Now, brethren, I do not desire to say much in comment on such words as these. But I do say, and I know not how to avoid saying, first, if such authority was committed to the priest, when was it committed to him, or how, but at his ordination, and in and by “the form and manner of ordering priests,” which we have before noted? And, secondly, can any reasonable being believe that the Church could have drawn up such a service, and put such words into the priest’s mouth when dealing solemnly and truly with a sick or dying man, and yet believe that such power of absolution, as a part of the priest’s distinctive character and endowment by God, had not been conferred upon him? or maintain that she thought our Blessed Lord’s commission extended no further than to its first recipients, and died out with the Apostles themselves, when still she uses the words continually in her “ordering of priests?” If it be said,—Well: still we cannot believe this, and can only say that we heartily desire to remove from our Prayer-book and Ordinal, as a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit, all traces of such authority being given,—I can only reply that this argument is wholly beside our present question. I am not now arguing whether such an interpretation and use of Holy Scripture be the right interpretation and use, (though I have given reasons before for feeling sure it is,) but I am shewing what is the mind and understanding herein of the Church of England. I am silencing, if I may, (and in the judgment of right reason I cannot conceive that I should fail in doing so,) the calumny that they who maintain the doctrine of the priesthood are disloyal to the Church of England, or deviating from the principles of the Reformation. For, not merely according to what right reason must, I think, enforce to be the intention of those who drew up our formularies, but according to the simple sense of those formularies, this doctrine and none other is the only doctrine which can be made consistent with the documents themselves, or which they can justly be taken to enunciate. We have at times heard not a little of the dishonesty of those who, it is said, have taken our formularies in a non-natural sense, on the Catholic side, though in a sense which they deemed they would fairly bear. If this argument be good for anything, against whom can it so conclusively be brought as against such as will affirm that, when in the most solemn exercise of a bishop’s office, the bishop says, “Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a priest in the Church of God,” the Church intends that there is no gift of the Holy Ghost bestowed, and no priest made at all? Or, again, when he says, adopting Christ’s own words of commission,—“Whose sins thou dost forgive they are forgiven unto them, and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained;”—that in this there is no intention to teach that the commission of Christ extended beyond the Apostles themselves, and that no power of binding or loosing is conferred by this solemn act? Or, yet again, who tell us that when the priest is instructed to exercise this holy function of absolving penitents, either that they may come “with a full trust in God’s mercy and with a quiet conscience” to the Holy Eucharist, or, in the solemn moments of serious sickness, perhaps the near prospect of death, (things and times surely beyond all others to drive away the very notion of unreal or unmeaning words, which must also, if they be such, be to the poor penitent most deceitful and misleading words also); that then the Church gives her instruction to use the word of absolution, and say, “By His authority committed unto me, I absolve thee from all thy sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” and yet means hereby only a mockery and a delusion; that there is no such power, no such authority, no such absolving at all; surely all this is not a mere non-natural sense which the words will bear, though it may not be the most obvious at first sight, but is a non-natural sense so monstrous that they will not bear it at all.