The preaching of the Cross is now no stumbling-block to the mind of man; it offers no difficulties to the rationalism of the day: nay, it is subjected to illustration, and the system of Redemption is made cognizable by us, and we understand it, and extol the wisdom of the scheme! The Holy Eucharist it has rationalized, and in that degree, as a Sacrament, destroyed: the efficacy of Infant-Baptism it cannot rationalize, and therefore denies it!
The popular theology of America is partly derived from that very source which first brought in the low and rationalist notions of the Sacraments, the Swiss Reformation; partly, it has been tampering with modern apologetic notions[1], and labouring to persuade the infidel that he has, after all, nothing on the score of mysteriousness to object to the Christian faith. And in the absence of any principles of our own, and forgetting those of our Church and its primitive character, and with a certain universalism, which cares not whether the details be sound, so that it finds certain portions of the faith, which it has arbitrarily selected, we borrow at second-hand a mixed farrago of criticism or history from Germany, unsifted and unadapted to ourselves; and from America, a popular illustrative divinity; and hope from the two to compound something which may meet the necessities of the day, and save us the labour of studying primitive Antiquity, wherein our great divines were formed.
It must not also be forgotten, that a popular portion of our religious teaching is ultimately drawn from the same source as that of America—the divines, who, with those of Geneva, fell away from the doctrines of the Ancient Church upon the Sacraments: that (whatever be its other merits or defects) it is founded on the supposition of the inefficacy
- ↑ See an offensive passage from Jacob Abbott's Corner Stone, on the Holy Eucharist, quoted in the British Magazine for 1835, vol.7. p. 55 sqq. comp. Vol. 8. p. 312.
