form, but he insists on "in spirit and truth." He says, "My son, give me"-not thine eye, thy knee, but-"thy heart." Worship is not a performance for a man to be charmed with, or the eye and ear to admire, but the expression of deep wants, the cry of broken hearts, the adoration of humble spirits. Nothing in the language of prayer should attract attention to it; there should be nothing in the music to make it take the place of the praise. Music may be carried as a clothing of devotion to the highest pitch painting and poetry are intended to produce impression on the mind from without; music is designed to be the expression of the feelings of the overloaded heart from within. This, however, must be our regulating recollection in all our worship-viz. "in truth." It must not be offered for parade, or ostentation, or éclat; nor to oblige God, or merit favours at his hand: but in truth, and from deep feeling, inspired by the Spirit, and presented through the Saviour, and accepted of the Father.

Let us now look at the place of worship. It ought, say the Romanists, to have a roof at the right angle, a crucifix on the altar, and the bones of some saint beneath it. In the Tablet newspaper there was inserted an advertisement, the other day, from one who has discovered the skull of Thomas à Becket, for a reliquary of gold in which to deposit it. How much wiser the pope seems to be than God! Of Moses it is written, God buried him, and "no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day." The pope would have placed his remains in a consecrated urn, as they wish to do with the pseudo-skull of the refractory Thomas of Canterbury. A human skull without brains is a meet type of the system which sets such value on it. The earliest name given to the place of public worship was Kuptazov. The early Christians boasted they had neither temple nor altar, and therefore refused to apply the word vads to the place of Christian worship. Their place of meeting was often an upper room, a crypt, a catacomb, or desert. As their temples grew in splendour, their worship decreased in purity; till we come to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the noblest cathedrals of England were built, and the sacerdotal despotism of Hilde

brand, the fierce fanaticism of the Crusades, and a cruel midnight superstition, stained the whole of Europe. In very early centuries, the communion-table and the pulpit were placed in the East-some think, in contrast to the Jewish temple, whose holy of holies was in the west. A place of Christian worship ought to be chaste, beautiful, and fairly proportioned; but let the idea of God's presence, not the magnificence of the decorations, be depended on for impression. If I want to feel the most overpowering religious impression from aught beneath and short of God, let me gaze on that high roof, the starry sky, or kneel on some rock while the tempest roars among the hills, and the thunder echoes, and the lightning writes God's glory on the concave of the sky. So shall I worship in God's own cathedral, and with God's own ritual. The noblest temple is built up of living stones. The holiest place on this side of God's throne, is where two or three are met together in the name of Jesus. There is no spot in the universe where God hears not the voice of the humble, be it the publican's first cry, or the penitent's only prayer, or the criminal's last breath; in the deepest mine or subterranean cave, or silent crypt, God hears his sons; on the Alpine peak, on the sea-shore, in the desert, in the silent glen, in height and in depth, there is consecrated ground if there be the true worshipper. The voice of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego rose from the fiery furnace, and entered the ears of the Lord of hosts. The cry of conscious want soars faster than angels can fly, and higher than archangel can soar. The still small voice of true devotion from the chancel of a holy heart is heard in heaven, more distinctly than the crash of the avalanche or the voice of the seven thunders.

The times of worship it is unnecessary to enlarge on. The Sabbath was long the only, and has always been the chief day, for the exercises of devotion and the Christian instruction of the people.

In conclusion, worship is not a form, or extemporaneous prayer-it is not a liturgy, nor the want of one-nor standing, nor kneeling-nor cathedral, nor church, nor chapel. And he is destitute of taste who does not admire the cathedral, but he is

destitute of Christianity who thinks there is no worship out of it. Nor is it of Gerizzim, nor Calvary, nor Zion; it is the worship of the only God, in the Spirit, and through Christ. Let us have no creed but truth, no service but love; let God be seen and felt, within us and by us; let him be the Alpha and the Omega of our life; to him let us give the undivided homage of the soul; and having worshipped imperfectly below, we shall be admitted to worship perfectly and perpetually above.

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LECTURE XX.

APOCALYPTIC SAYINGS.

"And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand."-Revelation xxii. 10.

THE command, "Seal not," is equivalent to, Proclaim-as of instant and extraordinary importance, as entitled to special and universal attention, on all occasions and to all men. The solemn issues in which these sayings shall terminate, and as they are appended here, are alone evidence of the duty of publishing abroad, pressing home, and attentively pondering the sayings of this book. These "sayings," unlike those of man, are of so precious a description, and so replete with practical direction, encouragement, warning, that it becomes more and more the duty, as it will be the joy of the minister of Christ, to unfold and enforce them as the time draws nigh. The cross of Christ, the consolations of the gospel, the greatness of a Saviour's love, the fulness of his gracious promises, the duties of the living, the blessedness of the dead, the responsibility of nations, the nearness of the judgment, and the dawn of the approaching sun, are the substance, and the burden, and the sweet music to man's heart, of many of the sayings of this book.

We are called upon not to seal, but boldly to proclaim these sayings, as far as they relate to us as a nation. God speaks to nations, and they must listen. Britain was "the tenth part of the city," or that one of the ten kingdoms which "fell," i. e. separated from the Papacy at the Reformation. This falling was its rise. We do not applaud the morality of the great persons, or the purity of their designs, by whose indirect and undesigned instrumentality this glorious result was precipitated. The licentious purposes of Henry VIII., and his quarrels with the reigning pontiff, not certainly on the score of evangelical religion, were not sanctioned, any more than the sanguinary proscription

of Mary; but overruled by the providence of God to the elevation of Britain as the Pharos of Europe, the grand national witness for Christ, the central missionary of the whole earth. Her retaining this position has been, and will be, her safety and her duty. Her glory has brightened as her protest has become pure; and her separation from the Apostasy has been felt in her experience, and proved in her unrivalled annals, to be separation from misfortune, degradation, and decay. But, alas! one cannot but notice the accumulating signs of approaching surrender of this high and holy position. Good and patriotic men, pained at the calamities of Ireland, and believing that quiet and order are to be secured only through the medium of the priesthood of the vast majority of that people, and by securing the good-will of the sovereign pontiff, propose to grant endowments for the one, and to open up diplomatic intercourse with the other. Step by step, we have been verging to this crowning sin during many years that are past; and though each step has plunged us into more terrible disasters, yet is the infatuated policy still pursued of attempting to propitiate, by partial concessions, a system whose whole history proves it incapable of satisfaction till absolute supremacy has been secured for its ambitious hierarchy. Each precedent has cried to us at the beginning of the next, Do it not -the very next year has witnessed it done with greater daring. It is our duty to tolerate, but not to endow and thus nationally recognise the Antichristian system. If we shall establish the Papal Church, against which God has spoken so much in his word, in any portion of these realms, or by any grant from our property, we shall then have left our position of strength and safety made good at the glorious Reformation, and have partaken of the sins, and so begun to receive of the plagues that are in store for Babylon. And I believe, that as soon as we shall have identified ourselves as a nation with the mystery of iniquity, the shield over us will be withdrawn, and we shall be sucked into the revolutionary vortex, and share in the ruin with which the ploughshare tears up the continent of Europe. One only wonders that sagacious statesmen, who may not be able to see sacrifice of principle in the endowment of the Papacy, do not foresee how certain of failure such policy must be, and thus how inexpe