Thus, even such have received the priesthood, and its indelible impress, the _χαρακτὴρ_, (as it is theologically termed,) which cannot be destroyed in them by any act or will of theirs. Thus, their ministration at the altar (so long as it be according to the rule and order of the Church of England) is the offering a valid sacrifice, and their distribution of the consecrated elements is the giving to be “verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful, the Body and Blood of Christ.” However, therefore, we may mourn for them, however we may feel in addition to sorrow a godly shame on their account, yet we need not fear that the flock is deprived of the needful food, nor defrauded of the blessed intercession of the Lamb, pleading for His people at the right hand of God, as often as the oblation is made, and the dread and blessed sacrifice is (even thus) offered up. As to such themselves (our second anxious question) what shall we say? I will say nothing of my own mind or thought, but rather adduce a weighty passage which I have found upon the matter in the work of the learned Dr. Hickes, whom I have mentioned more than once, as having so largely treated on our present subject. Even in his day, more than a hundred-and-fifty years ago, these deniers of the grace given them, were not unknown; and he thus speaks of them, going, you will observe, not so much as I have done here, into the question of the effect of their misbelief upon their ministrations to their flocks, but more particularly into its effect upon themselves. “I desire,” he says, “your late writer,” (the author whom, in his dissertation, he was answering,) “and such others as he, who have been led into their errors by these and other writers since the Reformation,” (Cudworth he means more particularly, and the novel theory propounded by him,) “to consider that, if the Holy Eucharist be a sacrifice, as the Catholic Church believed in all ages before that time, how far the defect of administering it only as a sacrament may affect the holy office and the administration of it; and whether the Communion administered by a priest, who neither believes himself to be such, nor the Sacrament to be an oblation or sacrifice, can be a Communion in or with the Catholic Church? I say, I leave it to themselves to consider these things, and I think they deserve their consideration, and hope they will seriously and impartially ruminate upon them, lest they should not ‘rightly and duly administer that Holy Sacrament.’ The best of the Jewish writers tells us” (i.e. Maimonides), “that it was a profanation of a sacrifice, if the priest thought, when he offered up one sacrifice, that it was another; as if, when he offered a burnt-offering, he thought it was a peace-offering; or if, when he offered a peace-offering, he thought it was a burnt-offering. Whether that obliquity of thought, when it happened, had such an effect or no, I