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I have been struck with this in the biographies of some of the most distinguished of our modern divines. Look to the terms in which they express the ground of their everlasting hopes. Although, from previously knowing the character of their minds, you of course conceive thoughts of a higher order associated with those terms, and although at times there may be coruscations of brilliant sentiment emitted, that indicate the undying light within, yet substantially they are the very same in which "poor Joseph" expressed the ground of his: "It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; and why not Joseph?" What dying sinner can say more? I mean not that the minds are equal-that were folly; but that, as the greatest and the least stand on the same ground of condemnation, they must stand also on the same ground of acceptance: so that he who has traversed the whole round of theological learning, has explored its depths, and scaled its heights, has argued with metaphysical acumen, and illustrated with matchless eloquence all its points, has read and has written volumes upon volumes, when he comes to the test of a dying hour, is shut up to all the simplicity of the "faithful saying." This is what he needs, equally with the least; and this is what the least, equally with him, enjoys. And the perfectly child-like submissiveness with which master-minds in Israel have avouched their reliance on the most rudimental elements of the truth, is among the marks of its divinity. It shows that, in the one point of need, in which all are alike, and which, in all cases equally, the Gospel is intended to meet, the adaptation of means to the end is perfect.

It is a fact not less extraordinary, and not less pregnant with evidence of the divine origin of the Gospel, that it never yet has had any one, in the hour of dissolution, repenting of having trusted to it. I call attention to the fact. The Gospel is the only system of which this can be affirmed; and the fact is without exception. I am in the full recollection, when I say so, of the many believers who have passed through the valley of the shadow of death in mental depression and gloom, and whose fears have encompassed them even to the last. But these are not exceptions to the fact; they are confirmations of it. For whence has the gloom of these believers arisen? What has drawn the cloud over their souls? What has engendered their fears? Has it been any question, starting up within them, of the solidity of the Gospel foundation of hope? Any doubt of its being trustworthy? Any conviction, or even any suspicion, forced upon them, in this testing-time of human confidences, of its being, after all, not rock, as they had fancied, but sand-a delusion-a "refuge of lies?" The very reverse. Their doubts have not been about it, but about themselves. The question has not been about the security of the foundation, but about the fact of their having built upon it; not about the sufficiency of Christ, but about the reality of their interest in him; not about the soundness of the hope, but about their scriptural warrant to entertain it. That is a very

different matter. So far from repenting in the end their having trusted to the Gospel, their bitter regrets and their heart-sinking fears are all about the reality of their trust. Their hearts misgive them, whether under the morbid operation of physical causes, or obscurity in their views of truth, when they think of their past profession. They fear that they may have been self-deceived, fancying themselves Christ's, when they were "none of his." But regrets, lamentations, anxieties, and fears, springing from such sources, bear testimony, not against the Gospel, but for it. I ask for an instance of any individual, in perfect possession of his mental powers, unaffected by any morbid hallucinations, and in the full prospect of death, expressing regret for the folly, or repentance for the sin of having believed and followed Christ; disowning the foundation on which he has rested through life, as now seen in the searching light of its closing hour, to be false and unstable.

Infidelity, and every system of human framing, have had their thousands who have renounced them at death. How comes it that the Gospel has had none? If it were itself human, how should it have this extraordinary distinction from all else that is human? Many are the schemes with which men have made shift to live, but which have misgiven them when they have come to die. The last enemy is a ruthless inquisitor. Many a time has he shown what a power he possesses of detecting to the mind the sophistries by which it had flattered itself in error, and of exposing to the conscience the flimsiness of its favourite refuges. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, there is often a revealing light, which compels the sinner to see what he had been shutting his eyes against before, and awakens him to a late and appalling sense of his infatuation. How comes it, then, that to no one mind has death, in the hour of his dread inquisition, ever made the discovery of the insufficiency and delusiveness of the Gospel? How comes it that of this foundation the hollowness, the unsoundness, the sandy instability, has never been exposed, and he who has trusted to it been convinced too late of his folly? Is there not something extraordinary in this-that of all systems this should be the only one that has stood the scrutiny of death, and the test of anticipated judgment? Let the infidel account for it. To me it appears as the seal of the God of heaven to his own truth; evincing its divine adaptation to all our nature's consciousnesses, and to all our nature's exigencies, and peculiarly in the hour of that nature's extremity. It proves itself, in this unvarying experience, to have proceeded from Him who "knoweth what is in man."

"Had I ten thousand gifts beside,
I'd cleave to Jesus crucified,

And build on him alone;

For no foundation is there given,

On which I'd place my hopes of heaven,
But Christ the corner-stone."

WEEKLY OBSERVANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER.
By Rev. A. C. Wright, Melbourn.

THE Command, "This do in remem-
brance of me," (Luke xxii. 19,) does
not of itself fix the frequency with
which the Lord's Supper is to be admi-
nistered, but it certainly implies that
more information either had been given
or would be given to those who were
about to found the Christian church;
otherwise, with the strong Jewish pre-
judices of the disciples, they could not
have thought of anything else but a
Christian passover, to be observed
annually. A few Judaizers in the
early church did actually take this
view of the ordinance of the Supper.
Yet if anything can be proved to have
been universal among the Gentile
churches in the second century, it is,
certainly, the weekly celebration of the
Lord's Supper on the Lord's day. Acts
xx. 7, is a clear indication of this cus-
tom. In Pliny's Letter to Trajan,
(A. D. 103 or 104,) the apostates, whom
he gives an account of, "affirmed that
[when they were Christians] the whole
of their guilt or error was, that they
met on a stated day, before it was light,
and addressed themselves in a form of
prayer to Christ, as to some God; . .
after which it was their custom to
separate, and then to re-assemble to eat
in common a harmless meal.” * The late
Dr. Neander regarded the earliest cus-
tom of the churches to be that of
having two services; that in the morn-
ing open to strangers-that in the
evening for the Lord's Supper, to which
only the members were admitted.
Afterwards, on the same occasion of
meeting, those who were not members
were admitted to the previous service,
* Coleman's Christian Antiquities, p. 18.

but dismissed before the Lord's Supper was administered. But he maintains that "the celebration of the Lord's Supper was still held to constitute an essential part of divine worship on every Sunday."*

Now, how can such uniformity in practice be accounted for,-connected as it is with so much diversity in other respects,-save on the hypothesis that weekly communion was universally appointed by the apostles in the churches which they planted, and that they did this by the direction of their Divine Lord? There would appear to have been no limitation to a Sunday observance of this ordinance understood by the first churches to exist; but however much more frequently they may have felt themselves warranted in celebrating the Lord's Supper, they seem all to have reckoned it the most fixed and settled part of service for the Lord's day. The general custom, at present, of the English Congregational churches, is without any foundation in the New Testament; and it is both unhealthful for the churches and injurious to the world. It is unhealthful for churches, for they are reminded, by any public act, of their being not of this world, only once in four or five weeks, instead of every week: and it is injurious to the world, for, the Lord's Supper excepted, the unconverted appear to join with us in everything else, and are thereby led to forget the unspeakable difference between being in a state of nature and being in a state of grace. Upon the present plan, we confess Christ publicly only once a month, in

Neander's Church History, vol. i., p. 452. (Torrey's Translation.)

any way in which the saints can be visibly distinguished from mere "hearers of the word." If we loved Christ and loved his people as we ought to do, should we ward off all appeal made to us on this subject, by demanding an express command, requiring us to meet our Lord and his disciples at his table weekly? As we are looking forward to a world in which we hope to be for

ever alone with Christ and his saintsall others being excluded-would it not be well to have a weekly test of our preparation for this state, in the feelings with which we can engage in a service which, of all others, is most fitted to fix our thoughts on our Lord's cross and his coming, and in which there is ever presented to us a type of that separation which will take place when the Royal and Divine Pastor will divide Adam's race, "as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats?"

That I may show to those who have not thought on this subject that I am not singular in maintaining these views, I give the substance of Mr. Orme's argument for the weekly observance of the Lord's Supper, gathered from the tenth chapter of his work, entitled, "The Ordinance of the Lord's Supper Illustrated:"

The Lord's Supper is one of the most distinguished privileges which Christians enjoy in this world; it brings them peculiarly near to their dying Lord "in the fellowship of his sufferings," and it tends more than any other religious service to unite and endear the followers of Jesus to one another.

It is very generally taken for granted that we are left completely at liberty in regard to the frequency with which this ordinance should be celebrated. Yet it is no question whether we should be baptized once or many times; whether we should meet together once a week or once a month; whether we

should have Christian instruction and worship on the Lord's day statedly or irregularly. On these topics there is no great diversity of opinion among professing Christians; and yet it would, perhaps, be difficult to point out the superiority of the evidence by which their regular recurrence is established, to that which brings the same conclusion respecting the Lord's Supper.

It is worth the reader's consideration

whether it is probable that on this point the Scriptures would be entirely silent, or leave it wholly undetermined. But supposing that our immortal King has left the frequency of our observing this

commemoration to our honour, or rather as the test of our love, do we requite his confidence and kindness by trying to excuse ourselves from a more frethan is generally paid? Is this what quent attention to his dying command he is entitled to expect from the purchased subjects of his kingdom? Is this our generous return for the treathas fixed weekly, we comply with; but ment we have experienced? What he what he has left to our feelings and honour, it is enough to do monthly

But is the Lord's Supper on a different footing from the other stated public institutions of Christianity? From the New Testament alone, there is the same evidence for the weekly observance of day of rest, or any other of the stated the Lord's Supper as for that of the ordinances of the Gospel.

"The word translated as often as in from authorizing a latitudinarian dis1 Cor. xi. 26," says Dr. Smith, "so far

cretion in men to fix the time at their own pleasure, does, in reality, determine the precise reverse. The very meaning of the word refers to some well known, acknowledged, and established rule of frequency, which can be no other than the rule above stated, viz., of weekly communion."

In Acts xx. 7, we are informed, that at Troas, "upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached to them." Here the day of the observance is distinctly specified. The phraseology conveys the idea of a standing practice or habit. Paul did not call them together, as he did the elders of the church at Ephesus. He was hastening on to

Jerusalem, and yet he did not convene an extraordinary meeting of the church, which he might have done, but waited patiently till the day of their regular meeting. One grand object of their meeting, if not the principal object, was to observe the Lord's Supper: they were assembled to break bread. Whatever else they did, this was not omitted. | The practice of the church at Corinth appears to have been the same as that of Troas in this respect. "When ye come together therefore into one place," says Paul (1 Cor. xi. 20), "this is not to eat the Lord's Supper." This is said by way of reproof; but it clearly indicates that it ought to have been to eat the Lord's Supper that they came together into one place. His argument shows that he is not referring to some particular instance, but to their habitual conduct in their church assemblies. If it can be proved that they came together into one place regularly on the Lord's day, it is also proved that they as regularly ought to have met together to eat the Lord's Supper.

If from the Scriptures we attend to the testimony of the most primitive antiquity, and proceed along the stream of ecclesiastical history, on no topic can a more complete chain of proof be had as to what was the original practice of the Christian churches, and continued to be the practice of all churches, till

the abomination which maketh desolate destroyed this with everything valuable in Christianity.

The testimony of the most distinguished Christian writers of the first four centuries clearly shows that weekly communion was the universal practice of the churches till towards the close of the fourth century.

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Church, as provision is there made for the celebration of the Lord's Supper, every Lord's day, in all the cathedral churches. The most distinguished men among the Nonconformists and Dissenters have maintained the same views. Dr. Owen, Mr. Baxter, Mr. Charnock, Dr. Watts, Dr. Doddridge, &c., all agree on this point. All church historians who refer to the Lord's Supper, together with a multitude of critics and theological writers, might be enumerated on the same side. In reply to all this evidence, it is objected that we are not in so good a frame of mind as that in which the first Christians habitually lived; and that frequency diminishes solemnity. In respect to these objections, they would be of equal force against prayer, praise, meditation on God's word, and all communion with God whatever; and if it were otherwise, they can be of no weight against the clear indication of the mind of Christ, as seen in the practice universally established by his inspired apostles in every church which they planted.

From a more recent writer, the late Dr. Richard Winter Hamilton, I add the following extract, confirmatory of the preceding views. It is taken from his tract on the Sabbath:*

Specially should this day be given to the Commemoration Feast. It was of old called the Day of Bread.† Unworthy is our regard to it, low is our state of devotion, if its weekly repetition could pall. It is unimaginable that the early churches ever assembled and this was not the act of their highest transport; that Christian strangers, when they

home feast and endeared banquet; that martyrs ever took their last embrace of each other without being fortified by the holy signs. They died in a profession of which they were not ashamed. Amidst the gorgeous but monotonous ceremonies of a Paganized Christianity, we behold the foremost rank which the Lord's Supper held in primitive times.

The testimony of the most distin-met, found not in this their familiar guished of the Reformers is decidedly in favour of the practice. Calvin says, "Every week, at least, the table of the Lord should be spread for Christian assemblies; and the promises declared, by which, in partaking of it, we might be spiritually fed." The Lutheran churches, to this day, have a communion every Sunday and holiday throughout the year. The sentiments of Cranmer were precisely the saine, in which he must have been supported by the other founders of the English | gines Ecclesiastica.

"The Christian Sabbath considered

in its Various Aspects," &c., p. 385.

"Dies panis." See Bingham's Ori

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