But let us go farther than personal experiences; let us take personal observations. Have we not marked an absorption, a sanctity, a silence, and a wrapt reverence about our congregations in prayer? Is it not the fact that even the outward marks of this have increased and not decreased?

Men may launch philippics against the want of outward prostration, etc., in Nonconformist Churches, but we should not like to mistake the bended knee for the prostrate heart; we should not care for a mere conformity of position. Anyway we have largely increased that! I can remember when some in our congregations stood, some sat, some knelt! Most unlovely, I admit. It is not so now there is as much real reverence of worship as in the most Liturgical Churches in the land!

Taking the history of our Churches within our own remembrances, their faults in free prayer are exceptions to an excellent use; they are only as specks on beautiful fruit; only as spots on a golden sun; only as shadows on a clear sky! Free prayers have interpreted the sorrows of the sad; they have quickened the joy of the thankful; they have awakened the cry of the contrite; they have softened the heart of the obdurate; they have. dried the tear of the mourner; they have palsied the hand of the tyrannical; they have opened the hand of the covetous; they have softened the asperities of the overtasked life; they have been ladders to the celestial gates; they have been staffs for life's weary heights; they have been anodynes for aching spirits; they have been strength for the weak, and life for the dead! Nay, more than this! They have contained all that is fer

vent in patriotism; all that is loyal in affection; all that is noble in citizenship; and all that is adapted to current history and common life!

And what in this past history has been our relation to Episcopal Churchmen? Peripatetic Evangelicals, who come and go, are often good, devout, and kindly people, but, to my mind, are of little worth as elements of strength, and in their uncertain position they do us little honour at the best. Whenever I hear of a Congregational Church among ourselves being largely recruited from Evangelical Churchmen-"out of church"-I have some few fears, not only for the honour and manliness of the ministry in contending for Congregational principles, but for the Church life itself. They are very velvet-handed, but they are not altogether true to you. They enjoy the ministry very much; and if?and if?-you would come to theminstead of their coming to you—it would be all right; but as it is we may be patronised by them; we may occasionally be dined by them; and we have the consciousness that if the Rationalist or the Rubricist were to leave St. Weathercock's to-morrow, they would take their hassocks to the church and sell their Congregational hymn-books to any bookseller who would have them! Such as they are, would they stay with us if we had a Liturgy?-not they! There is an undefined something in Episcopal ordination and episcopally-administered sacraments, even to the lowest. Evangelical churchmen, when they come to us, admire us, worship with us, fête us, buy our photograph, introduce us to their friends, we are not at one-we feel it-they are drawn

Low

to us by the hearing of the ear, they do not hold to us by the strong bonds of principle and truth; they are always making awkward little slips, as to what a pity we are not Episcopalians ourselves! I may be mistaken, but this is how the matter shapes. itself to me. God help the manhood of the ministry that could court this! I am quite willing to admit that our free Churches have not been very class comprehensive in the past. I deplore that; I think we have had men quite educated enough to draw all classes in. The professions, as a rule, we scarcely touch, and the higher part of the community we have no hold upon at all. I do not glory in this, because I think they include multitudes of the noblest and the best in character. What keeps them where they are is manifestly the status of an Establishment and Establishments are going to the wall with a rush-until then, if we had the golden-mouthed Chrysostom to preach for us, and that most beautiful of all saints in prayer, St. Augustine, though they were robed in richest sacerdotal dresses, and had surplice-clad choirs, I venture to affirm they would not succeed in winning away the worshippers at church. I know there are villages and sea-side places where Congregational ministers wear surplices and use the Liturgy in church; these have some of the aristocracy and the squires, but this is only where the Episcopalian minister is profane or wicked, and there is no other Church of England there. I am not criticising this. I should not object to do it myself under such special circumstances, as I have no manner of objection to surplice or Liturgy, provided Christ's kingdom could be extended.

From the days of Owen, however, until now, through the centuries when Independency has been connected with all that is heroic in endurance, and all that is spiritual in life— unless I read her history amissone of her greatest glories and one of her richest springs of spiritual life has been the free prayer of her children! Let every age be judged by its age and not by another. You would have enjoyed those long Puritan prayers if you had passed through those long Puritan trials. It seems to me little less than profane to join in satirising the devotion of men whose agonies we have never known, and whose strong cryings to God we fail to understand! I beg our brethren to remember that Independency has not been rich in stained windows or carven shrines, in dimly-lighted temples or prostrate penitents, in sad weird symphonies, or magnificent chants; but that she has been rich-God knows how rich!-in true confessors of the faith, in heroic defenders of Reformation principles, in saintly men and women, whose sometimes broken utterances have been used by God for breaking hearts, and whose prayers have ascended to Him who swings the censer, not as the stereotyped utterances of a book, but as the rich, tender, devout and fervent pleadings of men whose hearts God has opened, and whose prayers were the outcome of real religious faith, the living well-springs of renewed and penitent hearts! I honour this old history! I consider it the secret of our present strength and the glory of our past history in the olden days!

But what of the future? We are moving on to a new plane. We are manifestly coming face to face with

many ecclesiastical complications. I fear to touch the question lest I do so with a rude hand. But I will be true to what I think!

First-There seems to me in our Congregationalism to be rising up an unconsciously separating element. Our successful men, our well-to-do families, in many places well educated, and mingling in Church of England circles, are in sympathy with a Liturgy! Near to our successful cities, such as Manchester and elsewhere, you will find colonies of such who are looking that way. I think it is wicked to judge the motives of our brethren and set this down to worldliness, to fashion, etc. Not so! They are beginning, I rejoice to think, to learn that worldliness is in the spirit of our life, and not in certain negations of our life. This desire for a Liturgy is a craving after something higher and better in the religious life. I, for one, believe it is so. I honour the desire! By all means let them have it. Our Independency is no Independency if we cannot sympathise heartily with each Church acting out its own life-in the best way it can. Surplice or no surplice-prayer-book or no prayer-book-is as nothing in comparison with true Christian life; that is the end of all! But while I admit all this, I am sure the Liturgy they may adopt will be contingent to many things they do not see. It will be a developing power, musical responses, ritualistic robings-" et hoc genus omne "-will come after these! Whether simplicity and spirituality of religious worship will live with them I cannot say. They are, however, still Independents: not responsible to us, but to God alone. I do not use the term sarcastically, when I say this is

connected with fashionable Nonconformity!

Then there are our very numerous churches-old churches-town and village churches. Speak to nineteen out of twenty of these of a Liturgy, all their instincts, wise or unwise, would rise up against one! Many amongst them have still memories of fathers and mothers who worshipped in old churches of England, themselves dead, spiritually, as the old stone effigies in the chancel or the nave, and who were made alive to God through the Puritan services which they were induced to attend! Multitudes of them see, in a change to a Liturgy, something that seems to betoken decaying life. They may be mistaken, but they are earnest men, not at all dilettanti sort of religious people, but they teach, help, work, give. They are successors of noble fathers, scions of noble sires. Take care how you touch these sensibilities; your more æsthetic taste, your more cultured thought must not make you despise the least of them. Their instincts may, after all, be truer than your arguments. If there is a more excellent way, show it to them. I feel bound to say they are not ready for it yet.

In nineteen-twentieths of our assemblies the introduction of a Liturgy would receive no favour-but, perchance, excite sorrow of heart. We are bound not to disturb the old

unless we can originate a better

way.

And here what does our observation

say? Apart from surplice, ritual, and such-like things, Liturgies have failed! A more flat, cold, dull, melancholy service I know not of than the Church of England Liturgy in a Wesleyan chapel on Sunday morning!

Read without the outward reverence of ritual-it is death!

Concerning the probability of any great Episcopalian Free Church movement, I am willing to admit it would rob us of a vast amount of strength. It would absorb most of the Liturgylovers; but it would not do so only because of its Liturgy, but because of its ésprit de corps, because of its Church connections, because of its episcopally-ordained minister, because it would bring a bishop or two with it, and so keep its ecclesiastical status as separate from ours then, as it is

shall see that (with the sometimes wild excesses of Methodism on the one hand, and the cold statuesque ceremonialism of the English Church on the other,) we have enjoyed a religious life, devout and dignified, fervent and thoughtful, human as well as spiritual. Este perpetuo! we may well say; and whilst conceding fullest liberty to all, whilst rejoicing if others can lift their congregation to a higher life through Liturgical aids, it is not cowardice that makes us wait and see, it is not a scornful life of ease, or a desire to rest and be thankful, but the conviction that, somehow, free prayer has made us what we are, and has been the vital expression of a life which would find itself dulled as well as stereotyped in any form of prayer.

In no spirit of dogmatism would we approach the subject; in no proudly defiant consciousness that our convictions will never alter; with no dread of that bug-bear to some persons-the charge of inconsistency; with no assumption that the truth lies all on one side; but with the earnest hope and prayer that in this, as in all things connected with His dear Son's kingdom, the Father of light will, by His Spirit, guide us into all truth.

O GIVE me Samuel's ear, The open ear, O Lord, Alive and quick to hear Each whisper of Thy word; Like him to answer at Thy call, And to obey Thee first of all.

O give me Samuel's heart, A lowly heart that waits, Where in Thy house Thou art, Or watches at Thy gates; By day and night, a heart that still Moves at the breathing of Thy will. J. D. B.

I. WHILE ON THY JOURNEY, MEDITATE FAMILIARLY UPON THY PROVIDENTIAL PRESERVATION.

If you go down to the sea in ships, it may be wholesome to think there is but a plank betwixt me and death. While you travel by railway, let the reflection cross thy mind, some part of that nicely-balanced machinery may give way, and I may be hurried into eternity. Or when coached briskly along, contemplate the possibility of a mischance. Such thoughts the writer has accustomed himself to entertain; not for the purpose of creating a nervous terror, to the hindrance of enjoyment, but with the view of learning his entire dependence upon God for journeying mercies, and for leading him to look upward at every stage of a prosperous progress, and to say with gratitude, "THOU hast brought me hitherto." It is a natural, an instinctive prayer of the heart,

From sudden death deliver us;" yet, although the prayer may not be answered, it is consoling to think that sudden death may not be unprepared death; and, should the righteous be thus overtaken, his state is safe, and sudden death will only prove sudden glory. Though the righteous be prevented with death, yet shall he be in rest."

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And here it is that the mysterious procedure of an all-wise Providence brings us to a stand. The just man. perisheth often, even as the wicked man; one event happeneth to all. The righteous man's righteousness protects him not against the common

accidents of life. The lightning of heaven in its course shattered the monument which piety erected on the heights above Anwoth to the godly Rutherford. We see it, that one common calamity involves the man who seeks the Lord, and the man who calls not on His name. Prayer was offered up on that morning when the Rev. Greville Ewing and his little party set out on a visit to the Falls of the Clyde, and God's presence was asked to go with them, and to light up those scenes of grandeur which His fingers had formed. Yet grief met this little Christian party at the entrance; the horses shied, the party was precipitated into a declivity of the road, and Mrs. Ewing received injuries which terminated in death. Near to that fatal spot too, it was, that bridal joy was turned, by a seeming accident, into burial lamentation. A bridal company were enjoying themselves amid the rocky cliffs which confine the angry flood, when the bride suddenly disappeared, and was seen no more. Thus soon and unexpectedly can pleasure be turned into mourning! That which hath

been may be ; that which hath befallen others, may happen to ourselves. And just at the time when our spirits are most buoyant, and the heart is most full of life, and of some joyous anticipation, may mischance befall us; and, as in a moment, suddenly may we be called into the presence of God.

If, in the sovereignty of a righteous Providence, such disastrous accidents overtake those who are journeying on