reason, though, in a critical sense, less proper, it may yet be allowable.

Nothing is strictly and properly a Sacrifice, according to the ideas of the heathens, which is not brought to the altar, and consumed upon it, either in part or wholly ; but in common language, whatever is solemnly offered in the Eucharist, may be, as it has been, termed a Sacrifice.

Thus our excellent communion service speaks of a Sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving-a Sacrifice of our souls and bodies, a lively, or, in modern diction, a living sacrifice. Oblations of money are also offered, in our service, for the use of the poor indeed, but which we pray God, in the first instance, to accept as tokens of our charity.

The schoolmen say, the Eucharist is both a Sacrament and a Sacrifice; it is a Sacrament, so far as any thing is received; and it is a Sacrifice, so far as any thing is offered.* They say also, that any thing done to the honour of God, for the purpose of propitiating and appeasing him, is properly called a Sacrifice. The ancient heathens did not confine this term to an oblation; but sometimes comprehended under it, the whole of their religious ceremonies (their govgyta,) whether they offered a victim or not. Plautus uses the term sacrifice more than once, when he means worship only.

* Vide Thom. Aquin. Sum. Quæst. 65. Partis Stiæ.

Whatever was comprehended by the Jews under the word corban, a sacred gift, it is supposed, by some, to have been considered as a sacrifice; and this they divided into two kinds, the bloody and the unbloody, or the sacrifice of things animate or inanimate.

Any very solemn act of worship, says Turretin, in which something was consecrated to God for his glory, and man's advantage, was called, in the style of the Old Testament, a sacrifice.

According to this latitude of signification, many pious and learned men have maintained, that the Eucharist is a sacrifice : and when the term is thus comprehensively understood, there can be no sufficient reason for undertaking to refute them. From very early times, even from the Apostles, it has possessed this name with qualifying epithets, and has been denominated the spiritual sacrifice, the sacrifice of praise, the holy sacrifice, the mystical sacrifice, the unbloody sacrifice, and the reasonable or intellectual sacrifice.

The following passage from the prophet Malachi was, in the primitive ages, understood to be predictive of the Eucharistical Sacrifice: From the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, my name, shall be great among the Gentiles: and in every place incense" (interpreted prayers and praises)" shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering" (unpolluted with the blood of real vic

tims :) "for my name shall be great among the heathen, saith the Lord of Hosts."*

This was so very early applied to the Eucharist, that Joseph Mede, whose opinions are always respectable, thinks the ancients had learned thus to apply it by tradition from the Apostles. It was so applied, in the second century, by Justin Martyr and Irenæus, the former of whom flourished about thirty years after St. John, and the latter was a scholar of Polycarp, St. John's disciple.

By the Christian sacrifice this learned writer thinks the ancient Church understood not barely the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, but the whole act of worship, or solemn service of the Church assembled, of which this sacred mystery, the Sacrament, was (as he says in allusion to a ring) the pearl and the jewel. No public service of the Church was in those times without it. According to his definition, the Sacrament is "an oblation of praise and thanksgiving to God the Father through Jesus Christ." The sum of Mede's elaborate discussion seems to be, that the Eucharist, according to the ancient Church, is a sacrifice of praise and prayer, through Jesus Christ, mystically represented in the creatures of bread and wine.

To dispute about a variety of names, where the same thing is signified, is frivolcus, and pronounc*Malachi i. 11.

ed censurable by the Apostle. If men choose to denominate the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, a sacrifice, in a large and comprehensive sense, as an act of peculiar solemnity, there can be no valid objection to it; for there is at present little danger of encouraging the popish doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass, the fear of which caused our Protestant Divines at one time, to take particular pains in preventing the name of sacrifice from being ever applied to the Eucharist.

If the sacrament be a sacrifice, it is a sacrifice. (sui generis) of a peculiar nature. It is a spiritual and evangelical sacrifice. The oblation and the benefit are both of a transcendent kind; and the whole transaction a mysterious intercourse between man and his merciful Maker; in which the greatest good may be conveyed to the former, in any mode, approved by infinite wisdom, however unaccountable to the reason of minute philosophers.

SECTION VI.

Additional Considerations on the propriety of interpreting the Passages in the Sixth Chapter of St. John, as relating to the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper :- this Chapter being so understood, leaves no Doubt of the present and inesti

mable Benefits derivable from that Holy Insti

tution.

I CONSIDER the passages in the sixth chapter of St. John as thrown out to prepare the minds of the Apostles for the institution of the sacrament: and, under this notion, they appear in this place with peculiar propriety. An institution so extraordinary, required that the minds of the Apostles, who were not very docile at that period, in spiritual matters, should be gradually prepared for it.

St. John wrote his Gospel to supply the omissions of the other, and, according to that design, he had no occasion to add the history of the institution, which the preceding Evangelists had already given, and which was already known ; but it was highly proper to add these passages in the sixth chapter, because they tended to elucidate the design of the sacrament, and to point out its momentous consequences to those who might be inclined to consider it as a bare memorial, or as affording no present benefits to the communicant, at the time of communicating.

It is not reasonable to suppose the same expressions, and such remarkable ones, used by the same speaker, or writer, in senses entirely different. Therefore, if our Saviour's words, "eating the body or flesh," in St. Matthew, mean the Sacrament,