I return more generally to the declaration of the text, “We have an altar;” and I will adduce one further illustration of the mind of the Church of England hereon, by a reference to the foreign Reformation. Take the two systems of Luther and Calvin, and what do we find? Luther was already a priest before he began the Reformation, and he had no design to cast off the priestly element and character in his Reformation. He and other priests who joined him did not cease to administer Sacraments, or to teach their efficacy. The Confession of Augsburgh, which embodies the principles of the German Reformation, asserts regeneration in baptism, private confession to a priest, the grace of absolution, and the real presence in the Holy Eucharist. It also fully recognises (as with this teaching we should expect it would) the priesthood in its true meaning. Luther did not design or promulgate a change of system in any of these doctrines. What he did declare, under the exigencies of his position, because no bishop joined him, was, that for the purposes of continuing the priesthood and its powers, no episcopacy was necessary, but that priests could make priests; as Mr. Carter observes, a perfectly new doctrine in the Church of God. But the whole proceeding shewed that a sacramental system was maintained after the pattern of the Church, nay, with true priests to administer it for a time, but without the only ordained means of transmitting the same powers to the succeeding generation. Now how great a testimony is this to the true doctrine, and how much light does it throw upon the acts of our own reformers at home, who, with a true episcopate and the power of succession unimpaired, were not likely to design a less perfect system than the German Reformer admitted and maintained in his theory, though he failed in the appointed means validly to carry it out. And Luther’s testimony is all the more weighty when we remember that he was one who had so little reverence for antiquity or authority, that at one time he rejected and denied the inspiration of the Epistle of St. James, because he could not make its teaching as to good works square with his own theory of justification; and, at another time, absolutely exhorted the elect to sin boldly and shamelessly that they might be fit objects for the mercy of God, and because no sin which they could commit could frustrate the grace of God toward them! and yet even such a man wholly received and enforced the ancient doctrine of the priesthood, and its accompaniments, the altar and the sacrifice.