ence. swer.

that such a man is in no position to settle a controversy or to determine a moot point. For example, in the controversy upon Infant Baptism, most persons would consider the question settled at once by the practice of the early Church when it was still under the eye of the Apostles. Did they, or did they not at that time baptize infants? The New Testament gives no answer, except by inferBut the earliest Fathers give a very explicit anJustin says, for example (writing about forty years after the Apostles), that "certain Christians of sixty or seventy years of age, living in his days, were made disciples of Christ from their childhood." Justin was not inspired; but what he says is fair historical evidence in favour of Infant Baptism, and evidence, it is clear, which cannot be appreciated by a person who has never heard of Justin. This, however, is only one out of numberless instances which might be adduced, to show how essential sound learning, and especially a knowledge of Primitive Christianity, is to a correct interpretation of Holy Scripture. Holding fast Scripture as thus illustrated, we cannot ourselves make any great error in controversy. And amid the abounding errors and contradictions of the day we may comfort ourselves by thinking that by means of them all, God is really showing to His Church some new aspect or aspects of the Truth. The Truth has a vitality in it still; aud many dry rudiments of it, which at present lie dull and uninteresting in our minds, are yet destined to expand and acquire a new significance. Let the mind be frankly open to any and every Truth, however unfamiliar to us the first view of it, which may turn out to be in accordance with the teaching of the Apostles.

2. But a moment remains to follow out the thought

of the possible co-existence of real Unity with total difference of form.

There has been a Church of God, ever since there was a promise for Faith to lay hold of; but how different the forms which the Church has taken at different stages of her career! How different the Law from the Patriarchal Religion, the Prophets from the Law, and Christianity from the Prophets! How different the modern forms of Christianity from its ancient form! Looking to mere outward circumstances (which do not the least affect the essentials of the Rite), how different our present mode of celebrating the Lord's Supper, both from the primitive Institution, and from the early Christians' practice, according to which it was connected with a love-feast! Yet our hope and our faith is the same as that of Apostles and Apostolic men, and our Sacraments are essentially one with theirs. Unity is not uniformity. Unity is harmony; uniformity is monotony. Do not stickle for uniformity, as long as unity is secured. The having the same order of Worship, the same liturgical observances, the same hymns and the same prayers in the same method of arrangement,-friends, the Unity of the Church of Christ does not consist in this. Nay, but in the spiritual worship of one Lord, in the common confession of one Faith, in the filial acknowledgment of one God and Father, who is above all, and through all, and in us all, we find the living, growing principles which knit together the different members of the Body of Christ, Jew and Greek, male and female, Barbarian, Scythian, bond, and free,-which cement the structure of the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Jerusalem built as a city that is at Unity in itself.

LECTURE II.

HOW IT FARED WITH THE EUCHARIST WHILE THE INSTITUTION WAS STILL UNDER THE EYE OF THE APOSTLES.

"When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord's supper. For in eating, every one taketh before other bis own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken. What, have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye the Church of God?"-1 Cor. xi. 20-22.

IN our last lecture we took a view of the Holy Eucharist in its cradle, wrapped, as it were, in its Paschal swaddling-clothes. We now open the second chapter of its history. This second chapter is drawn from the notice of it by the Apostle Paul, as celebrated in the Corinthian Church.

First, it is important to observe that, on St. Paul's becoming an Apostle, the Institution was revealed to him by our Blessed LORD. Of it, as of other matters more purely doctrinal, he could say with truth, "I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ." St. Paul was to hand down or deliver to all the Churches of his planting, together with the doctrines and precepts of the Gospel, this Gospel Institution. And accordingly some means must be taken of putting him in this respect on an exact level with the original Apostles. He must hear from the Lord Himself a recital of what took place at the last Supper, and must receive from the Lord's own lips the Commission which gives virtue and validity to the Sacrament. A transaction so important is not to be transmitted to him through the medium of any man's memory;

it is to come to him pure and limpid from the fountainhead of Truth. And accordingly we read in the twentythird verse of the chapter before us: "For I have received of the Lord"-not of Peter, or John, or Matthew, not even through their instrumentality, but of the Lord"that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread,”—and then follows an account of the Institution, somewhat more exact than that given by the two first Evangelists, and having certain original touches in it, as where the Lord is made to speak of His Body being "broken" for us, and where the cup is called "the New Testament in His Blood." St. Luke, the companion of St. Paul, who was not present at the original institution, has evidently drawn his account from the Pauline revelation, not from the memory of the eleven. The coincidence of his narrative with St. Paul's account is a most interesting trace of the association of the two friends, so often incidentally noticed in the Acts of the Apostles.

My hearers, what shall I say of those Institutes of the Christian Religion, to which a glorified Christ refers in a glorified state-institutes upon which He holds a colloquy from heaven with his newly-admitted Apostle, in the solemn stillness, perhaps, of the wilds of Arabia? Shall I say of such Institutes that they are of more importance than the points of faith and practice, which He dwelt upon while on earth? Nay; without going thus far, we may surely say that any matter which the Lord Jesus, not content with adverting to it in the course of His Ministry, has reiterated from heaven, must be a matter of the utmost moment to the well-being of His Church. And if there be any among my hearers who either neglects the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, or

thinks meanly of it,-any who has taken up with that false notion of the popular religionism, that in Christianity faith is every thing, and Ordinance nothing,-I charge upon him to observe that the voice prescribing the Eucharist Rite is a voice which issues forth not merely from the Passover-chamber, but also from the many mansions of the Father's House, and that the form which gives utterance to this voice is not that of a man of "marred visage," but that of Him whose "countenance is as the sun shineth in his strength," and before whose Resurrection-Glory Apostles fell to the earth confounded.

But to proceed with our history of the Eucharistic Rite.

In the account of the Natural Creation contained in the book of Genesis, we find the various elements, Light and Darkness, Vapours and Water, Earth and Sea, in a state of confusion at first. Afterwards God divides the light from the darkness, the clouds from the waters, the earth from the sea, disentangling and giving them distinct spheres. Something very analogous to this we find in the history of the Primitive Church. It presents to us the appearance of a confused state of things, out of which order and method of arrangement is to dawn gradually. The Apostles at first have charge of the temporal as well as the spiritual concerns of the Church; but afterwards it is thought better that the administration of Church alms should be made over to special officers called deacons, and the Apostles be left at liberty to attend wholly to spiritual duties. Inspiration and the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost seem to have been at first poured indiscriminately over all the members of the Apostolic Church. "Sons and daughters," "young