would permit him to preach justification by faith, he would not object to the Mass," he understood not how certainly justification by faith is subversive of the mass, and of all conceptions of the Lord's Supper which have a common root with the mass, and which ask, for the right participation in that ordinance, a faith so alien to that which receives the gospel of the grace of God. Those with whom Luther contended had an instinctive feeling-probably beyond their own clear intelligence in the matter-of the danger to which his preaching of justification by faith exposed the whole hold of their church upon the minds of men, and above all, that which they felt, and feel, and justly feel to be their strongest hold of menthat mass to which he thus disclaimed hostility. The fear at present entertained, by those whose confidence is justification by faith, of the leaven of Romanism working in the land may be more instinctive than intelligent; traditional also it may bedoubtless is with many; while in many, we may hope, it is the discernment that this is another gospel, which yet is not a gospel. But, whether more or less enlightened, I believe that the fear does not in degree exceed the danger, nor, however inoperative, and therefore innocuous the doctrine of the real presence may have been, received by tradition and held among the mere forms of thought, can I, when it is seen, as now, attracting awakened minds, and sought unto for comfort and hope towards God, and renewal of strength for the daily conflict of life, regard it but as evil beyond the worst apprehensions which it has awakened. Christ is the desire of all

nations. All have in them a craving which Christ alone can truly satisfy. Yet, alas! how often is this desire unenlightened, unguided, just that which moves men to meet, with hasty and unwarranted response, the cry, "Lo! here is Christ, lo! there is Christ!" The warning of our Lord in regard to that cry-"Go not after them, nor follow them," may have reference to other and yet future forms of danger to his church; but according to the spirit of that warning do I believe it to be, to treat the assumption of the actual presence of Christ in the bread and wine in the Lord's Supper, as one form of that danger.

I have used the name, "the Mass," as that given to the Lord's Supper in the church of Rome, while I have only referred to part of what constitutes the Mass of Romanism, and gives its high place to that service in the worship of Romanists. For the Mass consists of two parts: first, that receiving and feeding upon the material substance, assumed to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of the Lord, which corresponds to what Protestants call the communion; and secondly, the offering up to God in worship, and as the mean of procuring the highest outcomings of divine mercy, that same material substance as to which this faith is cherished, which is called the unbloody sacrifice, or eucharistic offering of Christ. And this second part of the service of the Mass attracted fully more of the attention of the reformers than the first; for it took to their minds the form of a renewal of sacrificial offering for sin, to the depreciation of the one and all-sufficient

offering of Christ, who, once in the end of the world, hath appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of

himself.

Now, the eucharistic offering appears to me a natural development of the Lord's Supper, seen in the light of transubstantiation; and as such I would now notice it, because the appearance of this development still farther illustrates how the faith of the doctrine of the real presence renders participation in the ordinance a substitute for, instead of a witness to the life of faith.

That which was believed to be, through transubstantiation, the body and blood of the Lord, men fed upon as the food of eternal life. They then proceeded further to offer it in the eucharistic offering to God, that he might accept it as their highest worship, and might, in acceptance of it, manifest the highest grace, (for, doubtless, that effect on the condition of spirits out of the body, which they contemplate in that offering, they regarded as the highest form of answer to prayer.) I ask, is not this, as a whole, consistent with itself, and the second part a natural development of the first? I trust you regard the whole subject with too solemn a sense of its importance, to deal lightly with any part of it, because of its incongruity with our habits of thought. If Christ is conceived to be so truly present, where to sense is but a material substance, that he may therein be fed upon by the human spirit; to one so conceiving, what coming to God in the name of Christ, or asking mercies for Christ's sake, or presenting of Christ to the Father as the ground of

expectation of the answer of prayer, can be more fitting than that of the eucharistic offering? Feeding upon Christ, and worshipping God through Christ, are so related, that what we understand to be the first of these will always determine our conception of the other also. With very different measures of spiritual apprehension are the expressions-" accepting Christ as a Saviour,"-" receiving him as the bread of life, which hath come down from heaven,"-employed by Protestants; which may be also said of our use of the expressions"praying in Christ's name," "trusting for the answer of our prayers to Christ's merits," but the meaning of the former language, as used by any individual, determines, as to his use of it, the meaning of the latter also. As these two several attitudes of the human spirit are related to each other in the experience of Protestants, so to Romanists are the two parts of the service of the Mass mutually related. The parallel between what we know in ourselves, and what we see in the Mass, will be more and more apparent to us in proportion as our experience of Christianity is more truly the fellowship of the life of Christ. What we receive from God, in Christ, as eternal life, is what, being fed upon, and so becoming our own actual life, we offer to God in worship. Our life ascends to God in worship. And it is its being the divine nature-its being the eternal life, that is the secret of the acceptableness of the worship, and of the sureness of the response to it. The life which we are living is lived, so to speak, in our being led by the Spirit of God, and, therefore, the worshipping form of this life is,

worship in spirit and in truth. We are born of the will of God, and we, therefore, ask things according to His will, and He heareth us. Thus is it the mind of Christ which we present to the Father. Thus is Christ, who, through the Eternal Spirit, offered himself without spot to God, and was accepted as the one and sufficient sacrifice for sin, presented anew in all prayers of Christians, in so far as these are a participation in the spirit of Christ-a form of the life of Christ in them. "To whom coming as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious; ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ." Knowing thus, in ourselves, the relation which the spiritual reality of worship bears to the spiritual reality of feeding upon Christ, we understand how the belief of the doctrine of the actual presence has produced the Mass of Romanism in both its parts, and see, in the eucharistic offering, the substitute for that worship which is in spirit and in truth, as we saw in the other part of the service, in which the consecrated material substance is partaken of, the substitute for receiving with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save the soul.

The completeness of this parallelism greatly tends to confirm the conviction, that the one of these objects of contemplation is the counterpart of the other; and at the same time to strengthen the fear that, if the counterpart once begin to awaken an interest, and to be felt something to the mind because of what seeming religious feeling the faith of