immediately after Baptism (as is the usual custom in the Greek Church), the whole Western Church-both Anglican 11 and Roman 12-has thought good to order that none shall be confirmed but such as understand the rudiments of Christian faith and duty, and are old enough to "renew the solemn promise and vow" that was made at their Baptism. No age is specified, but any ordinary child, properly brought up, ought to be desirous of Confirmation, and certainly sufficiently instructed, when from twelve to fifteen years of age, some much younger, others not so young. It is at least the design of the Church that children, made members thereof in infancy by Holy Baptism, shall be brought up as children, not as strangers; and that as soon as they are come to years of discretion, they shall "be brought to the bishop to be confirmed by him," and then be admitted to the Table of the Lord. This is not "joining the Church;" that was done fully and once for all in Holy Baptism, wherein the person is regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ's Church." Dissenters, therefore who desire to conform to the Church, ought not to feel aggrieved when they are asked to be confirmed. The ordeal called "joining the church," to which they may have submitted when they became communicants of their respective denominations, is not Confirmation, nor indeed even analogous thereto. So that to thoughtful Christians who have been brought up in non-conformity to the historic Catholic Church, Confirmation, instead of being in any sense an obstacle,

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11. See third rubric after Catechism in P. B., closing exhortation in Baptismal Office, and preface to Confirmation Office; also Canon 61 of the Eng. Ch. 12. For R. C. usage, see Catechism of the Council of Trent, III., 7. "The time there marked out for Confirmation is between seven and twelve years of age." In the Anglican Church the usual age is from twelve to sixteen.

ought to be looked upon as one of the chief inducements for returning to the Church, in order to obtain a grace and a blessing to which as baptized Christians they were justly entitled, but of which they have been deprived by the insufficiency of the bishopless systems of Protestant dissent.

So keenly is "the conscious want of a connecting link between Baptism and Communion" felt by those who have lost the Apostolic rite of Confirmation, that most Continental Protestants (notably the great body of Lutherans) have retained the outward form of Confirmation even though they have no ministry empowered to bestow it. "I sincerely wish," said Calvin, "that we retained this custom of the Laying-on-of-hands, which was practiced among the ancients." The Presbyterians and the Baptists in this country have officially declared their belief in it.13 Had Confirmation, even as an empty form and without the Apostolic Ministry, been retained among our dissenting brethren, I am very sure that the heresy which denies Baptism to little children would never have made such havoc as it has in the religious life of this age. It is largely for want of Confirmation that Baptism has been transferred, with deplorable results, from infancy to adult age, in order to have some rite or ceremony of preparation for first Communion.

To all thoughtful Non-conformists, as well as to Churchmen, who have not fully grasped the meaning of Confirmation, I beg to speak a serious and loving word — call it preaching, if you will:

You believe in prayer; you believe that God in answer to prayer gives special grace through His appointed ordi

13. See Randall on Confirmation.

nances.

Now go back in thought to the first age of the Church. Suppose you are one of those Samaritans whom St. Philip has converted. You have repented of your sins; you have professed your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; you have been baptized into the Church. But St. Philip tells you that two of the chief pastors of the Church, the Apostles Peter and John, are coming down from Jerusalem to give you their official benediction, to lay their hands on your head and to invoke the Holy Spirit upon you. With what eagerness would you seize the precious opportunity! You would hasten to the place appointed; and as soon as you saw the benignant face of St. Peter or heard the loving voice of St. John, and realized that you were in the presence of one whom your Divine Master had commissioned as an Apostolic Bishop or Overseer of His Church, would you not rejoice to have him lay his hands on your head and bless you in God's name? Well, that is Confirmation. The bishops who visit our parishes every year come with the same office and authority as Peter and John, when they made the first Episcopal visitation of Samaria. If you believe in God; if you desire grace and help and strength,- come in faith, and as the good bishop after the example of his predecessors, the Holy Apostles, lays his hands on your head and blesses you in God's name, you will be blessed indeed.

In Confirmation, then, as in the sacrament of Regeneration, the Catholic Faith, and Holy Orders, the Anglican Church has continued steadfastly; and it is permitted us to see another golden strand in the cord which binds our Church to the Catholic Church of the Apostles, the Church which Christ founded on the Rock.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH AND THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD.

"And then-as when the doors were shut,

With Jesus left alone

The faithful sup with Christ, and He

In breaking bread is known."

-Bishop Coxe, Christian Ballads.

N the history of eternity there has been but one true sacrifice that of the Son of God Who made "by His one oblation of Himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world." This, the so-called sacrifices of the Patriarchal and Jewish dispensations foreshadowed; to it they pointed; from it they derived whatever of meaning, virtue, grace they possessed.

In like manner, our great High Priest, at the offering up of Himself, "did institute, and in His holy Gospel command us to continue a perpetual memory of that His precious death and sacrifice." The Eucharist, so far as its sacrificial character is concerned, differs from the sacrifices of the elder dispensation chiefly in point of time. They prefigured; it commemorates. They were a type; it is a memorial. They were the shadow on the dial before the hour of noon; it the shadow on the dial after the sun has past the meridian.

Christ bade His Church: "Do this for My memorial.”1 And the Church has done it, not as a renewing of Christ's sacrifice, but as a commemoration of it, a pleading of it before the Father, a "showing of the Lord's death till He come." 2 And so from St. Paul3 and St. Ignatius, nay, even from our Lord Himself,5 to the American Prayer Book, the Table of the Lord has been authoritatively (as it is almost always popularly) called the altar, because on it is celebrated the sacrificial memorial of the one great Sacrifice.

Scholarly readers will recall the eloquent passage in Origen's Second Homily, in which he speaks of seeing "Churches built, and ALTARS not sprinkled with the blood of flocks, but consecrated by the precious blood of Christ." Also the clear statement of Athanasius, in his Disputation against Arius, in the Council of Nicæa, in which he says that Christ "sent forth the Apostles, furnishing a Table, that is, the HOLY ALTAR, and on it heavenly and immortal Bread."

1. Eis ten emen anamnesin. St. Luke, xxii., 19. 2. I. Cor., xi., 26. 3. We have an altar, etc. Heb., xiii., 10; cf. also I. Cor., x., 18, 19, 20, 21. 4 "St. Ignatius, who lived in the Apostolic age itself, calls the Lord's Table the "Altar." See Epist. to the Philadelphians, Chap. iv. Other early fathers frequently allude to the Christian altar." Blunt, An. P. B., p. 158.

5. St. Matth., v., 23 and 24. See Sadler's commentary on this passage: "If the Sermon on the Mount is to be for the guidance of the Church in all time, then there must be in God's Church, at all times, something which can properly be called an ' 'altar,' etc.

6. See Office of Institution, Am. P. B., 4th rubric, et passim. Also the English Coronation Service and the English Canons. It is fair, however, to say that the English Coronation Service was never presented to Convocation, and has thus never received the sanction of the Church. It is a purely State service. It is important to remember this, as (while it uses the word Catholic) it also uses the word Protestant in the King's oath. William III. introduced the word as a slap on the face of the Church for refusing to sanction it. Of course, it is inter preted to mean simply not Romish.