The chair of the confessional is most properly placed near the entrance of the church, because men, by the habitual practice of sin, have nearly departed from the Church altogether. The spiritual case of such persons is the worst that can be imagined; they have returned like the sow that was washed to their wallowing in the mire; their last state is worse than that in which they were before they knew the way of righteousness; their souls have been, perhaps, warred against by fleshly lusts, and they are nearly twice dead, fit only to be plucked up by the roots and given to the flames. Surely the recovery of souls in such a state is an act of Almighty power as great as that put forth in their first conversion, or regeneration; and if this be so, how can the office of penitence be considered in any light inferior to that of a SACRAMENT? The experience of all confessors testifies in the works written on Penitence, that by very far the majority of the cases which are confessed to them are sins against the Seventh Commandment. In addition to this, all know the immense extent to which proofs of the prevalence of such sins abound in our public streets, and all who mix in the world are well aware of the degree to which it pervades all classes equally. The facilities afforded for it are greater in London than in any other city. Yet we are told that for a baptized man to commit this sin

is to take the members of Christ and unite them to

an harlot, is to grieve the Holy Spirit, and provoke Him to leave the soul for ever. From the powers of such sins nothing less than a special act of God can deliver any one, and that absolution is only to be obtained through the SACRAMENT of the CONFESSIONAL.

LECTURE V.

ON THE PERFECT WORSHIP OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.

ALTHOUGH Our first parents offered sacrifice to God, and the faithful descendants of Seth continued to teach their children to do so likewise, there was no worship of God by any larger assembly of persons than a family, until the children of Abraham were brought out as one body from the midst of the bondage and cruelty of Egyptian slave-masters. Even then, the first acts they were required to perform were by each family apart: the Passover lamb was killed and eaten, and the blood sprinkled on the door-posts of each private dwelling, without any union with others.

So soon, however, as God was about to bind together into one all the various families of which the descendants of Abraham were composed, in order to constitute them not only a family, but a nation and a church, He revealed to them the mode

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in which He was to be worshipped. The natural conscience of man might tell him that, since God was offended with him, he must do something by which to regain the lost favour of His Creator; but it could not tell what that something should be. God himself must have instructed Adam to slay and offer an innocent victim, as Abel and the rest of the faithful ever did, in anticipation of the slaying of that Spotless Offering which should appear as the Vicarious Sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. But the worship of God consisted in other things besides mere representation or mention of the death of the Son of God, although all parts of worship necessarily flow from, and have reference to that transcendant act; and it was as necessary for God to reveal these component parts of His worship, as it was for Him to teach men the other also.

The method by which mankind, collected into one nation and one church, must worship God, was revealed through the Tabernacle, as it was set up according to God's direction for that purpose. That was not only the first time that men were so taught, but they were never, at any other period, taught the details of which public worship must consist. men, therefore, will look to texts of Scripture in order to get a receipt for making a Church, they will find it only there. After the model of the Tabernacle was the Temple built the significancy

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of much of the Tabernacle service was explained by St. Paul to the Hebrews; and it is to be observed that he did not select the service of the Temple, which they had all seen and were familiar with, on which to expatiate, and through which to inculcate spiritual truths, but that of the Tabernacle, which had ceased to exist for many ages, and which consequently neither he nor any of the Jews then alive had ever seen. And this was, doubtless, because the real and true idea was contained in the latter, of which the Temple was but a developement; whilst in the Book of the Revelation given to St. John, it is the service of the Temple that the Prophet sees, and not that of the Tabernacle, as the service which is performed in the courts of heaven by the redeemed Christian Church: and St. Paul distinctly tells us, that the pattern given to Moses in the mount was the pattern of the House of God, "whose house are we." Now the pattern was not that of outward shape, but of rites, forms, and ceremonies; all of which are analogous to that outward shape. A Christian Church is not to be built of so many boards, and divided by curtains and pillars; but a Christian Church is to have a shape as definite as the pattern, and which shall express the same thing that the pattern expressed. The sanctuary of the Christian Church is not to be a cube of 10 cubits; nor the chancel 20 by 10; but the building must

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