make unconsecrated Bread and Wine equally available and effective? The tendency of this error is to place the whole of religion in the shifting frames and feelings of the soul; to turn the eye exclusively inward, and to foster a wretched introspection; to hinder man from walking abroad freely in the sunlight of Christian privilege, and among the great objective realities of the Kingdom of God.

But there is another, and at least equally fatal, error on the other side. In contemplating God's Ordinances, we may look wholly at the Institution, at the external observance, and dwell upon it until we allow it to engross the whole field of view, and put out of sight altogether the state of mind in which it is to be approached. The Ordinance, according to this view (and it is the view of all Romanizing Theology), becomes a spell or charm, which acts upon us independently of our giving our mind to it; and a sort of system of magic is set up in the Church of Christ, which quite deprives the Institution of the character of a reasonable service. The monstrous absurdity of such a view is shown in the strongest light by some of those frivolous questions which Romanist Theologians, pursuing their theory to its just conclusions, ask in their books of Casuistry; for example, "Would an animal,1 partaking by an accident of the Host or consecrated wafer, become partaker of the Body of Christ ?" The very fact of such a question being raised shows surely to common sense and common reverence, that they who raise it must be altogether on the wrong scent. To come across such a difficulty at all, they must have erred from sound Reason and Scriptural Truth. An animal has not that immortal spirit, by which alone man is enabled to hold communion with his Creator. To apprehend God, there must be reason; and accordingly the lower creatures, being devoid of reason, cannot apprehend God. This is of course an extreme form of error; but it is clear that any "the

1 The question was actually put to Anne Askew by Quest" in 1545, "whether, if a mouse should eat the consecrated wafer, he received God or no.'

approach to such a conclusion must be wrong. Suppose a man imbruted by sensuality, -one who had reduced himself by indulgence of the animal appetites to the level of the beasts that perish,--such an one, it is clear, could not apprehend Christ, nor become partaker of His Body. There may be in him the spiritual faculty; but it is latent, undeveloped, almost extinct. Then the question arises, "What kind and amount of development must there be in the spiritual faculty to ensure the blessing of the Ordinance to the recipient?" And the only answer to be given to this is that which our Church has given. There must be penitence, real and genuine, if not passionate. To celebrate Christ crucified with a heart of stone, what a profanation must it be!-There must be love. To celebrate the feast of Love with any portion of rancorous feeling, what an awful discordance between the outward and the inward !-There must be holy intentions. To profess self-surrender to a Crucified Saviour without integrity, what a frightful hypocrisy! And, finally, there must be the faculty which realizes things unseen. To regard the elements as so much natural food, and not to discern by faith the Lord's Body lying beneath them, would evidently be to frustrate the Ordinance altogether! We have indeed no warrant for prescribing the amount of these inward qualifications. We doubt not that where they really exist, there the blessing of the Ordinance is in a degree realized, even though a far greater measure of them might be desirable. And we cannot doubt also that, the more we grow in these dispositions, the more fruit shall we gather from this holy Ordinance, and the more shall we experience the blessedness of it. A lifeless body has no power of assimilating food. A feeble living body can only assimilate a little, administered by degrees. But a body with the pulses of life beating strong and quick within it, a hungry and a craving body, can assimilate it thoroughly and easily, and grow thereby. And the soul resembles the body. With a feeble spiritual pulse we can apprehend Christ but feebly in

the Holy Communion: but if there be a strong hunger and thirst after righteousness, a strong craving for the Bread of Life, a strong sense of spiritual poverty and indigence, a strong resolve formed in reliance on God's grace, a strong faith which pierces the veil of things sensible and material, great will then be the comfort received from this Holy Communion, and in the strength of that meat we shall go forward, like Elijah of old, to the mount of God, the end and goal of our pilgrimage.

CHAPTER III

OF THE CONFESSION

"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”—1 JOHN i. 9

MAN are

AN was made, we are told, originally in the image

of God; and, although man be fallen, there

still certain echoes in his nature, and in his dealings with his fellow-man, of the divine perfections. These echoes are recognised in some of our Lord's Parables, and are indeed the basis of the similitude. What other foundation have the Parables of the Friend at Midnight, the Unjust Judge, the Unmerciful Servant, the Prodigal Son, but the truth that God will deal with us much as we deal with one another; being won by our importunity, roused to anger by our harsh dealing with others, and moved to welcome us back to His arms on the first movement of a true repentance?

Now among the features of a better mind in man, which have survived the great moral wreck of the Fall, is this, that we are always disposed to relent towards an offender who ingenuously confesses his fault, and takes upon himself the whole shame and blame of it. That man's heart is unnaturally and exceptionally hard, who,

when another says to him, "I have injured you deeply, and I have nothing to say in my own defence; I throw myself upon your goodness and forbearance; forgive this great wrong,"-can spurn away the suppliant, and refuse to look indulgently upon him. Now this

feature of the human character is a dim reflection of the infinite compassionateness towards penitent sinners which there is in the heart of God, in virtue of which, "if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins."

And

But then it must be remembered that God, inasmuch as He is a searcher of the thoughts and intents of the heart, does not accept as confession, as we are obliged to do, the mere acknowledgment of the mouth. confession of sin with the heart is by no means so easy a thing as we are apt to imagine. The mere telling forth our faults presents little or no difficulty. What is so difficult-so impossible, except by divine grace— is the honestly taking to ourselves the full blame and shame of them. In the moment of the Fall, the principle of self-love acquired in the human mind the most exaggerated dimensions; it ceased to be a just and proper self-love, and became self-partiality of the grossest kind. And to stand clear of this selfpartiality in estimating our faults is, in fact, the hardest moral task we can set ourselves. Our present mental constitution resembles in this respect our physical. Persons afflicted with cancer, or similar complaints, are not themselves sensible of the loathsomeness and offensiveness of the disease; it is to them endurable, though it is eating into their vitals; whereas others can hardly be in their neighbourhood without a sensation of nausea. And bosom sins have a similar property of inoffensiveness to their possessor,-to the very person in whose nature they are a great gangrene. The man cannot, except by special grace, stand apart from himself, and judge his bosom sin as he would judge it in another. We see accordingly that the first indication of the Fall of man was his making excuses for what he had done, the exceeding reluctance to acknowledge

the freedom of his own will, and therefore the fulness of his own fault, in the eating of the forbidden fruit. Adam, when expostulated with, shifts the blame to his partner; while at the same time he does not hesitate to bring in God Himself as partly guilty: "The woman, whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat." The woman, when she is referred to, traces the guilt up to the serpent: "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." Marvellously lifelike representation of the way in which their descendants have always cloaked their faults, when God has expostulated with them in the inner man. Do we not all make for ourselves excuses precisely similar? Sometimes we secretly whisper to our own conscience; "The passions are so much stronger in me than in my neighbour." Sometimes (forgetting that different positions have different temptations of their own); "My circumstances are so peculiarly trying." Sometimes; "It was society which drew me into this sin." While we sometimes quarrel with (or at least murmur against) our Creator in the true spirit of Adam: "Why has He surrounded me with such an atmosphere of temptation? Why has He so strictly prescribed virtue, and yet made the attainment of it so difficult? If I throw temptation in the way of others, I am blameworthy, and consider myself so. Why does God put me providentially in harm's way, and then find fault?" And all this time, while we are thus reasoning, we fancy ourselves conscious of great rectitude of intention, even in the face of all facts. That is a profound saying of the wise man's ; "All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes." Not that sinners can sin without many checks and hindrances from an accusing conscience. But these checks and hindrances do not interfere with their favourable estimate of their own character. Even when their conduct is admitted to be faulty, they are still on good terms with themselves. The man who has committed the most atrocious crimes, never thinks himself a demon, though all the world may so esteem him. The truth is, that the human will never can accept evil

L