sence of our Lord's Flesh and Blood, did not involve the denial of the one Eternal Sacrifice, or that of the Real Presence of our Lord communicating Himself by His Body and by His Blood,-did not involve the denial of essential truth. If it had, the English Church would have ceased to be a Church in the strict sense of the word; she would have lapsed and fallen altogether. And that was not to be. She could not then have wrought her great work as restorer and repairer of the breach.

But the Reformers did complete their work of practical. devastation. They took away the Daily Sacrifice once for all, by forbidding the communion of the priest only; they placed a preparatory service before the essential Offering, which could not last less than an hour and a half; and they did away with early celebrations. In the prayer-book they removed the chief distinct recognitions of the sacrificial character of the rite, (doubtless some remain despite them,) and said nothing specifically of the presence of children or of others not desiring to communicate, nor of adoration due to the Sacramental Presence at the altar. And the bearing, the 00s of their work is attested by our almost invariable practice for three hundred years all together. For three hundred years our children, our poor have been forbidden to worship the Sacramental Presence of their Lord. The little ones have not been allowed to come to Him, and kneel at His feet! How fearful a sin against those children's souls! For three hundred years together the Eucharistic Service, instead of being the one essential worship of the Church, has been an occasional rite, -a spiritual luxury,-something over and above, in which only an elect few have taken part at all. Are not these FACTS ?-terrible facts? Yet we may not state them. It is shocking to mention what it has been found so perfectly natural to allow.

A very mild expression of indignation at the banishment of the poor from our churches gives scandal. Any refutation of the "Reformers'" conduct, however carefully guarded, is held shocking. We can make every allowance for intellectual mistakes; we know that man is liable to error, and that truth had been corrupted and abused; we do not demand of the Reformers that they should have discerned the true theory of the Perpetual Sacrifice in its fulness. But we blame them, and must blame them gravely, for having been so far influenced by the prejudices of the hour as to abolish the primitive and universal worship of Christendom, the Daily Sacrifice. We say that they had no right to set up their

private judgments against what had universal sanction and custom on its side, that they had no right to substitute an intellectual form of worship, however beautiful-and most beautiful it certainly was-for the Pure Offering ordained of God with incense, in which children and the uneducated could have their equal share. To take the most matter of fact and superficial view of the matter, they found many services in all town churches, and left one instead of many, thereby indefinitely decreasing church accommodation. However good may have been their motives, however much, as some imagine, they might desire to retain a daily celebration, they rendered one impossible in the country, and improbable in towns; for it was not probable that any body of the laity would form the habit of daily communion to furnish the three needful communicants; and as for a number of daily or even Sunday celebrations, they put them altogether out of the question. And hence they drove the poor from our churches. It was a gradual work, of course, occupying the better half of a century.

We render due thanks and due honour to such theologians as Mr. Chambers, Mr. Stuart, Mr. Vaux, and Mr. Perry, for vindicating our essential liberty as members of the Church of England, the right of the laity generally, and of children in particular, to remain without communicating during the celebration of Holy Communion. The legal question is not what we treat of. We fully admit and proclaim with Mr. Stuart, that the withdrawal of the people when there is a celebration, is not recognized or formally sanctioned before the benediction at the close, and we thank God for it. But the working of the system remains a sure experience. We must judge the acts of men by the light of their consequences. It was not enough not to enforce the absence nor to sanction the presence of all the people. That practice should have been commended, should have been insisted on, according to the invariable practice of the whole Church from the beginning. None should have been suffered to tear away the lambs of the fold from their rightful spiritual pasture. We are thought bad Christians because our pulse beats higher at the suggestion of this spiritual tyranny. We are accused of passionate exaggeration when we say that this was the best means to heathenize the poor. And yet no truth can be more certain. We all know the result; we have a non-communicant people. Is it wrong or passionate to say that? Is it any answer to point to other evils or scandals in other churches, the existence of a low moral standard, or the like? We are not bound to

give in our adhesion to a foreign system. We do not do so because we see great evils in our own. We are not bound to accept Latin services, compulsory celibacy of the priesthood, or the modern claims of the Papacy; but we say, these are not the things that more immediately concern us. We are not judging others. Our first duty is to judge ourselves, and to amend what seems to be most manifestly amiss in our own Church and country. And it is not disloyal to work in this direction. As we love our Church we wish to make her wholly Catholic.

Now, the most crying of our visible evils is the absence of the masses from our sanctuaries, their practically heathenized condition; of our spiritual, the general failure to recognize any objective Sacramental Presence. The forgetfulness of the departed, the absence of open and constant intercession for their souls, is another very melancholy defect, a virtual return to Sadducean blindness It is a soul-withering, heart-hardening Protestant superstition, that there is an iron work betwixt us and the departed which no prayers can pierce, or that they were frozen up and mummified in the hour of their departure, so that there can be no possible progress in the world of spirits. But on this aspect of the Protestant apostacy we will not now dwell. To return to our more immediate subject, the Real Presence-the more common feeling (one cannot call it opinion) among uninstructed Anglicans is that so daringly expressed by Dr. Biber in a recent pamphlet,-that our Lord, being universally present everywhere by virtue of His Godhead, is specially realized as present by the faithful communicant in the moment of communion, which reduces the whole surpassing mystery to a subjective impression or emotion of the individual soul. But the faith of the Undivided-of the Universal Church is, that our Lord is Present in His human nature, both as God and Man, from the moment of consecration formed under the veil of the elements, and is to be adored as the Lamb by all believing hearts; and this is foreign to the minds and apprehensions of the great body of even our believing people, of those who wish to be faithful to their Church's teaching.

This faith was common to all men, women, and children, save heretics, at the time of the Reformation, and this drew rich and poor together to the house of God, and prostrated them together in the dust before the Divine Majesty. This was Sacramental worship, and it was practically abolished by the "Reformers."

Is not indignation lawful and inevitable? Was it not

really an act of unprecedented presumption on the part of individuals, such as Cranmer and his friends, to take away the Daily Sacrifice, and to obscure the Pure Offering? Are we unreasonable or passionate because we say as much? What would prophets, what would apostles say? Nay, what did they say when they beheld this awful apostacy from heaven, the removal of the Presence and the Sacrifice?

Is it a sufficient excuse for the "Reformers" to urge that they did not wish to deceive or destroy the souls of men? Probably even Arius did not. We impute no evil motives to them, but we say they robbed the Church of her worshipthey practically forbade the only essential act in which little children, as well as men and women, could take equal part, the adoration of the Lamb; and the melancholy undeniable consequence is that the masses in our great cities are heathenized, while the Church has ceased to have any hold on the hearts of the great body of her members. We know we have an intelligent believing laity, and we thank God for it. We have the rich after a fashion, but we have not the poor; and even the rich give a cold assent rather than a hearty service. The great middle class is the staff and strength of dissent throughout the land. Think of our vast cathedrals, with all external pomp restored at last, and only the Essential Presence lacking, and the kneeling multitude. With their cold splendours, the towering columns, the fretted vaults, the glowing windows, and sometimes even the bejewelled altars, they seem to wait for the Pure Offering, the Daily Sacrifice, to give them life and meaning, as winter gardens for the flowers. "Awake, O north wind, and come thou south; blow upon My garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let My Beloved come into His garden, and eat My pleasant

fruits.

We are accused of idle exaggeration for making such assertions. To come, then, to plainest matter of fact, how many communicants do you count among the household servants that are known to you? How many among the artizans of our towns and cities? What amount of intellectual religious knowledge have you found in the minds of that agricultural population with which you are acquainted? Nay, have you not met with the most lamentable doctrinal ignorance frequently in "ladies and gentlemen!"-in the very people present all their lives long at our genteel religious gatherings at eleven on Sunday mornings?

Do we exaggerate because we say that personal love towards the Lord Jesus is not prominent in our teaching, or in

our working system? It is most certainly the fact that Anglicanism, while it has a high moral tone, is generally lacking in a devotional spirit. We do not set one class of graces against another. We do not, like Dr. Newman, in his "Lectures on Anglican Lifficulties," call truth and honesty heathen virtues, and only chastity and meekness Christian. We know this is an unhallowed division of what God hath knit together. We know that all good finds its essential prototype in the perfections of Deity, and is essentially divine. We know that Natural religion underlies Revealed. We know that religious errors, though grievous, may be compatible with the love of God; that wilful sins against the fundamental moral law are yet more fatal to the soul, sins against that teaching of the Holy Spirit which constitutes the moral sense. "He shall reprove the world of righteousness." Sin against the Son of Man may be forgiven; not that against the Holy Ghost. The sins of the Church of England are those rather of omission than commission. But we desire not to blame others; we would speak of our own shortcomings. As a people, as a community, it is true that we have a strong moral sense of right and wrong, but little Sacramental faith, little devotional ardour, little personal love to the Lord Jesus. We would have both qualities, the moral and devotional, the intellectual and the popular element in one working system. "Those ought ye to have done, and not to leave the others undone."

Without taking upon us to thread the mazy path of unfulfilled Prophecy, we may discern that the signs of the times are grave, that the last great conflict betwixt good and evil, faith and unbelief, may now be fast approaching. It is a strange symptom that Victor Emmanuel, the popular King of Italy, should have recently conferred the order of merit of S, Lawrence and S. Lazarus, on M. Renan, a man who had just published a most blasphemous life of our Lord and Master, which treats Him as a genial and a self-deceived impostor; and this on the express score of the services rendered by this infidel to religion! This pernicious book is sold in the streets of the Italian cities, we are assured, and bought largely and eagerly, for about a shilling. We fear that, for a time at least, evil may appear to triumph on the continent of Europe. Is it presumptuous to imagine that the wonderful Revival of Catholic truth amongst ourselves may be destined to prepare us for the last great tribulation? And is it wrong to add that we ought not to live on here without pressing forward that restoration to the utmost of our power?