you will have none other grace nor ground of strength than such as has been given to you today. In the strength of such sacred meat as this, you must go on your way rejoicing, from confirmation to the grave. If any should fall back into negligent and careless ways,—be irregular in duty, unthoughtful and irreverent in prayers, deceitful, impure, or disobedient, after confirmation,—their case would indeed be a melancholy one; for would they not be plainly grieving the Holy Spirit who once had quickened their hearts to love and obey God, and endangering His final departure from them? But if those who are in earnest now will persevere in earnestness, will pray with all their hearts, in public and private prayer, for grace to keep them in His faith and service, will anxiously and with painful preparation partake, as often as they may, of the Holy Communion, will strive to do their duty in the station to which God has been pleased to call them with full and devoted obedience, will watch their words and check their thoughts, not now and then, not for a few days, but for all the time that is coming,—then doubtless God will be working in their hearts; doubtless such spiritual fruits will declare a spiritual root, and they will have the well-grounded comfort of believing themselves to be more and more

His children. And if this should be so with any of us,-as God grant it may with all,-that we should thus grow in grace, and abound more and more in the Holy Ghost, while spared to live in the earth, then we shall not be lost for ever to each other when death comes to divide us, but shall meet, after ever so much separation or distance during life, in the great day of Christ, and on the shores of eternal life.

SERMON XV.

BENEFITS OF THE COMMUNION.

ST. JOHN vi. 55.

"My flesh is meat indeed, and My blood is drink indeed." THUS does our Lord, in the great discourse in which He anticipates the institution of the Blessed Sacrament of the Communion, speak of His own flesh and blood. They are meat and drink indeed! not like the meat and drink of the earth, not passing and temporary, earthly and bodily, so that when that which is eternal is come, the Lord shall destroy both the body and them; but meat and drink indeed: real, vital, eternal food no shadows, no figures, no unreal or trifling things, but the means of a growth never to be lost, the supports of a life never to die; "meat indeed," and "drink indeed."

At this time, when so many of us are looking

forward to partake, within a few days, of this sacred meat and drink, and that on the greatest feast in all the year, and after the season of most sacred and solemn preparation of all the year, I propose to speak to you on the benefits to be derived from the Communion, in order that you may understand the extreme dignity of those holy mysteries. In so speaking, I shall confine myself entirely to the language of the Prayer-Book, which is indeed of the strongest and most exalted kind. That language, borrowed by inheritance of our own Church from earlier ages, speaks of this sacred rite as it has always been spoken of in the Church from the very beginning. Adopted into the Liturgy, and therefore addressed with the utmost solemnity, either to God Himself in prayer, or to the congregation assembled in God's house and more immediate presence, it is to be regarded as chosen with the most reverent and awful caution. Whatever other, not unworthy or improper, objects the Church may have proposed to herself in framing the language of other documents, in her sacred services she must needs be understood to speak (as in the face of God) her full and divinely-instructed mind; not now fearing men; not now desiring to accommodate differences, or comprehend diversities, but sacredly

bound neither to withhold nor understate, but to give awful utterance to her soul-dividing words of full, undisguised truth.

I. In the first place, then, we read in the exhortation addressed to the communicants at the beginning of the service, that the benefits are great, if with a true penitent heart and lively faith we receive that Holy Sacrament, for then

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we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink His blood." In the same manner, in the last prayer of the post-Communion, those who have duly received the holy mysteries are said to have been fed with "the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ."

This is the first benefit: and it is obvious, at the first mention of it, how signal, mysterious, and blessed a benefit it is! It is immediately connected with the very ground and source of all our hope and comfort in our religion. The very blessing and gift of our Baptism was, that we were thereby planted into the body of Christ, and made His members. To keep this membership, and to be acknowledged as still in Him, is the very ground of our acceptance with God, and our prospect of glory. How great, then, must be the blessedness, and how wonder