So here we see the meaning and feel the appropriateness of the Lord's Supper. It is because our relation to God is so intimate that no other expression for it is adequate or truthful. The use of it proves the case so. For what other relationship would "eating flesh and drinking blood" be fit language, or that sacrament a fit emblem? That relationship, not to be described like others, demands that expression. As bread and wine are the very life and body of the man-as he is not, except by them-so is it that God is us, makes us, is our life and Being; we cannot be separated, we must live by Him. It is not that we live separately and by ourselves, and then come into relation with a Being apart from us, as we do with others; but we only live or be at all by Him; the relation to Him is not a result, but the source of the life.

With regard to prayer. True, God does not change; the fact, His act, changes not, but the phenomenon of it may change. That is change, not in God, but in man. "If that be all, why then pray for it ?" Observe, is it not real to us? Is it not what we want? We must allow that prayer will not change what is, but it may change what is in time.

Although the phenomenal only is subject to the power of prayer, yet is not that all that it should be? Is it not to that our feelings cling, and about which our hopes, fears and desires twine? Is it not the "actual" to us? and is not that all we would wish or desire to alter? Would we alter the fact of the universe, alter what God does and wills? This is the scope and place of prayer.

We may own and reverence, and heartily consent to, prayer; but we must nevertheless protest against its

being brought in as a kind of salve to make tolerable a theory of things that ought to be intolerable, and left in its naked hideousness in order that it might be felt so: viz. the idea that God has arranged a system in which evils, and bad and inexcusable things in themselves, may befall, by His abstinence, as it were, and permission. We must not call in prayer and Divine interference, to help us to swallow this camel; straining meanwhile at the gnat of him who says: "I see that God rules all, and I do not see how to pray." Of course, a seeing person cannot see how to pray, when prayer has been obscured, nay, blotted out, by such representations.

Christianity is not a theology but a fact. We see men are fallen, are wicked, and are redeemed by Christ; words are vain, and nothing to the point; say it how we like, here it is. Wicked men, dead men, do receive life from Christ; are redeemed, are made holy; it matters not to talk. And there is none other Name -no other religion does it, attempts it, tends towards it.

66

Seeing the world perfectly right and good is the true basis of all earnest and energetic action; for it is as a means it is right, because of what is to be by it. A man who sees and approves a means as such, does not rest in it; he acts and uses it. Seeing the world thus right and good, necessarily we throw ourselves heart and soul into the great life; God's (Nature's) action absorbs and carries us away too. If He works in us, there is a necessarily unfailing source of activity and zeal that casts the self out of us, and makes us one with the course of Nature. All other action must be laborious and lifeless in comparison. So we see the meaning of the apostles' contentment with the world; their finding

it full of God's glory; and at the same time their earnest, intense zeal to alter it. It is as God finds it, as He sees the world. His seeing the evil right and good, and not being a thing He cannot tolerate (or however we may like to say it), does not paralyze His activity, does not prevent His curing the evil.

Men will cling to the form, let what will come of the fact. We will have the believing in Christ, though there be nothing in it, it must be that form though it be nonentity. The fact, the life, or what is nearest to it, may be elsewhere; but this we utterly abjure, if there be not the Christian form. It is thus: once there was connected with Christ the very fact of man's Being; He gave life to men; now we have forgotten all about the life, and use Him more or less worthily merely as a means for getting something. And yet now more than ever we will have Him accepted and sworn by, though there be no longer any life connected with Him: this is our orthodoxy. But this is not the end; the stream does not flow through the channels where His Name is named; but it flows still, and none the less from Him. Christ is the sole life of this our modern world, the sole though unacknowledged source and spring of its love and self-sacrifice. In those ages when the Church was darkest, where were the saved? Why, out of the Church; among those who denied that Christ. Men are bound to deny our Christ, but that does not make them less Christians. If God be in them, and they true men, Christ is in them; they live by Him. It is monstrous to make believing in Christ the accepting of a name. We retain the name but have given up the fact. Never shall the world have true life until men see the fact of Christ again.

Surely it may be that there is a sense in which even Christianity is to be surpassed. Not, certainly, in the revelation of God to the heart and sight; not in the doctrine which shows Him as the giver of Life. In this, all thought apart from it has fallen infinitely short; nor can any advance do more than restore it, and place it in its true light. But in this sense such an advance may be destined: in the leaving behind the miraculous element" greater works than these shall ye do "which shall come through the perception of the spirituality of all our experience, truly, through Science. This is simply a corollary from the idea that miracle is by a negative. That less, that revelation by a minus, was needed then. The time may come when it will be thus understood, and no longer needed. Science faintly whispers about it now in the doctrine of God revealed in "law." Let us only see that this "law" is one with the revelation of self-sacrifice in Christ, and then, surely, this higher point is attained.

VII.

HOLINESS.

Nature is self-control-The moral life is parallel to the mental-To be moral is to act-Ago ergo ego-Misery only removed by removing selfishness-No action but right action-There is no true arbitrary action or free-will-Arbitrary action is sin-Freedom because necessity-Man cannot fail because he is a part of Nature—The only mystery is man's death-The moral lesson of Science-Our moral life is passion controlled-The phenomenal nature of evil— Sin as inaction-The analogy of disease to sin-Evil to the individual is good to the race—] -Life comes only from death-We are redeemed, not tempted, by matter-Creation is self-controlGod has no physical power-"Creation out of nothing "-The creature is one with the Creator-Self-sacrifice is not loss-A selfish world is the necessary phenomenon of an altruistic world— No nutrition without a final function-The resurrection of the dead comes by man.

NATURE is self-control, yet no restraint. It is perfect liberty; absolute, self-enjoying freedom. Oh wild luxuriance of beauty! forms of perfect loveliness in infinite diversity, wandering at your own sweet will, creeping over earth or towering to heaven, making space resonant with gentle laughter and radiant with smiles. Ye speak to my heart of passion wisely ruled, of affections directed to the right. Due self-control, ye testify ever to reluctant man, is life, is joy, is liberty. What gentle entreaties, what earnest admonitions, what solemn testimony, "God does thus," have ye uttered all the ages past, are ye uttering still. Ever ye say to man,