high priest entereth into the holy place year by year with blood not his own; else must He often have suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once (ẵπağ) at the end of the ages hath He been manifested to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And inasmuch as

it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this cometh judgment; so Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for Him, unto salvation."

x. 10-14: "By which will we have been sanctified, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (ἐφάπαξ). And every priest indeed standeth day by day ministering, and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices, the which can never take away sins: but He, when He had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever,1 sat down on the right hand of God; from henceforth expecting till His enemies be made the footstool of His feet. For by one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified."

These passages are absolutely conclusive as to the perfection of the sacrifice once offered on Calvary. The language of the Article is entirely covered by them, and exception to this first clause in it could hardly be taken by any well-instructed theologian. But if so much is admitted, an important consequence follows, for the words are entirely destructive of any notion that in the Eucharist there can be any sacrifice suppletory or additional to the sacrifice made once for all" on the Cross. They prove, therefore, that (to borrow the words of a most careful theologian) "the Eucharistic sacrifice, even in its highest aspect, must be put in one line (if we may so say), not with what Christ did once for all on the

1 On the punctuation of these words, see Bp. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 314.

Cross, but with what He is continually doing in heaven; that as present naturally in heaven and sacramentally in the Holy Eucharist, the Lamb of God exhibits Himself to the Father and pleads the Atonement as once finished in act, but ever living in operation; that in neither case. does He repeat it or add to it." 1

But since the Article is not concerned with the statement of the true doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice, which has been called "commemorative, impetrative, applicative," the subject need not be further considered here. We may therefore pass at once to the second part of the Article.

II. The Condemnation of "the Sacrifices of Masses."

The sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said (vulgo dicebatur) that the Priests did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits (blasphema figmenta sunt, et perniciosa importunæ).

Public attention has been recently directed to this statement, and an altogether unreasonable amount of importance has been attached to it in connection with controversies on the validity of Anglican Orders. A desperate attempt has been made in some quarters to represent it as a denial of the Eucharistic sacrifice, whereas the terms in which it is drawn ought to have made it clear to every reader that this could never have been its object. Had it been the intention of its compilers broadly to deny this doctrine, nothing would have been easier than for them to use words which would have conveyed their meaning without any ambiguity.

1 Bright's Ancient Collects, p. 144, note.

2 Archbp. Bramhall, Works (Anglo-Catholic Library), vol. i. p. 54.

"the

As a matter of fact, however, it is not even sacrifice of the Mass" which is condemned, but the sacrifices of Masses (missarum sacrificia), and in connection with them a current theory (" in which it was commonly said," quibus vulgo dicebatur) rather than a formal statement of doctrine.

What those who are responsible for the Article had before them was the whole system of private Masses, and the "opinion" which gave such disastrous encouragement to them (besides being the fruitful parent of other superstitions), that "Christ satisfied by His Passion for original sin, and instituted the Mass, in which might be made an oblation for daily sins, both mortal and venial." 1 Whether this dreadful perversion of the truth was ever authoritatively taught or seriously maintained by theologians of repute is not the question, though it has been attributed to more than one.2 The words just cited from the Confession of Augsburg are fair evidence that the error was sufficiently widely spread to demand notice; and it alone will account for the emphasis

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1 "Accessit opinio quæ auxit privatas missas in infinitum, videlicet quod Christus sua passione satisfecerit pro peccato originis, et instituerit missam, in qua fieret oblatio pro quotidianis delictis, mortalibus et venialibus."-Conf. August. Pars II. art. iii. De missa. Sylloge Confessionum, p. 139.

2 E.g. a Spanish theologian, Vasquez (1551-1604), attributes it to Catharinus, one of the Tridentine divines; and, as is pointed out on p. 149, the error is contained in a series of sermons attributed to Albertus Magnus. It has been replied that Catharinus has been misrepresented (see the Tablet for 1895, referred to in the Church Quarterly Review, vol. xlii. p. 41); and it now appears that the sermons De S. Eucharistiæ Sacramento are not the work of Albertus Magnus (see the references as above, and Vacant, Histoire de la Conception du Sacrifice de la Messe, p. 40). The authorship, however, of the sermons matters little. There they are; and nothing could be plainer than their language on the subject, as quoted on p. 149. It conveys proof positive that the error was taught; and that is sufficient.

Cf. Gardiner's language, which can only have been called out by existing false teaching: "For when men add unto the Mass an opinion

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which is laid twice over1 in the Articles on the fact that the death of Christ is the perfect satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual. The Tridentine decrees upholding private Masses, and laying down that the sacrifice of the Mass is "truly propitiatory (vere propitiatorium) both for the living and the dead," were certainly not present to the minds of

of satisfaction or of a new redemption, then do they put it to another use than it was ordained for."-Dixon, vol. iii. p. 264; and cf. Latimer's Sermons, pp. 72, 73 (Parker Soc.); and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiast., De Hares. c. 10: "Quapropter alia conquirunt sacrificia, quibus perpurgari possint, et ad hanc rem missas exhibent in quibus sacrificium Deo Patri credunt oblatum esse.

1 Cf. Article II.

"

2 Conc. Trident. Sess. xxii. cap. ii.: On these decrees see Mozley, Lectures and other Theological Papers, p. 216: "The popular belief of later times exaggerated the Eucharistic sacrifice till it became, to all intents and purposes, a real one, and 'the priest offered up Christ on the altar for quick and dead, to have remission of pain and guilt'; that is to say, offered Him up as a Victim in a sense which could not be dis tinguished from that in which He was offered up by Himself on the Cross. It is true that the decree of the Council of Trent just saves itself by cautious, not to say dissembling language, from the extreme and monstrous conclusion that the sacrifice of the Mass is the same with that upon the Cross. It distinguishes between a bloody and an unbloody oblation; and it states that the fruits or consequences of the bloody oblation or the sacrifice on the Cross are 'received through the unbloody one' (oblationis cruenta fructus per hanc incruentam percipiuntur); but at the same time it asserts that the sacrifice of the Mass is a really propitiatory sacrifice-vere propitiatorium. Now undoubtedly there are two senses in which an act may be said to be propitiatory. The act of Christ's sacrifice on the Cross had an original propitiatory power; that is to say, it was the cause of any other act, or any act of man, or any rite being propitiatory, that is, appeasing God's anger, and reconciling Him to the agent. We may allow that in common language a man may do something which will reconcile God to Him, and restore him to God's favour; but then all the power that any action of man can have for this end is a derived power, derived from Christ's sacrifice, from which any other sacrifice, the Eucharistic one included, borrows its virtue, and without which it would be wholly null and void. There is, then, an original propitiation and a borrowed propitiation, a first propitiation and a secondary one. Why then did the Fathers of Trent, when they had

those who formulated the Article, for they were not in existence, as the subject was only considered at Trent in the autumn of 1562, nearly ten years later. And it has been recently pointed out that these decrees are "the beginning, not the end, of a discussion which has been going on ever since," for "it is remarkable how little attempt there is in the Middle Ages to formulate the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Eucharist, and how little theological interest is spent upon it." It was the popular teaching alone which the Reformers had before them; and no one who knows anything of the history of the Reformation can doubt that the gravest abuses were connected with the whole system of private Masses, and that its "practical outcome . . . was to intensify the belief that Christ's once perfected oblation had to be reiterated and supplemented." The system had fallen, swept away by the Acts for the suppression of Chantries passed in 1545 and 1547. It only remained to guard against any revival of the erroneous teaching on which it largely rested, and this was effectually done by the promulgation of the Article which has now been considered.

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all human language at their command, deliberately choose to call the sacrifice of the Mass vere propitiatorium? They may have said that it was vere propitiatorium in the secondary sense; but no one can fail to see the misleading effect of such language, and that nothing could have been easier to the divines of Trent, had they chosen, than to draw a far more clear distinction than they did between the sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrifice on the Cross. It is evident that, as ecclesiastical statesmen, they were afraid of interfering with the broad popular established view of the Mass, while, as theologians, they just contrived to secure themselves from the responsibility of a monstrous dogmatic statement."

1 F. E. Brightman in Church Historical Society Lectures, Series i. pp. 193, 194.

2 Church Quarterly Review, vol. xlii. p. 45. The whole discussion of this Article in the Review (pp. 38–49) is well worth consulting. See also B. J. Kidd's Later Medieval Doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.