Now for a few moments only let us meditate on this service.  I have already referred to the lamentable practice of substituting biographical legends for the word of God.  And what is the tendency of this service?  What impression was it likely to make, and to leave on minds of ordinary powers and instruction?  Must it not, of necessity, tend to withdraw them from contemplating Christ, and to fix their thoughts on the powers, the glory, the exaltation, the merits of a fellow-sinner?  It will be said, that they will look beyond the martyr, and trace the blessings, here enumerated, to Christ, as their primary cause, and will think of the merits of Thomas as efficacious only through the merits of their Saviour; that in their invocation of Thomas they will implore him only to pray for them.  But can this be so?  Does not the ascription of miracles to him {221} and to his power; does not the very form of enumerating those miracles tend much to exalt the servant to an equality with the Master?

Whilst Thomas by being thus, in words at least, presented to the people as working those miracles by his own power, (for there is throughout a lamentable absence of immediate ascription of glory to God,) is raised to an equality with Christ our Lord; many passages in this service have the tendency also of withdrawing the minds of the worshippers from an implicit and exclusive dependence on the merits of Christ alone, and of tempting them to admit the merits of Thomas to share at least with Christ in the work of grace and salvation.  Let us place some texts of Scripture and some passages of this service side by side.

[Transcriber’s note:  They are shown here one after the other.]

Scripture.

But after that the kindness and love of God towards man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us.—­Titus iii. 4, 5.

He who spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?—­Rom. viii. 32.

The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin.—­1 John i. 7.

One Mediator.—­1 Tim. ii. 5.

Who also maketh intercession for us.—­Rom. viii. 34.

He ever liveth to make intercession for them.—­Heb. vii. 25.

Service of Thomas Becket.

O Christ Jesus, by the wounds of Thomas loosen the sins which bind us.

O blessed Jesus, BY THE MERITS OF THOMAS, forgive us our debts, raise us from the threefold death, and restore what has been lost with thy accustomed pity.

Do thou, O Christ, by the blood of Thomas, which he shed for thee, make us ascend whither Thomas has ascended.

Holy Thomas, pray for us.

And if this service thus seems to mingle the merits of Christ, the merits of his blood and of his death, with {222} the merits of a mortal man, the immediate address to that mortal as the giver of good things temporal and spiritual, very awfully trespasses on that high, exclusive, and incommunicable prerogative of the one Lord God Omnipotent, which his Spirit hath proclaimed solemnly and repeatedly, and which he has fenced around against all invasion with so many warnings and denunciations.