The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

III. SCRIPTURE PROOFS OF THE DOCTRINE.

In this Tract I shall continue to give you some of the Scripture proofs of the doctrine of the Mass; and in doing so, I shall at the same time more clearly explain what that doctrine is. This method, however, seems to call for some preliminary remarks, lest I should appear to be using the Bible as the Protestant uses it.

The Protestant professes to derive his belief from Scripture alone. He makes two assumptions: first, that holy Scripture was intended to teach him his religion; and secondly, that, as a matter of fact, he is so taught. The Catholic, on the contrary, declares that the Church, and not the Bible, is the appointed teacher; and that, as a matter of fact, no one is taught by his Bible, but that if a person is not taught by the Church, he learns his religion from teachers of some other kind. And certainly as respects the first assumption, that the Bible is the intended teacher of mankind, one would have thought it sufficient to remind people of the fact: 1. That it never itself professes to be such a teacher. 2. That it never has been such a teacher. The Jews were not left to the study of their sacred books; they were bound to hear and obey their Church: the world was evangelised by preachers, not by "Scripture-readers," or by each man reading the Bible for himself. The Bible was written in a language understood by a very small proportion of mankind, and was not even collected into a volume till a large part of the world had embraced the faith; written, and therefore, from the nature of the case, inaccessible to the multitude for hundreds of years, till printing was invented, and then only to those who were able to read. 3. That Protestants themselves

practically do not, and cannot, use it as a teacher. There is not a single subject they may name on which the Bible provides them with a continuous line of plain instruction, such as they can put into the hands of those whom they wish to teach the Christian religion; they cannot take the Bible as it stands; they have to break it up into bits, to bring a piece from this quarter and a piece from that; they have to make a selection of texts; they cannot trust the Bible to be its own interpreter; they add their own notes and comments; and, in short, are obliged themselves to be the teachers, instead of letting the Bible speak for itself.

The second assumption is therefore palpably untrue. No one really learns his religion from the Bible: as a matter of fact, he is taught it by his parents or other instructors, and by the ministers of the persuasion to which they belong; or if he be left without religious instruction properly so called, he picks up such religious notions as he possesses from the people amongst whom he lives. Even supposing him to remain ignorant of any thing like religion until his intellectual faculties are matured, still whenever he takes up any religious belief, he does not gather it from the Bible; on the contrary, whenever he goes to the Bible, he does so with a mind biassed and preoccupied in favour of certain opinions, and with a prejudice against others. Neither is he left alone to study the Bible for himself, by the sole help of God's Holy Spirit, when once he has access to it; which, nevertheless, is what every good Protestant declares to be the only divinely ordained method of learning the truth. No; he hears sermons, he talks with friends, he reads religious books; and if he does not study any regular commentary, that is, notes upon and explanations of holy Scripture, it is quite plain that as he learnt his religion from man in the first instance, so the agency and the influence of man have very considerably to do with the religious opinions which he continues to hold, and the interpretation which he puts upon the Bible. As a matter of fact, then, the theory of Protestants does not hold good. The Bible is not the foundation of their religious belief. The Bible is not their teacher. No Protestant goes to the

Bible as to that which is to reveal to him something of which he knew nothing before: he goes in order to confirm or to test by it what he already believes. His belief is derived, both in its first and in its last resort, not from the Bible, not from the Word of God, but from some other source which he considers, at least, to be merely human.

The Catholic theory alone is really consistent with itself, with reason, and with facts. It cannot be denied that mankind derive their religious ideas from society-from parents, and teachers, and rulers, and the social community at large. This is one of the laws of our nature, or rather of the God who is the author of our nature, and of the laws by which it is governed. This being so, God never left men to themselves; from the first He instituted a society with rulers and teachers, whose office it should be to instruct men in the truth, to educate them in the truth, to bias and prejudice their minds in favour of the truth. This society is the Church: it is a divine society; so that whoever is taught by this society is taught, not by man, but by God. The Church is the authorised teacher of religion, and to this end is divinely withheld from falling into error or from teaching any thing but the truth. The Bible is an inspired book, or rather a collection of inspired books, and all that is contained therein is therefore infallibly true; but it was not designed to teach men the truth. The Church is their teacher; and they who have received in faith the doctrine of the Church, and are thoroughly grounded therein, find what they have been taught by the Church, the divine society, most wonderfully confirmed in the Bible, the divine book. The Protestant may find individual texts which, taken alone, seem to justify the views afloat in his own sect or in the world about him; but the whole Bible, in all its parts, perfectly harmonises and corresponds only with the teaching of the Catholic Church.

We have had a specimen of this in the doctrine of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Certain expressions used by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Hebrews, torn from their context and wrested from their meaning by the violence of private interpretation, seemed to be opposed to this doctrine; whereas when read in connexion with the general

argument of the Epistle, and in the light of the Church's teaching, they were found, though directed immediately to another end, plainly to imply that doctrine, and to receive their full meaning only by supposing its truth. The result was the same in the case of the prophecies quoted in my first Number. Protestantism was found unable to supply any one consistent interpretation which covered them all. It says this for one text or part of a text, and that for an other: it cannot give any one doctrine which fits every text and every part of a text. This I shall continue to shew you by a general comparison of one passage of Scripture with another.

We have seen that from the beginning sacrifice was the principal and the essential act of divine worship. Neither do we find it any where written in Scripture that sacrifice was to cease; on the contrary, we find it expressly stated that it was to continue as long as the world should endure. Not Jews only, but Gentiles were to have "priests and Levites" and "the altar of the Lord" among them;* and though Jewish sacrifices, sacrifices of bulls and goats, were to be done away, yet in their stead was to be offered continually a "clean oblation," not in one nation only, but "in every place among the Gentiles." We have seen also that Christ, the Son of David, was to be "a priest according to the order of Melchisedech," and that He was to remain such "for ever," that is to say, in perpetuity. His priesthood was not to pass from Him; He was to continue to act as our priest until He appeared in His glory at the end of the world. He was to act by and through the priests of His Church, who are not His successors, but His ministers and agents. Thus it is true that Christ is our only priest, and as true also that the priests of the Church are really priests. So again it is true that there is but one sacrifice and one oblation, and as true also that every Mass that is said is a real sacrifice and a real oblation; because the sacrifice once offered on the Cross is continued in an unbloody manner on the altar.

Thus even the bloody sacrifices of the law were typical, not only of the sacrifice of the Cross, but also of the sacri* See Tract No. 24, p. 14.

fice of the altar. For, as we have seen, these bloody sacrifices were to be succeeded by other sacrifices, which were to be offered "continually," whereas the sacrifice of the Cross was offered only once. Again, the sacrifices of the law, except when offered as holocausts, were partly eaten by the priests and people; but Christ, who, besides being our Holocaust, is also our Sin-offering, our Peace-offering, and our Thank-offering, did not give His flesh to be our food when He hung upon the cross. They were typical, therefore, of something further, that is to say, of the sacrifice of the Mass, in which Christ is "eaten," as well as offered, after a heavenly manner. Hereby the sacrifices of the law are fulfilled perfectly and in every particular. The Victim is the same on the altar as on the cross; the substance of the sacrifice is the same; the only difference being the manner in which it is offered.

But this manner also is the subject of prophecy. Christ was to be "a priest according to the order of Melchisedech," not of Aaron. Aaron was indeed a type of Christ, as was also Melchisedech; but in his office of priest Christ was to resemble, not Aaron, but Melchisedech. Aaron's sacrifice,

as also Melchisedech's, was a type of Christ's; but they differed in this, that the one offered bulls and goats, and the other bread and wine. It may be said, however, that on the occasion on which we read of Melchisedech in Scripture, we do not find it stated that he offered sacrifice. I answer, we do not indeed find the word sacrifice, but it does not therefore follow that we do not find the thing. Remember what I said just now: the interpretation of holy Scripture is a very different thing from text-quoting. The Catholic Church does the former; Protestantism attempts only the latter. Let us see, then, what meaning the passage in question (Gen. xiv. 18-24) naturally bears. Without entering into any learned disquisitions unsuited to these pages, I may say, 1. that though the word sacrifice is not used, the term here rendered "bringing forth bread and wine" is that which is used in other places with reference to sacrifice. 2. That the original shews that Melchisedech is called "the priest of the most high God" in connexion with his bringing forth bread and wine, and not with what follows of his