Sacramentarianism, Deceitfulness of – Charles Spurgeon

I SEE now in vision a company of men gathering herbs along the slopes of the Seven Hills of Rome; with mystic rites they cull those ancient plants, whose noxious influence once drugged our fathers into deadly slumbers. They are compounding again the cup of Rome’s ancient sorcery, and saying: “Here is the universal medicine! the great Catholic remedy.” I see them pouring their Belladonna, Monkshood, and deadly Henbane, into the great pot forever simmering on the Papal hearth. Think you the nations are to be healed by this accursed amalgam? Will not the end be as in the days of the prophets, when one gathered wild gourds, and they cried out, “There is death in the pot? Ay, indeed, so it will be, even though Oxford and Canterbury set their seal upon the patent medicine. Come, you brave sons of protesting fathers! Come and overturn this witches’ caldron, and spill it back into the Hell for which alone it is fit. Pity that even old Tiber’s tawny flood should be poisoned with it, or bear its deadly mixture to that sea across which once sailed the apostolic barque. The wine of Rome’s abominations is now imported into this island, and distributed in a thousand towns and villages by your own national clergy, and all classes and conditions of men are being made drunk therewith. You lovers of your race, and of your God, stop the traffic, and proclaim around the Popish caldron, “There is no healing there.” No healing plants ever grew upon the Seven Hills of Rome, nor are the roots improved in virtue if transplanted to Canterbury, or the city on the Isis. There is one divine remedy, and only one. It is no mixture. Receive you it and live—”With his stripes we are healed.” No sprinkling can wash out sin, no confirmation can confer grace, no masses can propitiate God. Your hope must be in Jesus, Jesus smitten, Jesus bruised, Jesus slain, Jesus the Substitute for sinners. Whoever believes in him is healed, but all other hopes are a lie from top to bottom. Of sacramentarianism, I will say that its Alpha is a lie, and its Omega is a lie, it is false as the devil who devised it; but Christ, and only Christ, is the true Physician of souls, and his stripes the only remedy. Oh, for a trumpet to sound this through every town of England! through every city of Europe! Oh, to preach this in the Colosseum! or better still, from the pulpit of St. Peter’s!—”With his stripes we are healed.” Away, away you deceivers, with your mixtures and compounds: away you proud sons of men with your boastings of what you feel, and think, and do, and what you intend and vow. With his stripes we are healed.” A crucified Savior is the sole and only hope of a sinful world.