Truly God has been at infinite pains to inculcate upon men the identity of visible and invisible things; and in no way does He teach us so emphatically the nature and extent of the sickness of the soul as by the sickness, weakness, decay, and death of our bodies. Every man that is born must die so, save by the operation of a miracle in baptism, must every soul of man. Disease pervades each part of man's being: the vital organs of respiration and circulation have each diseases peculiar to themselves; the liver has diseases peculiar to it; every organ, however minute, the eye, the ear, the nerves, the muscles, the bones, every single particle of which the body of man is composed, not only shares in common those diseases which affect the whole frame, but each has a local and special disease of its own. Thus not only is the soul born in sin, with sin continuing to pervade every part of the being through its whole continuance, but each faculty of mind and affection of the heart has its own special and peculiar sin. As is the body so is the soul-the visible and invisible in inseparable connexion; the truth concerning the latter only fully taught by the state of the former.

The rationalist sectarians who affect to despise all the forms and ceremonies which have been developed in the Church as idle ceremonies, are yet, in their way, as strenuous supporters for the

principle of testifying by external action their inward feelings. Thus as they despise Christmasday and Good Friday, they make a point of desecrating both by some secular occupation; as they despise cathedrals, they delight in shewing their inward feelings by constructing their places of assembly like barns or stables, to be as unlike the former as possible; as they think that commemoration must be by imitation, they sit at the Lord's supper because He sat. The fact is, that the truth pervades all nature, and no man can do away with it, let him try as he may; and the only possible debateable question is, whether such and such an action be appropriate, that is truly descriptive or not, or whether another may be substituted which is more so; not whether there shall or shall not be an outward and visible expression of an inward and invisible reality.

One of the earliest controversies which arose in the Church was through those who would exalt the divine at the expense of the human nature of our blessed Lord. Truly," said they, "He was very God; but God cannot die, and therefore was He

not very man, but only man in appearance. The next heresy was from those who for the truth of His human would deny His divine nature. These said, "We know He died on Calvary, and that God raised Him from the dead; but as God cannot

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die, He was not very God, but only one sent from God." So it is at this day. The Romanists say, "This bread is the flesh of Christ, therefore is the bread changed into flesh, and no bread remains there." The Protestants say, "Our senses, which we cannot as honest men deny, tell us it is bread that we taste, and, therefore, there is no flesh really there." But He was very God and very man, and the Sacrament is very flesh and very bread. And this great truth of His divine and human nature, subsisting together without confusion or denial of either, must be witnessed for, by there being ever on His altar the consecrated elements, true bread and the true flesh of Christ, the visible contradiction to the Popish lie that there is no bread at all in the sacrament.

A sevenfold candlestick, or more properly a stand with seven lamps, was the emblem of the Church in the tabernacle, and a candlestick, or rather lamp, is again given by St. John as the emblem of the Christian Church. Whether one sevenfold lamp or seven lamps it is still one church filled with manifold and perfect distributions of the sevenfold gifts of the Holy Spirit. This truth has been developed in the Greek and Roman Churches by lights burning at different times and in different places. But it is evident that in neither do the clergy know the meaning of the rites they perform,

from the variety of the number of these lights, the places where they are used, and the different significations which different writers give to them. A sevenfold candlestick is certainly the emblem of the Church filled with the sevenfold enlightening of the Holy Spirit; but it does not set forth a method of acting or ministry. The Roman clergy have endeavoured, as usual, to appropriate the whole to themselves and reject the laity and women altogether, by making seven orders of ministry amongst themselves to be the reality of this symbol. But, firstly, there are not seven orders or ranks, but only three in each Church; and, secondly, the sevenfold candlestick is an emblem of the whole Church, men, women, and children, and not of the clergy only. On the other hand, the Protestant Rationalists have a truth lurking at the bottom of their objections to symbols in the Christian Church, but it arises from a confusion in their minds between such things as are of their very nature necessarily symbolical, and therefore eternally so in all time, and others which are only so by the special appointment of God, and therefore change whenever the end for which they were ordered is attained. Of this latter character are the Levitical priesthood, the boards, bars, pillars, curtains, &c. of the Jewish tabernacle: these are no longer of any use, because the realities which they sym

bolised have taken another form; even as the people of God have taken different forms in the Jewish and Christian economies. Of the former character are light, plants, rivers, seas, earthquakes, &c. and bound up in the languages of all the people on the earth. Light is that which makes manifest to the material, mental, or spiritual eye a vine or fig-tree bearing good or no fruit is an emblem of men graffed into Christ; rocks are emblems of a solid foundation, sand of an unsound basis; earthquakes, symbols of convulsions from below, which overthrow all things on the surface of the ground. The Lord Jesus Christ is the intellectual and spiritual light of the world; material light is an emblem of Him; lights on a sevenfold candlestick shew that His light is diffused through all, and not concentrated in any one individual of the Church: but a sevenfold candlestick does not shew how that light is ministered unto men. Light in the Church services is the emblem of something which the Lord Jesus Christ does in it for men: He is the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world; but He sheds forth His light by the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Spirit is not given for ministry equally to all mankind, but "severally as He will" through the different ministries, the two principal of which, as has been mentioned, are apostleship and pro