established priest or bishop is needed for the performance of the sacraments; the sacraments may be performed by any clergyman or layman, by either man or woman, and they preserve their power, no matter how they are performed, even without any intention of performing, and even with ridicule or mystically. A full half of our dissenters, who form the Popeless sect, permit laymen also to perform the sacraments; but the other half, under the name of the Popish sect, leave them to the clergy, but to clergymen who are either under the ban or even entirely unfrocked, and who have in any case run away from the Orthodox Church, and have renounced it for the sake of joining the dissenting sect. On the other hand, the ancient Donatists, in the twelfth century, and later the Waldenses and the Albigenses, and beginning with the fifteenth century, the Wycliffites, fell into the opposite extreme, asserting that for the performance and efficacy of the sacraments not only a legally established priest but even a virtuous priest was needed, and that the sacraments which were performed by a tainted servant of the altar had no significance whatever. Finally the Reformers and Lutherans invented a doctrine that the efficacy of the sacraments depended not on the worth and inner disposition of the performer of the sacraments, but on the disposition and faith of the persons who received the sacraments, so that the sacrament is a sacrament and has power only during its acceptance and application together with faith, and that when it is not used, or when it is not accepted with faith, it is not a sacrament and remains sterile.” (pp. 314-316.)
The Theology does not refute these heresies, but proceeds to expound its doctrine about the sacraments, each separately. I will analyze each one of these so-called sacraments, but first it is necessary to point out the deceit of the specious proof of the divine establishment of the sacraments, which alone and in one and the same form
