fore no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.' . . . May the Spirit of Truth shine in your heart, and may you lay aside every weight, and know that peace and strength in your heart which Christ died to give you, and pledged to you in baptism.

I do not in the least doubt your firm faith in the doctrine of the remission of sins as a doctrine; but what I doubted was, whether you derived that comfort from it practically, whether you made that personal application of it, which every baptised son and daughter of the Church is entitled to. I am so tempted myself, and so I think are most sincere persons whose hearts have ever been touched with the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Others, alas! are tempted on the contrary side, as we know but too well.

The act of kneeling, like most formal acts, changes its meaning with time and place. In our Church and day, it is by right only practised when we kneel immediately to God, or when we kneel before a bishop to receive the formal imposition of his hands, according to the ordinance of the Church. At other times, it is an impropriety. In different Churches the case may be otherwise: just as an Abyssinian does right in worshipping in church with his hat on, if he takes off his shoes. I do not consider that what St. Paul says, about praying with the head uncovered, in the least affects him; for St. Paul was laying down a rule there for a particular Church. Again, you may see that our Lord and His apostles reclined in the usual manner of eating when they took the Passover; and yet Moses had most expressly

commanded that it should be taken only with the loins girt and in a standing posture. This clearly shows that in all but God's everlasting truth, and the obviously essential points in the divinely-appointed rites, a change may lawfully take place under the conditions so well expressed in our Thirty-fourth Article.

It has doubtless at other times and in other Churches been lawful to kneel to a priest on certain occasions; but there seems to me to be a very strong presumption against it in the passage between St. John and the angel, in the last chapter of Revelation. Our Church has, in general-I may say, all but universally taken this view. Except in church (when, remember, there is at all times reason to kneel besides the presence of the priest), I am satisfied that we should not kneel except in directly addressing God.

You said something respecting your difficulty in realising a sense of self-improvement. I entirely sympathise with you in this. I have learned to know that it is impossible, under any circumstances, adequately to realise a conviction that we are making progress. Probably it is not fit that we should do so. It seems to me that nothing in the world requires a simpler, stronger exercise of faith than self-education. One must lay down a rule to do certain things in a certain way habitually and patiently, day after day. Again and again it will seem as if one was not getting on; and hence comes in the necessity of walking by faith and not by sight. You may take my word for it, that no one perseveres day after day in any useful pursuit, without fruit well worth the rains.

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The true remedy against all such temptations as you describe, is to think less of your own qualities, and pray earnestly to God to keep your thoughts centred in Him as your Supporter and Sanctifier. Endeavour to feel towards Him as your ever-to-berelied-on personal Father and Friend, who knows what you are, and who can make you what you would be.

It is right that I should forewarn you not to expect to be much interested at first in St. Augustine's confessions. You will find the style somewhat difficult, and much of the matter obscure and on the surface, unpleasing from its belonging to a distant and very different age and country. But I will promise you a sufficient harvest of interest and improvement, if you will read with care, patience, and perseverance.

I wish I had said more to you respecting Prayers for the Dead, when we were together, as the subject is a larger one than I can now pretend to do more than glance at in writing. I think I told you that Archbishop Ussher and Dr. Johnson, with some other English Churchmen of consideration, have approved of them, or at least, allowed and offered them. They are found in very old liturgies, some as early as the third century. They existed in the Prayer for the Church Militant in the first Prayer Book published in the reign of Edward VI. The dead were then commended to God's mercy, and He was supplicated to grant them mercy and everlasting peace in the general resurrection. In the second Prayer Book of his reign, this was changed for the beautiful and undoubtedly

unobjectionable commemoration of departed saints which we now read. I believe the reason alleged for the change was not a direct assertion that prayers for the dead were, in themselves, to be condemned, but that their use in the Church had been made by the Romanists a plea for the doctrine of purgatory, with all its heathenish consequences.

It seems plain, then, that no very strong ground can be taken from authority for excluding their use in private prayer, at least. I should not care to say much either against them or about them in public, or to people in general. But I would fain tell you that I do not, and would on no account offer to God a prayer pertaining to a departed soul. Whatever good or even great men and many may have thought and practised, I cannot but regard the tendency to pray for the dead, whom we love, as an impulse of mere nature, which the full daylight and mature manhood of Christian faith ought to raise us above. I believe that I have felt the temptation as strongly as you, or as almost any one may have done, and on this account I speak the more confidently. Are we not assured again and again that no man can redeem his brother, that every man must be judged according to his own deeds? See how earnestly this is set forth in Ezekiel xviii., and other passages of the same prophet, and of Jeremiah, in opposition to the current lie of the Jews, the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.' See also Psalm xlix. (which, difficult as it may be, is not obscure on this point), and every allusion of our Saviour to the last judgment contained in the gospels. There is, indeed, no passage in our canon bearing on the subject which

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does not clearly prove that it is God's righteous doom that each man should be judged exclusively according to his own deeds.

The most discreet Romanists rest their chief argument on the last few verses of 2 Maccabees xii. As we, on the best and surest ground, reject the authority of the book, we have nothing to do with this passage.

If, then, it is certain that our prayers cannot alter the state of the dead, it would be to me something very like mocking God to offer up such prayers. On the other hand, it would perhaps be a sort of practical denial of His righteous judgment if we thought the prayer could avail anything. But on this view I am not disposed to insist.

If we admit the practice as an allowable weakness, it would seem to me to lay us open to the temptation of loving the creature more than the Creator; that is, of preferring the happiness of a fellow spirit to the justice of God. Now, however hard it may be, we are bound by our baptismal covenant to be ready to give up everything-nay, even to hate (for such is the Gospel language) the dearest object of our love, if it stands between us and God.

In regard to praying for living persons and their contingent salvation, I need hardly observe that the words of Scripture are unmistakably different.

I am much interested with what you tell me of your poor little sick niece. There is always to me something peculiarly affecting in the religious impressions of little children who are on their way by a short road to heaven. I have intimately known