If we ask therefore why, on this scheme, one man is saved rather than another, we must answer, Because the sacraments come to one and not to the other. If we ask why the sacraments come to one rather than to another, we must answer, Because the general order of providence, wisely and justly instituted for the government of the world, permits them to come to the one and not to the other; and the free agents in- volved, under the command of God, freely concur to that end in the one case and not in the other. If we ask whether it is not God who has so disposed provi- dence as to produce these precise effects, we must answer, No, for the general order of providence was instituted for the general wise government of the world and these particular effects are merely incidental to it. If we press on and ask, Could not God have so arranged his general providence as to have produced better results, and could he not so govern the world as to secure all else he wished and yet the salvation of men in greater numbers and with more particularity of choice on his part, we are dumb. For there is a manifest subjection of God’s activities here to the working of the instrumentalities which he has or- dained; there is a manifest subordination of God in his operations to second causes; or, to put it in another way, there is a manifest removal of man in the matter of his salvation from the direct control of God and the
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commitment of him instead to the tender mercies of a mechanism.
The explanation of Christianity in terms of sacer- dotalism is unfortunately not confined in our day to the old unreformed Church from which Protestantism broke forth, precisely that it might escape from de- pendence on the Church rather than on God alone in the matter of salvation. A very influential, (perhaps presently the most influential, and certainly to the onlooker, the most conspicuous) party in the great Protestant Church of England, and, following it, large parties in its daughter Churches, have revived it in more or less completeness of expression and certainly with no hesitancy of assertion. It iscommon nowadays to hear men referred by Anglican writers to the Church rather than directly to God for salvation; and to have the Church defined for them as “the ex- tension of the incarnation.” “To anyone who thinks carefully, and believes in the Incarnation,” we are told by an influential clergyman of the Church of England,” with all the accent of conviction, “it is evident that the Church, the Body of Christ, ever united with her divine Head, holds in herself the forces of his life," and therefore is “equipped,” not merely to speak for its Lord, but prevalently “to apply to the individual soul the grace won for his Church by our blessed Redeemer, and residing in that Body because ever united to the Head." The whole sacerdotal system is wrapped up in that state- ment. The Church, Mr. Darwell Stone tells us,® is
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a visible society, the work of which is twofold, cor- responding to the work of the Lord, as expressed in John 1 : 17: “Grace and truth came by Jesus Christ”: “the Church, as his mystical body and his organ in the world, is the teacher of truth and the storehouse of grace.” “Since the day of Pentecost the day of the creation of the Christian Church," he further explains,” “the ordinary way in which God bestows grace on the souls of men is through the glorified humanity of our Lord, and the work of God the Holy Ghost. The closest means of union with the glorified humanity of Christ, and the most immediate mode of contact with God the Holy Ghost, are in the mystical body of Christ, that is the Church, and are open to men in the use of the sacraments. Thus the Christian Church is the channel of grace.” From this beginning Mr. Stone goes on to expound the sacerdotal system in a manner indistinguishable from its ordinary exposition in the Church of Rome.
We will ask, however, an American divine to explain to us the sacerdotal system as it has come to be taught in the Protestant Episcopal Churches.” “Man,” we read in Dr. A. G. Mortimer’s “Catholic Faith and Practice," “having fallen before God's loving purpose could be fulfilled, he must be redeemed, bought back from his bondage, delivered from his sin, reunited once more to God, so that the Divine Life might flow again in his weakened nature" (p. 65). “Ву his Ше and death Christ made satisfaction for the sins of all men, that is, sufficient for all mankind, for through
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THE PLAN OF SALVATION