I ask the special attention of my readers to the following extracts from the last Charge of the late Dr. Longley, Archbishop of Canterbury.
The office held by the Archbishop, the remarkable gentleness and mildness of his character, the fact that this Charge contains his last sentiments, and that it was not made public till after his death,--all this appears to me to invest these extracts about the Lord's Supper with peculiar interest.
"It is far from my intention to impute to all those who have taken the ill-advised step of adopting the Sacrificial Vestments (in administering the Lord's Supper) any sympathy with Roman error; but I am constrained to avow that there are plain indications in some of the publications which have been issued as manifestoes of the opinions of that section of our Church, that some of its professed members, yea, even of her ministers, think themselves at liberty to hold the doctrines of the Church of Rome in relation to the Sacrifice of the Mass, and yet retain their position within the pale of the Anglican Church with the avowed purpose of eliminating from its formularies every trace of the Reformation, as regards its protest against Romish error. The language they hold with respect to it is entirely incompatible with loyalty to the Church to which they profess to belong. They call it 'a Communion deeply tainted with Protestant heresy:' 'Our duty,' they say, 'is the expulsion of the evil, not flight from it.' It is no want of charity, therefore, to declare that they remain with us in order that they may substitute the Mass for the Communion; the obvious aim of our Reformers having been to substitute the Communion for the Mass. Doubtless the Church of England admits of considerable latitude in the views that may be taken of that most mysterious of all mysteries, the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. And so long as those solemn words of its original institution, 'This is my Body,' 'This is my Blood,' shall remain in the sentence of consecration (and they never can be erased from it), so long will there be varieties of interpretation of these words, all of which may be consistent with a true allegiance to our Church, provided these three conditions be observed:--
"1. That they be not construed to signify that the Natural Body of Christ is present in the Sacrament:
"2. Nor to admit of any adoration either of the Sacramental bread and wine there bodily received, or of any corporal presence of Christ's Natural Body and Blood:
"3. Nor to justify the belief that the Body and Blood are again offered as a satisfaction for sin; seeing that the offering of Christ once made was a perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, original and actual.
"These are the limits which our Church imposes upon the liberty of interpretation of the words of our blessed Lord.
"The use of these sacrificial vestments is in the minds of many intimately connected with the idea that an essential element in the Holy Communion is the offering to God a Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ, which abide with the elements in a mysterious manner after the act of Consecration. The minister wears the vestments at that time as a sacrificing priest. According to this view it would seem that the most important part of this Holy Sacrament is what we offer to God, not what we receive from Him.