[Sidenote: Modern and Dionysian ritualism very different.]
The Dionysian theory of sacerdotalism being thus, in its spirit and attitude, an exact inversion of the modern one, it might naturally be expected that the Dionysian ritualism would, in like manner, involve an inversion of modern ritualistic notions.
This was the case. Instead of idolizing the sacraments as of mystic power and virtue in themselves, the Dionysian theory represented them as divinely instituted ceremonies intended to draw mankind by types and shadows upward to God.
[Sidenote: Priests have no power of loosing and binding.]
It did not, like modern ritualism, tend towards the view that the Eucharist is a _sacrifice_ in the heathen sense--a continued offering by a human priesthood of the sacrifice of Christ.[141] On the contrary, it represented this sacrament as commemorative of the death of Christ, and as symbolic of the professed communion on the part of men with Christ, and with one another.[142] It did not set forth the sacrament of baptism as modern ritualists are so fond of doing, as effecting there and then the regeneration of the person baptized. But it regarded baptism as a symbolic _profession_ of change of heart--as the ceremony in which the believer openly takes his soldier's oath to Christ, and promises amended life.[143] It did not represent the sponsors as promising or professing _in the child's stead_, that he is then and there regenerated, but promising that they themselves will do all they can to bring him up as a child of God.[144] It did not admit in any sacerdotal order, any power to remit or retain sin, to bind or to loose. On the contrary, it regarded the priests as God's ministers, who ought to keep in communion with Him, so that receiving intimation by the Spirit of what is already bound or loosed in heaven, they may disclose it on earth.[145]
If any sacerdotal theory could be believable, it must be confessed, there is an intrinsically rational and _Christian_ tone about the Dionysian theory according to Colet's rendering of it, strangely lacking in that of modern sacerdotalists.
Forgetting for the moment the speculative adjuncts to the theory, the professed knowledge of mysteries unknown, which Colet's belief in Dionysius obliged him to accept, but which did not add any force to the theory itself, it will be seen at once how powerful a rebuke he must have felt it to be to the ecclesiastical scandals of the closing years of the fifteenth century. It assumed, as the essential attribute of any sacerdotal order laying claim to apostolic institution, the attribute of a really pure and personal holiness. No merely official sanctity imputed outwardly to a consecrated order, by virtue of its outward consecration, could possibly satisfy its requirements.[146] And in the same way the sacraments were nothing apart from the personal spiritual realities which they were meant to symbolize.