's Body, as signifying it, so the action described was of old called a Sacrifice, as representing and commemorating it. And it is no more improper than calling our bodies, and our alms, and our prayers, sacrifices. And the naming of the table an altar, as related to the representative sacrifice, is no more improper than the other. 'We have an altar whereof they have no right to eat' (Heb. xiii. 10) seems plainly to mean the Sacramental Communion."-RICHARD BAXTER'S "Christian Institutes," i. p. 304.

With these considerations in our minds let us approach the consideration of the words of institution, Τοῦτο ποιεῖτε εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν áváμvno. The early Church undoubtedly held these words to be the institution of a sacrificial act; and the modern popular religion of the day denies this. Now, inasmuch as there is beyond all doubt no sacrifice in the Eucharist resembling, in the least degree, in outward form, either the ancient Jewish sacrifices or the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross-for there is no death in the Eucharist, nor any destruction, as by fire, of the thing sacrificed-inasmuch, I say, as there is no immolation or mactation of any kind, let us see

whether we can find any way of bringing to a point, as it were, the spiritual resemblance between the Old Law sacrifices and the Eucharist; and, by contrast, the essential difference between the ancient and modern view.

I believe that the difference will be found to be this. The ancients understood that the Lord here instituted a solemn memorial rite in which His death could most effectually be pleaded BEFORE GOD-the modern view makes Him to institute a memorial before men only, or amongst ourselves.

Now the former view-the old-though it makes the memorialising before God to be the great purpose of Christ in saying, “ Do this εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν,” does not exclude the fact that we are to show forth His death before the Church; whilst the latter view-that Christ instituted a memorial before men or amongst ourselves—can only be maintained by excluding altogether from the vision of faith the former, viz., that the Holy Communion is an ἀνάμνησις ἔναντι τοῦ Θεοῦ. It must necessarily be so, because the view of a solemn pleading memorial before God is, in the nature of things, so immeasurably greater than any exhibition before men, that, if held at all, it must be held as beyond all calculation the leading feature of the rite-the rite, I mean, considered as a memorial or ȧváμvnois. The reader, if he chooses, may see a remarkable proof of this by referring to so well-known a book as D'Oyley and Mant's Commentary (on Luke xxii. 19, and 1 Corinth. xi. 24). There he will see lengthened expositions of the words of the Redeemer, not by Nonconformists, but by leading Latitudinarian Bishops and Divines of the last century, such as Tillotson, Stanhope, Atterbury, Tomline, in which there is not the smallest reference to any view of the Blessed Sacrament as a memorial before God. And yet this view of the Blessed Sacrament as a memorial before God is evidently the most worthy of the Death of the Son of God, and is most in accord with the atoning virtue of that death, for the Death of Christ is the one only Death which we are empowered to plead before God. We may make an act of mere remembrance of the death of any man who may have died for our welfare, but we can plead before God in our act of remembrance only the One Atoning Death.

To interpret, then, "Do this in remembrance of Me" as "Celebrate this rite as the most solemn pleading of My death before God," seems to recognise the Death of the Son of God to be what it really is, not an act of mere love and endurance only, which any man

might have performed, but as the one act of atoning love which is was only in the power of the God-Man to perform.

The essence, then, of the sacrificial view is that Christ ordained a solemn memorial before God of His atoning Death.

Do the terms in which He instituted this Sacrament accord with this?

They are unquestionably the terms which He would have used if He had desired to make the most solemn memorial possible before His Father. Whether He spake these words in the vernacular Aramaic or in the Greek we know not. All that we know is that the Holy Spirit has not preserved to us His words in Aramaic, but has preserved them to us in the Greek.

We are, then, to take the words of Christ as if said in Greek, and not in that classical Greek which the Holy Spirit did not choose to honour as the vehicle of the ideas and thoughts of the Saviour and His followers; but in that Greek of the Alexandrian translation of the Old Scriptures which the Holy Spirit caused the inspired writers to quote so often in preference to the original Hebrew of the Jewish Scriptures.

The Saviour uses two words, ποιεῖτε and ἀνάμνησις, each of which is undoubtedly used in a certain technical sense in connection with the sacrifices and oblations. Now I think that in this investigation the stress has been most unhappily laid upon the word ToleÎTE, whereas the stress ought to have been laid upon àvάuvnois, or upon the two used in connection.

Пoleiv is unquestionably used in a technical Sacrificial sense. The first instance which I will give may be taken as an example of all similar ones (Exod. x. 25): Καὶ εἶπε Μωυσῆς, ̓Αλλὰ καὶ σὺ δώσεις ἡμῖν ὁλοκαυτώματα καὶ θυσίας, ἃ ποιήσομεν Κυρίῳ τῷ Θεῷ ἡμῶν. (Other instances quite as technical are, Exod. xxix. 36, 39, 41; Levit. ix. 7, 22, xiv. 30, xv. 30, xvi. 24, xvii. 4, xxii. 23, xxiii. 12, 19, &c.)

The Saviour, then, in using this word, employs the term which He would have done if He had intended His Sacrament to be regarded as a solemn religious act of a sacrificial character; but the word is used continually in contexts where there can be no sacrificial allusion, and where it is used in the most ordinary sense of the word "do" (see, for instance, Matt. v. 46, 47, vi. 1, vii. 21; John xiii. 27).

Very different is the use of the word àváμvnois. It is used (not in connection with the Eucharist) only once in the New Testament, in Heb x. 3, where reference is made to the remembrance of sins: