it is a repetition of the sacrifice upon the cross, or a sacrifice again of Christ upon the altar, or that any propitiation is made there for the "remission of pain or guilt" for either" quick or dead; " and as our Church thus rejected the teachings of the Middle Age theology, it, of course, also abandoned the ceremonies, such as genuflexions, elevation, adoration, and assisting by mere presence at the sacrifice of the Mass, which had been introduced "to display more fully" as the Catechism of Trent says, the distinctive features of this theory. They had no warrant in the early liturgies, and do not belong to their age or doctrine. Their source and only significance comes from the system which they symbolize, and as the Church in the United States has never held the doctrine of this system, so has it refused to allow its ceremonial, and the Twenty-eighth Article affirms most unmistakably the mind of the Church upon this whole matter, in its declaration, "The Sacrament "of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshiped."

In this same line, too, is the restoration to the people, as has been already noted, of their part in every "celebration" of the "Lord's Supper." They are not only to receive," as the Lord hath commanded," both the wine and the bread, but, the intention of "this Church" is that those of the faithful who are present at the Sacrament shall partake of the Communion, and in the language of one of the Homilies, they "must be guests, not "gazers, eaters, not lookers-on; feeding ourselves, not "hiring others to feed for us, that we may live by our "own meat," etc. In other words, it is not a service to be performed by the priest alone, but one in which

they are to be "partakers of these holy mysteries" with him. As Strype informs us, one chief purpose of the first English revision of the Liturgy was "the alteration of the Mass into a Communion," and our whole order, from its title to its concluding prayer, is based on this conception. Its preliminary exhortation announces the purpose to "administer" it, and is addressed only to those who are "disposed to receive." Both the invitations are for those who come "to take this holy Sacrament;" the confession and the prayer of humble access belong to none but those who "shall receive;" and the prayer after the Communion gives thanks for the spiritual feeding of those alone "who have duly received" the body and the blood of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. In this, again, as in the points previously referred to, we have in our Liturgy the true Scriptural conception of the Eucharist, and may say, with the great Apostle to the Gentiles, "The cup of blessing which we bless is it not "the communion of the blood of Christ; and the bread "which we break is it not the communion of the body of "Christ?"

Our Liturgy has thus in all its important elements preserved the forms of the early Church and of Apostolic origin, and like them, too, it finds its interpretation and application in the discourses of our Lord and the narratives of His institution of this Sacrament which He left for own guidance "until He come again." With them it places the essence of the Christian life, and the personal value of every Sacra

1Strype's Life of Cranmer. Book I, chap. 30.

ment and ordinance of the Church in the operation and influence of the Holy Spirit. All the benefits which are promised are spiritual; the means are effectual only when blessed by the Spirit, and in our Holy Communion, as in them, the blessing sought and if sought earnestly obtained, is the two-fold communion, on the one hand of our soul with Christ, in which we be made one with Him and He one with us," and on the other of our hearts and lives in spiritual unity with "the blessed company of all faithful people," with whom we are thus knit together as one living body in Him.

But neither eighteen hundred years ago nor now can forms, merely as forms, convey to us the power of these vital truths of Christ. No explanations of either the ancient liturgies or our own can ever give us the full depth of their Divine and holy meanings without our own careful study of their contents, and a prayerful endeavor to live out the life for which they call; and no discussion of their doctrines or their structure can ever teach us their spiritual worth without "an offering of ourself, our soul and body, to be unto God a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice," and a constant desire "to be filled with His grace and heavenly benediction," and thus enabled "to do all such good works as He has prepared for us to walk in, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

LECTURE III.

THE DAILY SERVICES OF THE EARLY CHURCH- THE MEDIEVAL BREVIARY-THE AMERICAN ORDER FOR DAILY MORNING AND EVENING PRAYER-THE PRIMITIVE DOCTRINE OF CONFESSION-THE ROMAN SACRAMENT OF PENANCE-CONFESSION IN THE AMERICAN PRAYER BOOK.

IN

the last lecture I indicated some of the more important relations of the "Communion Office" in the American Prayer Book to the Holy Scriptures and to the liturgies of the Apostolic age and Church.

This service was presented first in our study of the Prayer Book because it has always been regarded as the highest and most distinctive act of public worship of the Church, and also because the doctrine of the Eucharist involves all the vital elements of the nature of the Church and of its ministrations, of the relations of the individual soul to Christ, and of the aims and means of Christian growth and cultivation, as Dr. Dix has1 well said: "What is held about the Sacrament of "the altar, and done in celebrating and administering "it, must always be the test of a religious body."

If we regard the key-note to this to be that it derives its true force and meaning from the operation of the

1 "Lectures on the Prayer Book of 1549," p. 10.

Holy Spirit, that the Divine and actual consecrator is the Spirit, that its benefits lie in the spiritual use we, the receivers, make of it, that as such it demands, as a necessary condition of its worthy reception, faith in those who partake; in a word, if we accept the sacramental doctrine contained in the discourses of our Lord and embodied in all the early liturgies and fathers, we will apply those same principles to all the other offices of the Church, and to the mode in which we shall employ these, for the right development of our Christian life and character. But if in our doctrine of the Eucharist we substitute "the priest " and "the force of the words of consecration" in place of "the blessing" of the Holy Spirit, given in answer to the prayer for His coming, and in consequence consider the presence of Christ such as to be described under physical terms and subjected to material conditions, we shall unavoidably connect the Sacrament with mechanical notions, and regard its effects as very largely dependent on mere mechanical operations; hence also our conceptions of the Church, its means of grace, the work of its ministry and the nature of the religion it fosters, will all be correspondingly materialistic and formal. We have already seen abundant evidence that these were the actual characteristics of the medieval or sacerdotal theology of the Mass in "the dangerous deceits" of masses for the dead, the giving "the whole Christ" in the communion of the bread only, the attributing of sacrificial efficacy to the celebration by the priest alone with no reception by the people, and the worship due only to the true God given, as also due, to the Sacrament.