We hear a great deal in modern times of the mass. The Church of England calls the holy sacrament “the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion.” But some faithless sons of hers call it “the mass,” and some amiable men are so enamoured of visible unity that they actually memorialize the Archbishop for a recognized toleration of all the paraphernalia of what the Reformers used to call “massing priests.” Now let us clearly understand what is the real point of the controversy respecting the mass. It is associated in people’s minds with the Eastward position, and with candles, with incense, with chasubles and tunicles, with thurifers, acolytes, and priests, &c., &c., &c. But it was not for such things as these that our martyrs died. They are all bad enough, but in themselves they were not worth dying for. They died for a truth, and the great truth for which they died was the complete, final, everlasting sufficiency of the one Divine Sacrifice for sin. It was this that put the Church of Rome and the Church of England into direct and irreconcilable antagonism. It was not till the year A.D. 1562 that Rome drew up her decrees on this subject, so that in this instance England was first. Our Reformers were well acquainted with all that was being taught by Rome, and so drew up the noble and uncompromising words of article xxxi. in the year A.D. 1552:—“The offering of Christ _once_ made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin but that _alone_. Wherefore the sacrifices of masses, in the which, it was commonly said, that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits.” Well spoken words were those, burning words from glowing hearts. Those men knew the value of a finished, complete, all-sufficient, and final propitiation by the Son of God, and their trumpets gave no uncertain sound as they swept to the winds the man-made fiction of a propitiatory sacrifice in the mass. And it was in direct opposition to these noble words that Rome decreed, “If any man shall say that the sacrifice of the mass is not propitiatory, and ought not to be offered for the living and the dead, for sins, punishments, satisfaction, and other necessities, let him be anathema;” (Sep. xxii.–3), and thereby taught that there was a necessity for some further propitiatory sacrifice; and that the remission of sin is not granted, as England had declared it was, through the one complete, final, and all-sufficient propitiation and that alone; but that for the remission of sins and punishments there is required a continuation of sacrifice in the mass.