universal Society with a common tendency towards its Heavenly Head, a multitude of Sects, each claiming to represent, within its narrow limits, the peculiar family of God. Our author regards the occasional Services of the Prayer Book, from birth to death, as qualified by their spirit to be an effectual preservative against this danger. The view at least is singular: to most persons they would seem designed to form the walls of a school, rather than to throw open a House of God for all dwellers upon earth. In the first place, the obvious question occurs, Has the Church of England through the influence of these Services sought to gather into one the divine Family, and hating divisions, as the only heresies, shunned to form a Sect? Is she not a Sect, and the Mother of Sects, exacting as the conditions of communion with her, or of recognition by her of our incorporation into the body of Christ, metaphysical subtleties that have no assignable relation to the filial or the fraternal sentiment? In the second place, Has not the Church of Rome all these Services, with some others else that, by the same rule, might be supposed to keep alive the memory of a heavenly origin on earth? Yet Romanists and Anglicans hardly form an harmonious family just at present: and the Church of Rome has the virulent spirit of a Sect though aiming at Universality, which the Church of England by her constitution never can do, the Queen's supremacy not extending beyond the British dominions. In the third place, Has not every class of Protestant dissenters, the Quakers excepted, precisely the same Services, consecrating all the solemn times of life and all the marked seasons and agencies of Religion, with the reservation only of those offices which are peculiar to Episcopalian Government? Do they not all baptize, and catechize, and prepare for Communion, and administer the Lord's Supper, and marry, and visit the sick, and bury the dead?—and if it is necessary to find a parallel for the Commination as a family tie, they are not illiberal in their announcement, and distribution, of God's judgments against Sin. How is it that Mr. Maurice claims a virtue for these Services which yet they never exert, or how is it that he is blind to the fact that all the other Churches have these Services too and yet are Sects, fearing and disliking one another, enemies not brothers? Never will a Church that

is not Catholic in her fundamental conception, in her broad positions, in her pervading spirit, be made Catholic by the attempt of individuals to infuse amiable meanings into her occasional formularies. A Church essentially dogmatic may be a fence for her own disciples, but never can be a fold for the family of believers. Hence it is that though all Christian Churches have these institutes equally with the Church of England, they are all Schools of Theology, and none of them the Family home of God's children. It is right that a Churchman should find in, or put into, the Church's Services, as much of the spirit of Christianity as he honestly can, but it is a strangely superficial expectation that this will give a Catholic aspect to a Church intensely sectarian in its whole structure and conception, or make a reconciler of diversities out of a definer of differences. If indeed the Church was framed after the idea of a Family, these Services, belonging to the various occasions of mortal and of religious life, might be admirably qualified to keep alive the remembrance of our Father and our Home, but, as it is, whatever holy meanings they may have for the members of a religious club, they have no tendency and no fitness to draw together a universal Society through sympathy of spirit with Christ as an elder brother under God. When did the Church of England ever show any desire to be comprehensive? When did the idea of a Family ever subordinate the idea of a School? When did she increase liberty, even in such a trifle as a garment, that she might abate sectarianism, and become the Mother of us all?

The Service for the Baptism of Infants is regarded, if we rightly understand Mr. Maurice, mainly as a recognition of the great Christian fact, that human Society has its true foundation in its connection with God's nature, that we are not children of passion and impulse only, but from the first endowed with a spirit that makes us fit subjects for spiritual treatment, and capable of being led into the closest personal relations with the Father of spirits. This is a spiritual and Catholic view; but is it the obvious meaning of the Church of England's Baptismal Service? Is that Service only "the witness to us that we are in a state of grace?" Does it not profess to be the introducer of influences that destroy the state of nature, and produce the state of grace? Is it true that it only attests a fact,

and does not profess to make a change? Again, in the Service for adult baptism, the penitent and believing man, according to Mr. Maurice, only "does merely confess that to be true which is true according to God's eternal law, and is only assured that he has that grace which he seeks, that he is received as a member of that body in which the Spirit of God has promised to abide,-which He has said he will make a living witness of the union that Christ has with the Father." Baptism then does not make the infant a child of God, it only attests that it is one: Baptism does not receive the penitent and believing adult into the Family of God, it only assures him that he is received. Is this the Doctrine of the Church of England? If it only witnesses to a spiritual fact, what is the meaning of the language of the formulary, that "the child coming to holy Baptism receives remission of its sins by spiritual regeneration;" and what is the meaning of the assurance, that "it is certain by God's word that Children which are baptized, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved?" If Baptism only confesses a great spiritual fact, why are not unbaptized children dying before the commission of sin equally assured of Salvation by the Church; and why is the Service for the Burial of the Dead refused to the unbaptized?

The spiritual facts confessed in their Baptism enables the Catechism, Mr. Maurice thinks, to impress upon the young that they are in a state of grace, and therefore need not be under the dominion of sin. This is true, if it only means that the spiritual nature of the child may be exalted to resist temptations by a representation of God's relations towards it, and that only by spiritual love towards a Heavenly Father can it be released from the law of Sin and death; but there is something in the manner of his statement which implies that Baptism has had an efficacy in introducing that state of grace-else, why should not the Catechism be as effectual to bring the realities before the mind of a child, without Baptism, as with it?

Every one who repeats that Catechism is told that he is a child of grace, the inheritor of a heavenly kingdom. He is declared to be in a state of salvation; he is bidden to give God thanks for it. Being in that state, and on that ground, he can

resist the powers which will seek to draw him out of it, to make him a natural brute beast, or the mere creature of an artificial civilisation, or the subject of a more inward, radical, spiritual depravity. The world, the flesh, and the devil, he is told plainly, are fighting against him, and will fight against him to the end. But these powers shall not have dominion-for he is baptised into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; he can look up to God when the Evil spirit claims to be his master, and say, 'I believe in the Father Almighty.' When the pomps and vanities of the world are bringing him into bondage he can say, 'I believe in Him who was born of the Virgin, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and who has overcome the world.' When the flesh is asserting its tyranny, and trying to stir him up to selfish thoughts, and divisions, he may say, I believe in the Holy Ghost, who has brought me into a divine family, who promises to unite me, and all its members, in one communion, who gives me forgiveness, and enables me to forgive, who will raise up my body, and give me that life of which I have been declared an inheritor." "P. 62.

Much religious evil is justly traced to a forgetfulness of the spiritual nature of the child, to a treatment by Law only, and an exclusive enforcement of the authority and obligation of Law.

Religious people suppose that every kind of effort must be used to make a child feel its sin, that so it may appreciate God's mercy in sending it a deliverer. I cannot but think that such a method has produced, and must produce, premature self-consciousness, then hypocrisy, then infidelity or despair.-To realise evil without first apprehending good; to understand the departure from a moral order, when we are not told that we have any connection with it; to be bidden to repent, when we do not know whom we have grieved; this must be a contradiction out of which only the most fatal mischiefs can come. They become visible when the intellect is beginning to be aware of its own strength, and is going forth to explore nature, or the laws of man's being, or the conditions of national existence. Then it seems as if the lore of childhood had nothing to do with the apprehensions and desires of manhood; as if it had demanded of us simply a contemplation of our own acts and feelings. From that contemplation we have gained nothing but pain, discontent, restlessness, while there is a whole universe lying about us, with which, as spiritual beings, it seems we have no concern. What is the issue of this strife in the majority of cases? A devotion to some one of the pursuits which are called secular, with a feeling that it is merely secular, and that CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 51.

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only secular ends can be attained by it; here and there temporary zeal in the study itself; material interests soon supplanting that zeal in the hearts of nearly all. On the other hand, those who devote themselves to what they call the study of religion are exceedingly apt to substitute the worship of their own souls, that is to say, of themselves, for the worship of God; to make the work of converting men to the faith of Christ a kind of trade, into which earthly ambition largely enters, and to leave the impression upon the minds of onlookers that the Church is not a more comprehensive and human fellowship than the world, but a narrower, closer, more exclusive corporation. Oh! brethren, is it not time to bethink ourselves how we can set to rights a system of things which is keeping us apart from each other, which in our inmost hearts we feel to be wrong, which the coming generation will cast aside, perhaps that it may give itself up to utter unbelief? Is it not time to ask ourselves whether we cannot return into the older and more excellent way which we have fancied it was the highest wisdom to desert? Is it not time to give over talking about the dogmatic teaching of the Church,-making it a watchword for party agitation,—and with all our hearts to consider the beauty of the Church's teaching as exhibited in the Catechism, in that it is not formal, not dogmatic, but living and personal, in that it speaks to each child by its own Christian name, reminds it what that name signifies, declares to it the infinite treasures of which the peasant, as much as the noble, has been made possessor? If we lay this foundation for the education of those who are to form the next age, with what comfort may we look forward to any earthquakes that may be appointed for it! How certain we may be that there will be that strength in it to act and to endure which has been so much wanting in our own! How confidently we may expect that a real Christian family will be created out of the chaos of parties in which we are dwelling! How surely will the accidents of birth, rank, property, be felt to be utterly insignificant compared with that humanity which all inherit together! How surely will these accidents be looked upon as trusts committed to a few for the good of all! How will all gifts and powers of thought be regarded and valued only on the same ground, for the same end! But how much more precious will these gifts and powers be than they have ever been! How shameful it will be thought to leave them uncultivated : how shameful to limit the field of their exercise; to say that the whole of God's universe is not intended for the Christian man to study and to use for the glory of his Father? When we look upon ourselves as redeemed, we shall look upon the whole creation, though groaning and travailing, as sharing in the Redemption, as destined hereafter to enter into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” —P. 68.