Book 4, Chapter 18 (3)

XIII. That no wrangler may take occasion to oppose us from the terms sacrifice and priest, I will briefly state what I have meant by these terms all through this argument. Some extend the word sacrifice to all religions ceremonies and actions; but for this I see no reason. We know that, by the constant usage of the Scripture, the word sacrifice is applied to what the Greeks call sometimes θυσια, sometimes προσφορα, and sometimes τελετη, which, taken generally, comprehends whatever is offered to God. Wherefore it is necessary for us to make a distinction, but such a distinction as may be consistent with the sacrifices of the Mosaic law; under the shadows of which the Lord designed to represent to his people all the truth of spiritual sacrifices. Though there were various kinds of them, yet they may all be referred to two classes. For either they were oblations made for sin in a way of satisfaction, by which guilt was expiated before God, or they were symbols of Divine worship and attestations of devotion. This second class comprehended three kinds of sacrifices: some were offered in a way of supplication, to implore the favour of God; some in a way of thanksgiving, to testify the gratitude of the mind for benefits received; and some as simple expressions of piety, to renew the confirmation of the covenant: to this class belonged burnt-offerings and drink-offerings, first-fruits and peace-offerings. Therefore let us also divide sacrifices into two kinds, and for the sake of distinction call one the sacrifice of worship and piety, because it consists in the veneration and service of God, which he demands and receives from believers; or it may be called, if you prefer it, the sacrifice of thanksgiving; for it is presented to God by none but persons who, loaded with his immense benefits, devote themselves and all their actions to him in return. The other may be called the sacrifice of propitiation or expiation. A sacrifice of expiation is that which is offered to appease the wrath of God, to satisfy his justice, and thereby to purify and cleanse from sins, that the sinner, delivered from the defilement of iniquity, and restored to the purity of righteousness, may be re-admitted to the favour of God. This was the designation, under the law, of those victims which were offered for the expiation of sins; not that they were sufficient to effect the restoration of the favour of God, or the obliteration of iniquity, but because they prefigured that true sacrifice which at length was actually accomplished by Christ alone; by him alone, because it could be made by no other; and once for all, because the virtue and efficacy of that one sacrifice is eternal; as Christ himself declared, when he said, “It is finished;”[1346] that is to say, whatever was necessary to reconcile us to the Father, and to obtain remission of sins, righteousness, and salvation, was all effected and completed by that one oblation of himself, which was so perfect as to leave no room for any other sacrifice afterwards.

XIV. Wherefore, I conclude, that it is a most criminal insult, and intolerable blasphemy, both against Christ himself, and against the sacrifice which he completed on our behalf by his death upon the cross, for any man to repeat any oblation with a view to procure the pardon of sins, propitiate God, and obtain righteousness. But what is the object of the mass, except it be that by the merit of a new oblation we may be made partakers of the passion of Christ? And that there might be no limits to their folly, they have not been satisfied with affirming it to be a common sacrifice offered equally for the whole Church, without adding, that it was in their power to make a peculiar application of it to any individual they chose, or rather to every one who was willing to purchase such a commodity with ready money. Though they could not reach the price of Judas, yet, to exemplify some characteristic of their author, they have retained the resemblance of number. Judas sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver; these men, as far as in them lies, sell him, in French money, for thirty pieces of copper; Judas sold him but once; they sell him as often as they meet with a purchaser. In this sense, we deny that they are priests; that they can intercede with God on behalf of the people by such an oblation; that they can appease the wrath of God, or obtain the remission of sins. For Christ is the sole Priest and High-Priest of the New Testament, to whom all the ancient priesthoods have been transferred, and in whom they are all terminated and closed. And even if the Scripture had made no mention of the eternal priesthood of Christ, yet as God, since the abrogation of the former priesthoods, has instituted no other, the argument of the apostle is irrefragable, that “no man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called of God.”[1347] With what effrontery, then, do these sacrilegious mortals, who boast of being the executioners of Christ, dare to call themselves priests of the living God!

XV. There is a beautiful passage in Plato, in which he treats of the ancient expiations among the heathen, and ridicules the foolish confidence of wicked and profligate men, who thought that such disguises would conceal their crimes from the view of their gods, and, as if they had made a compromise with their gods, indulged themselves in their vices with the greater security. This passage almost seems as if it had been written with a view to the missal expiation as it is now practised in the world. To defraud and circumvent another person, every one knows to be unlawful. To injure widows, to plunder orphans, to harass the poor, to obtain the property of others by wicked arts, to seize any one’s fortune by perjuries and frauds, to oppress a neighbour with violence and tyrannical terror, are universally acknowledged to be enormous crimes. How, then, do so many persons dare to commit all these sins, as if they might perpetrate them with impunity? If we duly consider, we shall find that they derive fresh encouragement from no other cause than the confidence which they feel that they shall be able to satisfy God by the sacrifice of the mass, as a complete discharge of all their obligations to him, or at least that it affords them an easy mode of compromising with him. Plato afterwards goes on to ridicule the gross stupidity of those who expect by such expiations to be delivered from the punishments which they would otherwise have to suffer in hell. And what is the design of the obits, or anniversary obsequies, and the greater part of the masses, but that those who all their lifetime have been the most cruel of tyrants, the most rapacious of robbers, or abandoned to every enormity, as if redeemed with this price, may escape the fire of purgatory?

XVI. Under the other kind of sacrifices, which we have called the sacrifice of thanksgiving, are included all the offices of charity, which when we perform to our brethren, we honour the Lord himself in his members; and likewise all our prayers, praises, thanksgivings, and every thing that we do in the service of God; all which are dependent on a greater sacrifice, by which we are consecrated in soul and body as holy temples to the Lord. It is not enough for our external actions to be employed in his service: it is necessary that first ourselves, and then all our works, be consecrated and dedicated to him; that whatever belongs to us may conduce to his glory, and discover a zeal for its advancement. This kind of sacrifice has no tendency to appease the wrath of God, to procure remission of sins, or to obtain righteousness: its sole object is to magnify and exalt the glory of God. For it cannot be acceptable and pleasing to God, except from the hands of those whom he has already favoured with the remission of their sins, reconciled to himself, and absolved from guilt; and it is so necessary to the Church as to be altogether indispensable. Therefore it will continue to be offered for ever, as long as the people of God shall exist; as we have already seen from the prophet. For so far are we from wishing to abolish it, that in that sense we are pleased to understand the following prediction: “From the rising of the sun, even unto the going down of the same, my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering; for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of hosts.”[1348] So Paul enjoins us to “present” our “bodies, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God,” which is our “reasonable service.”[1349] He has expressed himself with the strictest propriety, by adding that this is our reasonable service; for he intended a spiritual kind of Divine worship, which he tacitly opposed to the carnal sacrifices of the Mosaic law. So “to do good, and to communicate,” are called “sacrifices with which God is well pleased.”[1350] So the liberality of the Philippians in supplying the wants of Paul was “an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable and well pleasing to God.”[1351] So all the good works of believers are spiritual sacrifices.

XVII. Why do I multiply quotations? This form of expression is perpetually occurring in the Scriptures. And even while the people were kept under the external discipline of the law, it was sufficiently declared by the prophets that those carnal sacrifices contained a reality and truth which is common to the Christian Church, as well as to the nation of the Jews. For this reason David prayed, “Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.”[1352] And Hosea called thanksgivings “the calves of our lips,”[1353] which David calls “offering thanksgiving” and “offering praise.”[1354] In imitation of the Psalmist, the apostle himself says, “Let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually;” and by way of explanation adds, “that is, the fruit of our lips,” confessing or giving “thanks to his name.”[1355] This kind of sacrifice is indispensable in the supper of the Lord, in which, while we commemorate and declare his death, and give thanks, we do no other than offer the sacrifice of praise. From this sacrificial employment, all Christians are called “a royal priesthood;”[1356] because, as the apostle says, “By Christ we offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to his name.” For we do not appear in the presence of God with our oblations without an intercessor; Christ is the Mediator, by whom we offer ourselves and all that we have to the Father. He is our High Priest, who, having entered into the celestial sanctuary, opens the way of access for us. He is our altar, upon which we place our oblations, that whatever we venture to do, we may attempt in him. In a word, it is he that “hath made us kings and priests unto God.”[1357]

XVIII. What remains, then, but for the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and even children to understand, this abomination of the mass? which, being presented in a vessel of gold, has so inebriated and stupefied all the kings and people of the earth, from the highest to the lowest, that, more senseless than the brutes themselves, they have placed the whole of their salvation in this fatal gulf. Surely Satan never employed a more powerful engine to assail and conquer the kingdom of Christ. This is the Helen, for which the enemies of the truth in the present day contend with cruelty, rage, and fury; a Helen, indeed, with which they so pollute themselves with spiritual fornication, which is the most execrable of all. Here I touch not, even with my little finger, the gross abuses which they might pretend to be profanations of the purity of their holy mass; what a scandalous traffic they carry on, what sordid gains they make by their masses, with what enormous rapacity they gratify their avarice. I only point out, and that in few and plain words, the true nature of the most sanctimonious sanctity of the mass, on account of which it has attracted so much admiration and veneration for so many ages. For an illustration of such great mysteries proportioned to their dignity, would require a larger treatise; and I am unwilling to introduce those disgusting corruptions which are universally notorious; that all men may understand that the mass, considered in its choicest and most estimable purity, without any of its appendages, from the beginning to the end, is full of every species of impiety, blasphemy, idolatry, and sacrilege.

XIX. The readers may now see, collected into a brief summary, almost every thing that I have thought important to be known respecting these two sacraments; the use of which has been enjoined on the Christian Church from the commencement of the New Testament until the end of time; that is to say, baptism, to be a kind of entrance into the Church, and an initiatory profession of faith; and the Lord’s supper, to be a continual nourishment, with which Christ spiritually feeds his family of believers. Wherefore, as there is but “one God, one Christ, one faith,” one Church, the body of Christ, so there is only “one baptism” and that is never repeated; but the supper is frequently distributed, that those who have once been admitted into the Church, may understand that they are continually nourished by Christ. Beside these two, as no other sacrament has been instituted by God, so no other ought to be acknowledged by the Church of believers. For that it is not left to the will of man to institute new sacraments, will be easily understood if we remember what has already been very plainly stated—that sacraments are appointed by God for the purpose of instructing us respecting some promise of his, and assuring us of his good-will towards us; and if we also consider, that no one has been the counsellor of God, capable of affording us any certainty respecting his will,[1358] or furnishing us any assurance of his disposition towards us, what he chooses to give or to deny us. Hence it follows, that no one can institute a sign to be a testimony respecting any determination or promise of his; he alone can furnish us a testimony respecting himself by giving a sign. I will express myself in terms more concise, and perhaps more homely, but more explicit—that there can be no sacrament unaccompanied with a promise of salvation. All mankind, collected in one assembly, can promise us nothing respecting our salvation. Therefore they can never institute or establish a sacrament.

XX. Let the Christian Church, therefore, be content with these two, and not only neither admit nor acknowledge any other at present, but neither desire nor expect any other to the end of the world. For as the Jews, beside the ordinary sacraments given to them, had also several others, differing according to the varying circumstances of different periods, such as the manna, the water issuing from the rock, the brazen serpent, and the like, they were admonished by this variation not to rest in such figures, which were of short duration, but to expect from God something better, which should undergo no change and come to no end. But our case is very different: to us Christ has been revealed, “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,”[1359] in such abundance and profusion, that to hope or desire any new accession to these treasures would really be to displease God, and provoke his wrath against us. We must hunger after Christ, we must seek, contemplate, and learn him alone, till the dawning of that great day, when our Lord will fully manifest the glory of his kingdom, and reveal himself to us, so that “we shall see him as he is.”[1360] And for this reason, the dispensation under which we live is designated in the Scriptures as “the last time,” “these last times,” “the last days,”[1361] that no one may deceive himself with a vain expectation of any new doctrine or revelation. For “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath, in these last days, spoken unto us by his Son,”[1362] who alone is able to “reveal the Father,”[1363] and who, indeed, “hath declared him”[1364] fully, as far as is necessary for our happiness, while “now we see” him “through a glass darkly.”[1365] As men are not left at liberty to institute new sacraments in the Church of God, so it were to be wished that as little as possible of human invention should be mixed with those which have been instituted by God. For as wine is diluted and lost by an infusion of water, and as a whole mass of meal contracts acidity from a sprinkling of leaven, so the purity of Divine mysteries is only polluted when man makes any addition of his own. And yet we see, as the sacraments are observed in the present day, how very far they have degenerated from their original purity. There is every where an excess of pageantries, ceremonies, and gesticulations; but no consideration or mention of the word of God, without which even the sacraments themselves cease to be sacraments. And the very ceremonies which have been instituted by God are not to be discerned among such a multitude of others, by which they are overwhelmed. In baptism, how little is seen of that which ought to be the only conspicuous object—I mean baptism itself? And the Lord’s supper has been completely buried since it has been transformed into the mass; except that it is exhibited once a year, but in a partial and mutilated form.