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the paschal lamb did not save the Hebrews by being shed merely, but by being sprinkled; so it is not enough for our pardon and safety that Christ has died, and that His blood was shed upon the cross. That blood must be applied to us in a spiritual sense; it must be sprinkled on the soul, in order to our forgiveness and acceptance. Every one, for himself, must go to this fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness. It is as those who have been washed in this blood that we approach the table of the Lord, rejoicing in the atonement made by the death and sacrifice of the Son of God. Thus He is all our salvation, and should be all our desire.

3. Another important feature of the Passover was the participation of the sacrifice. The paschal lamb was to be eaten by those for whose safety its blood had been sprinkled as an atonement or expiation. It was duly prepared for food, and all in the household were to partake of it, that the sacrifice might thus become to them symbolically the food or sustenance of a new and better life. And the use to be made of the sacrifice of Christ is frequently signified as feasting on Him. He is the Bread of Life -the true nourishment of the soul. His own words emphatically declare this,- 66 Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you." (John vi. 53.) Christ Jesus, in the fulness of His perfected redemption is "the living bread which came down from heaven," and by partaking, through faith, of this heavenly sustenance, we become in Him"one bread and one body," partakers of His life, and fellow-heirs of His glory. The Saviour must be

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the daily food of the regenerate soul, as He alone can nourish the spiritual life within, so that it shall grow in strength and beauty. He is food to the intellect, for He is "the truth," and can alone fully satisfy and nourish the human mind. He is food to the heart, for He is love itself, and the highest proof to us that "God is love," and He only can fill the heart with that Divine affection which is essential to its life. He is food to the conscience: no voice but His can hush its accusations, and fill it with peace; no influence but His can maintain its purity and power. Christ nourishes sacredly, efficiently, and eternally, every faculty and element of manhood. He is "our life." Blessed are they who feast on Him as the Passover sacrificed for them. What can they want beside? In Him the soul's true life finds development and strength, sustenance and adornment from day to day. The more that our life is a life of faith upon the Son of God, so much the more vigourously and surely shall we advance in likeness to God and meetness for glory. Let us then, with growing desire and delight, seek to know more of the Communion of the blood and the body of Christ.

4. Another significant ceremony essentially connected with the Passover, and in some sense a part of it, demands notice. The day which followed the paschal feast was to be observed as a Sabbath—“ an holy convocation;" and on the morrow after that Sabbath, a sheaf of the first fruits of the barley harvest was to be presented to the Lord by being waved before Him, in the name of all the people. (Levit. xxiii. 9-11.) Thus they acknowledged that their title to the produce of the land rested ex

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clusively on the gift of God. But why was the ceremonial connected with the Passover? Was it not clearly symbolical of the resurrection of "Christ our Passover," as the first fruits of them that sleep in death? (1. Cor. xv. 20-23.) Christ was crucified for us on the day before the Jewish weekly Sabbath, so that on that occasion, as sometimes was the case, the ordinary Sabbath and the paschal holy convocation" occurred on one and the same day. Hence in the Gospel of John (xix. 31) it is, called " an high day," and as Christ arose from the dead on the following day, He actually rose as the Great Antitype on the very day on which the sheaf of first fruits was offered and waved according to the law. Then the type and antitype, the symbol and the reality, significantly met. "Christ our Passover," who was crucified for us, arose from the dead the first fruits of them that slept,--arose the pledge and pattern of the resurrection of a

mighty multitude who shall reign with Him in glory for ever. Thus the Passover points us to the future as well as reminds of the past, and shows us how, as sprinkled with the Saviour's blood, we may claim the promised inheritance of the saints, and rise with Him to life for ever

more.

In these words, which have been the subject of our brief meditation, there is great suggestiveness, and much instruction. In the prospect of sitting at the Lord's table, and in the actual commemoration of His dying love, they may well supply holy thought to the mind and rich solace to the heart, assuring us of the atonement which has been made, and the reconciliation which has been effected; revealing to us the source of all spiritual strength, and the means of spiritual progress; and pointing us to a glorious future in which death is "swallowed up in victory," and life encompassed with unfading glory.

DOCTOR ROBERT SOUTH ON THE PRAYERS OF DISSENTERS. LESSONS FROM OUR ENEMIES.

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his life, when the Protector was in power, he was a staunch Calvinist and Presbyterian; but at the Restoration he had the prudence to discover the error of his past ways. He found that "the light of the king's countenance was life, and his favour as dew upon the grass," and henceforth he did the work and fought the battles of the Established Church.

There are some men who are miserable if they have nothing to love. South would have been miserable if he had had nothing to hate. Fortunately for himself, he does not appear ever to have been reduced to

that extremity. His temperament

was such that he showed his fidelity less by loving his friends than by hating his and their enemies. And yet we cannot help liking the man. He is so thorough; he seems so thoroughly to enjoy his own invective that we can hardly help enjoying it with him, even at our own expense; and there is so much strength and humour, such felicity of illustration, and, behind all his buffoonery, so much sound common sense, that it would be hard indeed if, now that the sense of injury has had 200 years to cool, we were too indignant to read with some sense of enjoyment as well as profit his fierce tirades against us.

South never wore a mitre, though on one occasion he was very near winning one. He was preaching before Charles II., and, speaking of the vicissitudes of life, selected Cromwell for an illustration. "And who," exclaimed the royal preacher, "that beheld such a bankrupt, beggarly fellow as Cromwell, first entering the Parliament-house with a threadbare, torn coat, and greasy hat, perhaps

neither of them paid for, could have expected that in the space of so few years he should, by the murder of one king and the banishment of another, ascend the throne?" At which, we are told, the king fell into a violent fit of laughter, and, turning to Lord Rochester, said that his chaplain should be made a bishop at the next vacancy. However, the promised bishopric never came. Either no bishop would die, or the king forgot his promise; even as South seems to have done that famous Latin panegyric on Cromwell which had won him so much renown at Oxford a few years before.

But, though ambitious, South seems to have been comparatively free from the vice of covetousness. He desired preferment for its own sake, not for the emolument it brought with it. He even boasts that he declined various livings which were offered to him. And it appears that he devoted a great part of his income to the improvement of those livings from which he derived it, residing himself at Caversham-though none who know what a pleasant little nest for a country parson that is, with its fine old residence and pleasure-grounds sloping down to the river, will be inclined to give him much credit for self-denial on that account.

The contrast between the character of the man and much of the best part of his preaching sometimes painfully mars the effect of the latter. But we have no need to suppose that he was insincere or did not feel at the time what he was writing. In many of his sermons we have a record of the best moments of the best side of the man. And that, after all, was the side which was most truly HIS. A man is often

maligned by his own biography. Those facts which go to make up his history are often not those which represent the man most kindly or even most faithfully. And not only is his life often better than his biography, but his heart is often better than his life. That it was so with South must be evident to all who will read his works in a kindly Christian spirit, and judge him as they would wish to be judged themselves.

Now there are many lessons which might be learnt from this prince of preachers, as he is called; some of the most valuable of which are incidental in their character, and must be gleaned from the works themselves. But we propose calling special attention to only one.

In a spiteful, vigorous sermon from the text, "Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter anything before God; for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth; therefore let thy words be few" (Eccles. v. 2.)--which may be said to be directed against what South himself would call "the SIN of extemporaneous prayer"-he gravely assures his auditory that two hours was reckoned quite a moderate dose; that the pulpit was generally the emptiest thing in the churches of Dissenters; that their ordinary fasts were from seven in the morning till seven at night; and that he never knew such a fast kept by them, but their hearers had cause to begin a thanksgiving as soon as it was over. He speaks of their prayers as full of insolence, scurrility, confusion, prolixity, tautology, hypocrisy, and cant; says that they shut their eyes and stretch out their hands like men who are talking in their sleep; and that they pray at

such length that those who can forbear sleeping deserve greater praise for watching than they do for praying. After much more to the same effect, he finishes up by an apology to his audience for the annoyance he must have caused them by raking into the dirt and dunghill of these men's devotions.

Perhaps some of our readers may think that an apology is due to them for raking up this strange specimen of what was thought consistent with the proprieties of public worship in Westminster Abbey 200 years ago, and that by a dean who was so great a stickler for Church order as South, whose effigy still adorns the ancient pile where once his living voice uttered these words.

Of course it would not be difficult for us, after such a passage as this, to retort with interest the charge of insolence, scurrility, and indecency, if so disposed. Truly such a style as this, as De Foe justly observes, savours more of the bear-garden than the cathedral. But it will be more for our profit to see what grains of wisdom may be gathered from the words of this priestly scoffer.

So far as the inordinate length of their prayers is concerned, a little acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Puritans of that generation helps us to determine that the charge is not quite so exaggerated as at first sight it may appear. Calany has left an account, which he says he received from Howe's own lips, of one of the services ordinarily held by him on fast-days, which were of frequent occurrence at that time, from which it appears that the service commenced about nine in the morning and continued till four in the after

noon, without a single break for the people, and only one of about fifteen minutes for the officiating minister. There were two prayers of about an, hour each, two of half-an-hour, and an introductory prayer about the same -length as our ordinary long prayer in public worship; nearly three hours' preaching, and the remaining part of the seven hours' service was taken up with the full-flavoured psalmody of the period.

Truly, if such meetings were common, even with Howe for the preacher, they must have been a weariness of the flesh, while with men of far inferior ability it must have been a test of patience and endurance to which, to say the least, it would require a bold man to subject modern Puritans. Such extemporaneous prayers as these could hardly have been the "intoxicating and bewitching cheat" which South calls them; and if the " terpieces the Devil," they were masterpieces over which South should have rejoiced, for their manifest tendency would be rather to drive men from the conventicle than to attract them to it.

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As to the matter and manner of their prayers-confusion, tautology, prolixity, cant, and so on-we may take his assertions for what they are worth. From most of them it would be simply an insult to the memory of these holy men to attempt to defend them.

The most obvious inference one should think, even from the caricature which South draws, is about the last which that celebrated court preacher would have desired. These Puritans, whatever their mistakes or failings, must have been men terribly in earnest if such things were common among

them. That men living in so corrupt and scoffing an age should have set themselves so laboriously to work, to seek that God whom others esteemed so lightly was surely a striking and noteworthy fact. We are not defending their extravagances, whatever they may have been; we merely assert that if all that we know of the Puritans was derived from these sermons of Dr. South's, we should earnestly desire to know something more concerning men who gave so strong an evidence of religious earnestness.

This lesson as to the earnestness of our forefathers is, of course, one familiar to all of us; but it is one which we continually need to take to heart if we would be worthy of them. The fervency of a prayer is not, it is true, to be measured by its lengthvery often the reverse; and no man in our own day would think of advocating a return to such usages as we have described; but we cannot help feeling that nothing but a spirit of intense earnestness could have sustained men of like passions and like weaknesses with ourselves in services so protracted and so laborious. If only there could be a revival of their spirit, what might not Christians of modern times, with all the facilities possessed by them, accomplish in the service of their Lord!

But, at the same time, while from our heart we would acquit the old Nonconformists of any conscious irreverence in their worship, and of any desire merely to multiply their prayers in a pharisaical spirit, we feel that their example has also its warning for us. No doubt their worship was attended with certain extravagances, which gave occasion for the enemy to There was, no doubt,

blaspheme. blaspheme.

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