1

Nor does this view at all involve the doctrine of Transubstantiation, or anything akin to it. In the Eucharist we make the solemn memorial of Christ's death, before God as well as man, pleading the merits of His sacrifice with the Father by the prescribed action of breaking bread and pouring out wine, just as in word we plead it, when we offer our prayers in the Name of Jesus Christ. The essentially sacrificial character of the Eucharist, then, is the cause of the infrequency of direct addresses to Christ in the service of the Holy Communion. But every rule has its exceptions. The Church before the Reformation had three Communion Collects, as our own Prayer Book has three, addressed directly to our Blessed Lord. And these, and the numerous other invocations of Christ which are found elsewhere in our Prayer Book, are to be regarded as definite dogmatic assertions, on the part of the Church, of the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour. We do homage to Him thus, by way of professing our faith in His Divine Sonship. It is to His Personality, be it observed, that the homage is done. And there is in Christ but one Personality, which is Divine, though there are two whole and perfect natures, the Divine and the human. And if any man should presume to say that human nature (being a creature of God) cannot be even in Christ a legitimate object of worship, the answer is that by the Word's taking flesh "the Godhead and Manhood were joined together never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man." (Art. II.) And because of this close union, His "Manhood" (as Dr. Liddon says) "rightly and necessarily shares in the adoration offered to His Deity."

What follows in the Collect is seen, when carefully looked at, to be another affirmation of our Lord's Divinity. 1 Canon Liddon gives an exhaustive list of them, pp. 522-524.

"Who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee." This is a citation from the book of the prophet Malachi, and a citation every way remarkable, because our blessed Lord in the first and third Gospels (St. Matt. xi. 10; St. Luke vii. 27) gives it a different turn by a change of the pronouns, and the Evangelist St. Mark also (writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost), adopts Christ's version of the words (i. 2). The prophet speaks in the person of Christ Himself; "Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before ME." "He who speaks" (says Dr. Pusey in his "Commentary on the Minor Prophets ") "is He who should come, God the Son. . . . He speaks here in His Divine Nature, as the Lord Who should send, and Who should Himself come in our flesh. In the Gospel, when He was come in the flesh, He speaks not of His own Person, but of the Father, 'since indivisible are the operations of the Trinity, and what the One doth, the other Two do, since the Three are of one nature, power, and operation."" Accordingly, our Lord, in quoting the words of the Prophet, puts them into the mouth of the Father, by a change of the pronouns ; "Behold, I send my messenger before THY face, which shall prepare THY way before THEE" (St. Matt. xi. 10). This alteration of the phraseology was in conformity with the whole plan of our blessed Lord's humiliation, in which He constantly took up lower ground than as God He might have done, and loved to represent Himself, not as acting independently, but as the Father's envoy and ambassador. And yet at the same time, to those who believe the phraseology of Malachi to be inspired, the change of the pronoun is, to use Dean Alford's words, "no mean indication of His own eternal and co-equal

Godhead," showing as it does that the First and Second Persons of the Blessed Trinity are "of one nature, power, and operation." It is well that so early in the series of the Collects we should meet with an affirmation so explicit of the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, which is a mainstay of our faith, since the power, efficacy, and meritoriousness of His atoning work are bound up with it. And how beautifully does the act of adoration at the end of the Collect chime in with the assertion of His Deity in the early part, when we formerly ascribe to Him His place in the ever-blessed Trinity; "who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end."

CHAPTER IV.

THE FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT.

Lord raise up (we pray thee) thy power, and come among us, and with great,might succour us; that whereas, through our sins and wickedness, we are sore let and hindered in running the race that is set before us, thy bountiful grace and mercy may speedily help and deliver us, through the satisfaction of the Son our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

Excita, quaesumus, Domine, potentiam tuam, et veni, et magna nobis virtute succurre, ut auxilium gratiae tuae, quod nostra peccata praepediunt, indulgentia tuae propitiationis acceleret. Dui vivis. (Miss. Sar. Col. 40.) And see, on the preceding Collect, p. 132, 1.

IN the first two Collects of Advent we have seen the work of the English Reformers; in the third the work of the Revisers of 1662. The Collect for the fourth Sunday is the first in the series which is translated from the old Latin Offices.1 And it is, or perhaps I should say it was,

1 Dr. Neale speaks, it appears to me, with undue severity of this first effort of translation. [Essays on Liturgiology, p. 51. London, 1863.] "In the fourth Sunday" [in Advent] “we find them" [the Reformers] "for the first time translating from the old Collect, but so translating as to lose almost wholly its true spirit and emphasis. In the original it is addressed to God the SON; and, with the dramatic effect which permeates every ecclesiastical office, calls upon Him-as if the work of our redemption were not yet begun to raise up His power and succour us, to be born, as it were, for our sakes. In our version, this beautiful realisation of the approaching festival is lost: the silver is become dross, the wine is mixed with water; the prayer is now addressed to GOD the FATHER, and ends

The addi

when first made, nearly a literal translation. tions to the original we will note as we go along.

The

"O Lord, raise up (we pray thee) thy power." words are those of the eightieth Psalm, and we will glance at them in their original context. "Thou that dwellest between the cherubims, shine forth. Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh stir up thy strength" (the words used in the Vulgate, or Latin Translation of the Scriptures, are exactly the same which the translators have here rendered "Raise up thy power"), "and come and save us." Let us not overlook the interesting reference to the order of Israel's march in the wilderness. The three tribes descended from Rachel marched immediately in the rear of the ark. In front of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh, the ark was carried by the Kohathites, the curtains and boards of the tabernacle having previously gone forwards under the escort of the Gershonites and Merarites. Hence, if there had been a literal shining forth of the Shechinah from between the cherubims, which bent over the ark (which of course there could not be, as the ark was carefully covered up before removal), the glorious light would have flashed full in the faces of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh. Now the Lord Jesus Christ is the true Ark and Mercy-seat, of whom St. John says that "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt" (the original word means "tabernacled,"1 dwelt in our nature as in a tent, just as the ark of the covenant dwelt in a tent during the 'through the satisfaction of Thy SON, our LORD,' etc." Did Dr. Neale forget that in the Gelasian Sacramentary, which is the original of that in the Sarum Missal, this Collect is addressed to God the Father, as is clear from its ending with Per, and therefore the alteration made by our Reformers in this respect was in truth (whether they so intended it or not) a return to earlier usage? See the preceding Collect, p. 134, where in note 1 will be found the Sarum and Gelasian versions of this Collect side by side. 1 ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν. St. John i. 14.