Memorials of John Mcleod Campell (Volume 1)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1877. Excerpt: ... 212 CHAPTER VII. 1849--1853. Publication of Christ the Bread of Life--Letters to Mr. D. Campbell, Miss Macnabb, Mr..Erskine, and others--Life of Dr. Chalmers--Scott's Appointment to Owen's College--Lord Ashley, Maurice, and Kingsley--Disraeli and Bentinck--Carlyle's Life of Sterling--Bunsen's Hippolytus--Maurice at King's College. The five years which are included in this chapter contain few incidents which need be here referred to. It was in the spring of 1851 that Mr. Campbell published his book on the Eucharist, Christ the Bread of Life--the first book which he prepared for the press. The public attention had been for some time occupied with the controversy with the Church of Rome; and there was much popular denunciation of the Mass. It was characteristic of Mr. Campbell's habits of thought that, without indulging in any declamation against the Romish Church, he penetrated to the very heart of the controversy; and showed that the root of the error, of which the Mass was the development, was present in many Protestant sects who thought themselves the farthest removed from Rome. He rested his rejection of Transubstantiation, not on the ground that it contradicts the evidence of the bodily senses, but on the ground that it contradicts "a higher endowment with which God has endowed man; namely, that faculty of perception which distinguishes him as a spiritual being--that in man which makes him capable of knowledge, not of nature only, but of Nature's God." There is a spiritual eye, he argued, which perceives spiritual realities--which sees that in Christ is presented to us the appropriate food of eternal life. Faith was, in truth, this spiritual vision, not the taking anything on trust in the dark; as, for instance, believing blindly in some change in the ...