'This one foundation, Christ crucified': an Old High sermon for Good Friday

The doctrine of the cross is therefore a saving doctrine, a vital doctrine, a fundamental doctrine of Christianity; and we hold it to be no less indispensable now, than it was in St. Paul's time, that every minister of the Gospel should be able to say with truth, We preach Christ crucified. 

The words are those of Charles James Blomfield in a Good Friday sermon during the 1820s, when he was vicar of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, London and (from 1824-28) Bishop of Chichester. Blomfield had associations with the Hackney Phalanx. The preacher at his episcopal consecration in 1824 had been John Lonsdale, who had links to the Hackney Phalanx. The Old High Howley of London, translated to Canterbury in 1828, cultivated Blomfield as his successor.

This, in other words, was most definitively an Old High sermon - an Old High sermon proclaiming Christ Crucified as "a saving doctrine, a vital doctrine, a fundamental doctrine of Christianity", contrary to the oft repeated misrepresentations of the preaching of the Old High tradition by 19th century Evangelicals and Tractarians. What is more, Blomfield warns of the necessity of this proclamation in the face of "rational Christianity":

it is so important, and especially in these days, in which rational Christianity, as it is called, is cried up, in opposition to that which we hold to be scriptural and evangelical, it is so important, that all Christians should have a serious and reasonable conviction of its being indeed a scripture doctrine, an essential feature of Gospel truth.

Having addressed the coldness of a "rational Christianity", emptied of the Cross, Blomfield also reminds us that the saving power of the Cross is ministered not through the emotions of Enthusiasm and Revivalism, but through "all the ordinances and ministrations of our holy religion", in exhortations to repentance and the declaration of absolution, in creedal faith, in preaching, moral teaching, prayer, sacraments, and the church's ministry at the hour of our death. 

Here is the "most holy and comfortable truth", that the Church's ministrations bring to us "this one foundation, Christ crucified":

My brethren, we preach Christ crucified. That most holy and comfortable truth is implied, and taken for granted, in the whole of our teaching. All our exhortations to repentance, all our encouragements to hope, all our declarations of God's mercy to sinners, have this one foundation, Christ crucified. When we tell you to believe in Christ, we mean, Christ crucified. When we persuade you to do, or to abstain from any thing for Christ's sake, we mean, for the sake of Christ crucified. If we pray in Christ's name, it is in virtue of his name, as a crucified Saviour. If we baptize in his name, it is that you may be elect, through sanctification of the Spirit unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Christ. When we invite you to his holy table, it is, that you may spiritually partake of Christ crucified; and have your faith in him strengthened by those convincing words, This is my blood which is shed for you, and for many, for the remission of sins. It is thus, that in all the ordinances and ministrations of our holy religion, by which the Christian is instructed, strengthened, and comforted in his passage through the vale of tears, Christ crucified is made to him the power of God, and the wisdom of God. And when his race is run, and that moment, so dismal and hopeless to the unbeliever, is at hand, when he must pass into the world of spirits; when the legal confidence of the formalist, and the unsubstantial wisdom of the disputers of this world are crumbling into dust; religion still attends him, and bids the trembling soul look to the cross of Christ; not to that material representation of it, to which superstition attaches an imaginary efficacy; but to that lively portraiture of the crucified Redeemer, which has been graven by the energy of faith upon the fleshly tables of the heart; and soothes the pangs of departure with the only plea for mercy which can then be urged: "Lord, we humbly commend the soul of this thy servant into thy hands; beseeching thee that it may be precious in thy sight. Wash it, we pray thee, in the blood of that immaculate Lamb, that was slain to take away the sins of the world; that whatsoever defilements it may have contracted in the midst of this miserable and naughty world being cleansed and done away, it may be presented pure and without spot before thee."*

[*These words are from the 'commendatory Prayer' in the 1662 Visitation of the Sick.]