From the Catechism let us turn to the Communion Service. And here we are met at the outset by Dr. Pusey’s remarkable admission, that the only passage teaching the doctrine is the language of thankful dedication in the prayer that follows the reception: ‘We, Thy humble servants, entirely desire Thy Fatherly goodness mercifully to accept this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.’ No person who understands the difference between propitiation and thanksgiving can fail to see at a glance that there is no reference in this passage to propitiatory sacrifice. The next sentence is: ‘Here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto Thee.’ ‘Ourselves, our souls and bodies,’ what are they to make a propitiation for sin? Nothing can be plainer than that the prayer is intended to be the language of the thankful heart surrendering itself as a thank-offering to God. If the language admitted of the smallest doubt, that doubt would be removed by the position assigned to it in the Communion Service of 1552. In that of 1549 it stood with certain additions before the administration of the sacramental elements, but the human mind is so prone to misunderstand the simplest documents, that our Reformers, to avoid all possibility of mistake, first removed from the prayer any expressions which they thought could be misunderstood, and then placed it after, instead of before, the reception of the elements. Thus they secured that there should be no room for doubt that the sacrifice referred to is the surrender of self, and the motive for that surrender, not the desire for forgiveness, but the deep gratitude of a thankful heart, when sin has been blotted out through a finished atonement, and the appropriation of that atonement has been sealed to the soul by the sacred emblems of His body and blood.