To take that chief stronghold of ecclesiasticism and sacerdotalism, the institution of the Eucharist. As Catholics present it, it makes the Church indispensable, with all her apparatus of an apostolical succession, an authorised priesthood, a power of absolution. Yet, as Jesus founded it, it is the most anti-ecclesiastical of institutions, pulverising alike the historic churches in their beauty and the dissenting sects in their unloveliness;—it is the consecration of absolute individualism. 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for you.'[1] When Jesus so spoke, what did he mean, what was in his mind? Undoubtedly these words of the prophet Jeremiah: 'Behold the days come, saith the Eternal, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, which covenant they brake; but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: After those days, saith the Eternal, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother, saying: Know the Eternal! for they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest.'[2] No more scribes, no more doctors, no more priests! the crowning act in the 'secret' of Jesus seals at the same time his 'method,'—his method of pure inwardness, individual responsibility, personal religion.
Take, again, the Protestant doctrine of Justification; of trusting in the alone merits of Christ, pleading the Blood of the Covenant, imputed righteousness. In our railway stations are hung up, as everyone knows, sheets of Bible-texts to catch the passer's eye; and very profitable admonitions to him they in general are. It is said that the thought of thus exhibiting them occurred to Dr. Marsh, a venerable leader of the so-called Evangelical party in our Church, the
