FOOTNOTES.

I find a passage in Hickes’s Treatise, “The Christian Priesthood Asserted,” which, though written more than a hundred and sixty years before Mr. Carter’s book, seems almost as if it were a comment upon the passage just cited, and the application which I have made of it. He says, “I believe no man in the world that was of any religion where sacrifice was used, and that by chance should see the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist administered among Christians, as it was administered in the primitive times, or as it is administered according to the order and usage of the Church of England, but would take the bread and wine for an offering or sacrifice, and the whole action for a sacrificial ministration; and the eating and drinking of the holy elements for a sacrificial entertainment of the congregation at the table of their God. To see bread and wine . . . so solemnly brought to the table, and then . . . brought by the deacon, in manner of an offering to the liturg or minister, which he also taking in his hands as an offering, sets them with all reverence on the table; and then, after solemn prayers of oblation and consecration, to see him take up the bread, and say, in a most solemn manner, ‘This is My Body,’ &c., and then the cup, saying as solemnly, ‘This is My Blood,’ &c., and then to hear him with all the powers of his soul offer up praises, and glory, and thanksgiving, and prayers to God the Father of all things, through the Name of His Son, and Holy Spirit, which they beseech Him to send down upon that bread and cup, and the people with the greatest harmony and acclamation saying aloud, ‘Amen:’ after which also, to see the liturg, first eat of the bread and drink of the cup, and then the deacon to carry about the blessed bread and wine to be eaten and drunk by the people, as in a sacrificial feast; and, lastly, to see and hear all concluded with psalms and hymns of praise, and prayers of intercession to God with the highest pomp-like celebrity of words; I say, to see and hear all this would make an uninitiated heathen conclude that the bread and wine were an offering, the whole Eucharistic action a sacrificial mystery, the eating and drinking the sanctified elements a sacrificial banquet, and the liturg who administered a priest.”—Hickes’s “Priesthood Asserted,” Library of Anglo.-Cath. Theol., Oxford, vol. ii. p. 105–7.