"The whole range of the Christian life": Jelf's Bampton Lectures on the Church as means of grace

In the second of his 1844 Bampton Lectures, An inquiry into the means of grace, their mutual connection, and combined use, with especial reference to the Church of England, Jelf - one of those whom Nockles lists as the 'Zs', the post-1833 continuation of the Old High tradition - expounds the Old High understanding of the salvific nature of the Church and does so in a manner which beautifully captures the character of the ministry of the parish church, from cradle to grave:

But the Church on earth is not only to those who are truly united with her a means of grace; not only an element in each process of sanctification; she is also a means leading directly to many of the means by which grace is to be attained. She is herself "a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ"; she is the authorized channel of the two holy Sacraments of the Gospel; she furnishes a body of men, whom the Holy Ghost calls from within her to be the appointed ordinary stewards and dispensers of these Sacraments, and of God's holy Word; to whom also the direction of public worship is entrusted, together with the power of the Keys.

She provides also many of those subordinate instruments, and exercises, and usages, which, if not means of grace in the proper sense of having Christ's express promise, are yet, in their degree, real, though secondary and derivative, helps to holiness.

So that her influence extends to the whole range of the Christian life. The babe in Christ, of which she hath travailed in birth, and which hath been born to her in holy Baptism, is entitled to be nursed in her lap, and fed with her milk, and to be "satisfied with the breasts of her consolations". It is her office to fold his hands in prayer; to lead him, through the ignorance and dangers of youth, up to spiritual manhood; to warn , correct, recall him to "the path of life"; to sanctify his sorrows and his joys; to comfort his last moments on the bed of death; to lay him in the dust "in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life". These are the privileges, and nothing less than these, to which every faithful member of Christ's visible body has a covenanted and indefeasible title.

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