and the Holy Communion. Suppose somebody, after hearing S. Paul preach, had believed his message and confessed himself a disciple, and then had gone on to deliver himself in some such fashion as this: "Your teaching is profoundly spiritual, and I approve it; you state facts for which you furnish evidence that satisfies me; I really wish to be identified with your work, and will help you as far as I can. But I can't go exactly so far as you do in what seem to me mere forms and ceremonies. I would rather not be baptized. I cannot see that any real good can come from the use, even the religious and symbolic use, of mere water. I am already a disciple by faith. And I don't care to be mixed up with your Church. Some of the members are very vulgar, some are not even good men. And you certainly yourself speak of the Communion of the Body of Christ' in a way that seems to me very likely to mislead thoughtless people. You must be aware that they may get the impression from your way of putting it that your simple little friendly supper has a kind of mystery about it; that it corresponds somehow to a sacrifice in which the offerers and participants have communion with their Deity; that the bread and wine have some kind of real and spiritual efficacy. I wish to be one of Christ's disciples, and I will be; but religion is of the heart, and so I will serve God in my own way, quietly and alone, and I doubt not He will receive and bless me. It is not the form I care for, but the substance." Now, if anybody had addressed S. Paul in this fashion, can we have the slightest atom of doubt how he would have been received? People (if there could possibly have been such in those days) who, when they believed, refused

to be baptized; who took just as much and just as little as they liked of the Apostles' "doctrine"; who respectfully begged to be excused from the Apostles' "fellowship"; who regarded "the breaking of bread" as tending dangerously to superstition; who said their "prayers" by themselves at their own homes-such people were most certainly not the material out of which the primitive Church was constructed. To attempt to construct any Church of such material, would be as wise as to attempt to build a cathedral by letting oxygen gas escape into the open air.

We do not vividly realize this because we are, in these last days, so familiar with the exercise of selfwill and independence in matters of religion; with the great multitude and ever new creation of sects. We do faintly realize it sometimes in missionary work, both at home and abroad. And in fact the divisions of Christendom, though exceedingly injurious and always highly dangerous, are not as yet utterly fatal, because the Church, though with diminished power, does still exist and bear her testimony to the world. But is it worth while to ask-even if by the mutual repulsion of gaseous atoms a Church could have been brought into existence-is it worth while to ask how, without a solid organization, an august hierarchy, a fixed creed, a solemn liturgy, the perpetual objectlessons (to say nothing of the divine grace) of Sacraments, the Church of Christ could have been preserved in the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the creation of modern nations? It may be irreverent to speculate upon what God could or could not have done for the protection of Christianity; what He actually did was to defend it by the organization and ecclesi

astical institutions of the Church, by the political genius of the Roman people, and by the supremacy of the Roman See. It is hard, indeed, to find unmixed good in this world, either in Church or State. The strong power which saves may become a destructive despotism. But however thankful we may be for the Protestant Reformation, and however satisfied with its results, we cannot reverse the facts of history; and it is an indisputable fact of history that Christendom was saved by the See of Rome.

The perfect revelation of divine truth in the Incarnate Word has, like all earlier revelations, to make its way slowly into the hearts and conduct of men. It must be woven into their lives; it must determine their habits; it must present itself even to their senses; it must be so summarized that it can be learned by heart; it must, as a "perfect law of liberty," be embodied in precepts; it must meet men at every turning of their lives, giving them feasts and fasts; it must have its appointed ministers, and solemn and, it may be, even gorgeous rites. Men are what they are, not what we should like them to be. They do not, all the world over, read books, carry on elaborate trains of argument, steer clear of the Scylla of irreverence and the Charybdis of superstition. They have not only their individual, but their national temperament. There are tens of thousands of simple people to whom a roadside crucifix would teach more theology than all the works of S. Augustine or Hooker. The altar and the Eucharist have done more to keep alive the belief in a real propitiatory Sacrifice on the Cross on Calvary, and a perpetual intercession on our behalf in heaven, than all the sermons that have ever been preached. That

we need a higher life than we derive from our earthly parents, that God will give us this life, that He loves and cares for every one of us, and that His love is the cause and not the effect of ours, has been taught more effectually by the Sacrament of Baptism than by whole libraries of systematic divinity. And whenever religion, even the Christian religion, has been deprived of the shelter of institutions, a cultus, à hierarchy, creeds, Sacraments, ritual, it has been more or less dissipated. As a matter of plain fact, those who minimize Christian doctrine are more afraid of what they call "externals" than of all the arguments in the world.

Therefore, at once for the propagation, the preservation, the application to all varying human conditions, of the revelation of the Son of God, we have an organized Church, a Kingdom of Heaven; "ministers of Christ," "stewards of God's mysteries," writing, ruling, teaching-bringing divine truth "home" to every child of man. The Church, because she is ever the same, can be ever variable; because she is "the pillar and ground of the truth," she can "be all things to all men."

REVELATION AS AN AUTHORITATIVE GUID

ANCE OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE.*

I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy commandments from me.-PSALM CXIX. 19.

It may be well, in a few brief sentences, to recapitulate the substance of what I have been trying to say to you during the first three Sundays in Advent. I explained to you, as well as I was able, what I believe. revelation to be. It is not the result of the ordinary processes of the human understanding in pursuit of truth. An industrious schoolboy, learning lesson after lesson, becomes at last a consummate mathematician or a classical scholar; but it would be an absurd abuse of language to affirm that his knowledge of mathematics or of Greek grammar and literature had come to him by revelation. Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, Paley's Moral Philosophy, J. S. Mill's Logic, are highly valuable contributions to human knowledge in very different ways and very different degrees; but they are the result of patient inquiry, severe thought, knowledge of affairs, and the like. Revelation is a direct communication from God to the spirit of a man, of truth which, then and there, he could not otherwise have known; and of rules of life which, then and there, he could not otherwise have discovered. That God is able to make such a communication to men is involved in His very nature and infinite perfection.

* Preached on the fourth Sunday in Advent, 1885.