"The means of grace are not yet exhausted": Jelf's 1844 Bampton Lectures on ministration at the hour of death
And so, at length, the day is far spent, and "the night cometh, in which no man can work." The hand of sickness and death is upon God's weary servant. Still, even then he is mindful that the means of grace are not yet exhausted; his spiritual friend and guide is once more at hand to warn, to support, to pray with him and for him; to receive, if he desire it, his last confession, and, by Christ's authority committed unto him, to "absolve" him "from all" his "sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost". Finally, he receives for the last time the Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, and so, is now and ever, one with Christ and Christ with him. And so he departs in peace, the last sounds which his mortal ears, if God open them, shall hear, being the words of the Church's Commendatory prayer.
It is a quite lovely depiction of why we petition in the Litany to be delivered from "sudden death", that we might have these ministrations in the last days of our earthly life, that we might be delivered "in the hour of death". Note, too, the gentle, modest description of the parson in these ministrations: "spiritual friend and guide". As Jelf has previously reminded us in these lectures, sacerdotalism is no part of the Anglican understanding of the ordained ministry.
Those of us in provinces of the Anglican Communion in which the 1662 form of absolution in the Visitation of the Sick has been (wisely) revised, should not be concerned in the light of Jelf's words. After all, he says elsewhere in this final lecture, ministerial Absolution is for "the quieting of the conscience, the pardon assured to repented sin" - this is given by the ordinary form of Absolution no less than by the special form used in 1662's Visitation of the Sick.
The means of grace sustain us in this earthly life. Then they pass away, when we are received - by the grace and mercy of God in Christ - into "our perfect consummation and bliss". And so the last word goes to Jelf, reminding us of that hope to which Old High piety orients us in our earthly pilgrimage:
May we not suppose, then, that when hope shall have been changed into certainty, and faith into sight, and grace into glory, that the means by which faith, and hope, and grace have been kindled and kept alive, shall likewise vanish away? When this mortal life shall have come to an end (to adopt and pursue a thought of St. Augustine's) there will be no need of the Holy Eucharist, when we shall ever be with the Lord, whose Body we have verily received by faith; nor of an Apostolical Ministry, when we shall be living in the blessed society of Apostles and Angels, and when we shall ourselves, every one of us, have been by "him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood," made "kings and priests unto God and his Father;" nor of the Holy Volume, when we shall see Him who is the Word, when we shall see face to face, and "know, even as we are known;" nor of preachers and evangelists, when we "shall be all taught of God;" nor of Confession and Absolution, when there shall be no more sin; nor of Prayer, when supplication shall be swallowed up in thanksgiving, and in the new song of the Lamb. The use of all these instruments shall have passed away. Yet still that life obtained in Holy Baptism, cherished by faith and obedience, and made more than conqueror, through Christ who gave it, over sin, and death, and the grave, shall endure through endless ages, in the holy city, the everlasting Church, the new Jerusalem, when "the tabernacle of God shall be with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God."
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