from us; it has sprung out of the actual experience of mankind and grown brighter through the ages. The vision of what ought to be is the secret heart and meaning of what is; it is not an alien standard imposed upon us. Do not

worship the Moral Ideal in its abstract dignity only; but, since it is the soul of the actual, turn equally to good persons, whether they be preserved for you in literature and history or whether they bless your daily life by their presence.

But Reason, even when reinforced by the influence of Good Persons, is still not adequate to secure the rounded development of your character. Despite the company of the best-nay, because of it-you may be in danger of moral exclusiveness, of intolerance, of spiritual haughtiness, and even of cruelty towards the less gifted, the vicious and the unfortunate. You may be tempted to avoid contact with those who, although they offend, may need you most and would cleanse you best. You may lose your grip of the responsibilities of life. You may be in danger of becoming idly good. You must belong to an organised movement for the redemption of the world; only absorption in such a movement can give you the strength, enthusiasm and compassion you need.

This third discipline we find in the influence of the Church as a whole upon its members. The Spirit of the Church will not permit you to rest except as you seek to make its fellowship all-embracing. It is not satisfied if anyone is left out. The enthusiasm of the Church's mission creates in us a thirst for the co-operating love of all mankind.

The Moral Ideal, moreover, is essentially social, and can never be adequately manifested in an individual person, however holy. Only a Church-nation is able to reveal the fullness of human perfection.

You, who have now entered into this fellowship, must therefore be loyal not only to Reason, and not only to one holy man or to many good persons, but to a communion devoted to the ideal of humanity.

It would be fatal, however, to magnify even the Church at the expense of righteous persons or the law of reason; not even to the Church must be subordinated either individual persons or that vision which may never be fully embodied in any society.

Let each one of you, then, submit his spirit equally to Reason that gives Law, to Friends who give Love, and to the Community that gives Life.

Following this homily, a hymn of social prophecy might be sung, and then the service ended by the minister with Keble's exquisite words depicting the serene strength of those whom the secret of the higher life sustains :

There are in this loud stunning tide

Of human care and crime,
With whom the melodies abide

Of the everlasting chime;
Who carry music in their heart

Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,
Plying their daily toil with busier feet

Because their secret souls a holier strain repeat.

CHAPTER XIII

THE COMMUNION SERVICE

In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper one sees the life and thought of the Christian Church both at their best and at their worst. This is what one would naturally expect for if there be, as I believe, a fundamental error in the Christian scheme of redemption-its trust in superhuman agents-then in its most intense sacrament this error would find its boldest embodiment. At the same time, it is natural that here also the ethical and human elements should be manifested in their highest power.

Indeed, it is characteristic of Judaism and Christianity throughout their evolution, that those ceremonies and doctrines which are of greatest social utility are at the same time most in need of radical revision. It has been inevitably so. The tracing of inner experiences to the action of superhuman agents has been an attempt at a philosophical or scientific explanation of the profounder sequences of the moral life. These deeper facts did not find a place in the order of everyday events; and they, therefore, were especially attributed to preternatural sources. Hence one may be almost certain that, wherever theology most defies the law of secondary causes, there lies hidden the deepest and tenderest of experiences.

Thus it comes about that the heights of moral discipline have always hitherto been also the pinnacles of supernaturalism; and that dogmas, instead of being merely barren peaks raised by fantastic and empty fears, have been theoretical coverings to human insight at its clearest and human love at its purest. Denude the Church's forms and doctrines of their supernaturalism, and for the first time you will find their full significance and beauty. You remove a disguise which concealed the underlying mental and social truths. The chief points of theological contest are therefore now again the centres of interest for the scientific investigator of mind and morals and for the practical statesman who would reconstruct society.

It thus becomes easy for us to understand why the lightnings of controversial wit have flashed incessantly for a thousand years over the communion-table. The illusion that the ethical power of this sacrament was due to the presence of a supernatural agency began early to take possession of men's imaginations. So deep was the sense of intimacy with Jesus Christ which was induced by participation in this rite, so helpful was it in allaying inward temptation and so quickening to enthusiasm for the fellowship of the Church, that already in the second century a belief arose in the actual presence of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine. Soon the idea grew that in the Communion Service a bloodless sacrifice was each time repeated. In the ninth century it began to be maintained that the bread and wine were actually transformed into the body and blood of Christ. The bread and wine, some thought, ceased to exist except in form, taste and smell; others thought that the substance remained, while the efficacy and power were changed. In 1215 transubstantiation became an article of faith in the Roman Church; in 1672 in the Greek. In the thirteenth

session of the Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, it was declared, "If anyone shall say that in the holy sacrament of the Eucharist there remains the substance of bread and wine, together with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny that wonderful and singular conversion of the wine into blood, the species of bread and wine alone remaining, let him be

anathema." Luther, less consistently, adopted the doctrine that the substance of the bread and wine continued together with the body and blood of Christ. Calvin declared that, accompanying the rite, a supernatural change took place in the soul of the communicant. No body of Christians has doubted the efficacious presence of a living Christ in some mysterious manner through the Eucharist. The Roman Church believes that Christ is entire in both bread and wine, and that accordingly only one kind need be administered to the laity. Witnesses have testified that they have seen the wafers bleed.

How pitiable these errors of pre-scientific subtlety appear to-day! How hard to conceive that men should have once supposed the moral personality of Jesus to need any such support, or that the benefits of the Eucharist would be lessened even if the belief in the miraculous action of a Christ still energising fell away! Happily, this question was one of the few points of philosophical interest in which the Protestant reformers dared to differ from the Church of Rome. The principle underlying their rejection of transubstantiation formed. one intellectual stronghold of the Reformation, and has proved an armoury wherein weapons have been forged for the cause of naturalistic religion and of freedom of thought.

On account of the supernaturalistic interpretation of its moral power, the Lord's Supper, as we know it to-day,