Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing ChristiansRyle, J. C. (John Charles)
Religion
Practical Religion: Being Plain Papers on the Daily Duties, Experience, Dangers, and Privileges of Professing Christians
Ryle, J. C. (John Charles)
Christian life -- Anglican authors
To every reader into whose hands this paper may fall, I commend the
whole subject of it as deserving of serious and solemn consideration. I
am nothing better than a poor fallible man myself. But if I have made
up my mind on any point it is this,--that there is no truth which
demands such plain speaking as truth about the Lord's Supper.
* * * * *
NOTE
I ask the special attention of my readers to the following
extracts from the last Charge of the late Dr. Longley,
Archbishop of Canterbury.
The office held by the Archbishop, the remarkable gentleness
and mildness of his character, the fact that this Charge
contains his last sentiments, and that it was not made public
till after his death,--all this appears to me to invest these
extracts about the Lord's Supper with peculiar interest.
"It is far from my intention to impute to all those who have
taken the ill-advised step of adopting the Sacrificial
Vestments (in administering the Lord's Supper) any sympathy
with Roman error; but I am constrained to avow that there are
plain indications in some of the publications which have been
issued as manifestoes of the opinions of that section of our
Church, that some of its professed members, yea, even of her
ministers, think themselves at liberty to hold the doctrines of
the Church of Rome in relation to the Sacrifice of the Mass,
and yet retain their position within the pale of the Anglican
Church with the avowed purpose of eliminating from its
formularies every trace of the Reformation, as regards its
protest against Romish error. The language they hold with
respect to it is entirely incompatible with loyalty to the
Church to which they profess to belong. They call it 'a
Communion deeply tainted with Protestant heresy:' 'Our duty,'
they say, 'is the expulsion of the evil, not flight from it.'
It is no want of charity, therefore, to declare that they
remain with us in order that they may substitute the Mass for
the Communion; the obvious aim of our Reformers having been to
substitute the Communion for the Mass. Doubtless the Church of
England admits of considerable latitude in the views that may
be taken of that most mysterious of all mysteries, the
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. And so long as those solemn
words of its original institution, 'This is my Body,' 'This is
my Blood,' shall remain in the sentence of consecration (and
they never can be erased from it), so long will there be
varieties of interpretation of these words, all of which may be
consistent with a true allegiance to our Church, provided these
three conditions be observed:--
"1. That they be not construed to signify that the Natural Body
of Christ is present in the Sacrament:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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