the investiture with the robe of innocence, and the presenting of the burning light? Where is the piety or the use of making common cause with men who scorned the holy" Ephphetha," thereby insulting the practice of our Lord Himself?* In the ceremony of anointing, is there nothing of a nature to fix the unction of the Holy Ghost indelibly on the mind? or is there no intelligible connexion between a white robe and holy innocence, between a burning light and a luminous faith? Would Englishmen ever have seen the great doctrine of Sacramental Regeneration become the plaything of parliaments, if their imagination had been stored with the remembrance of all those significant actions, performed under circumstances the most likely to impress them on the mind of a parent? Or would it be found as hard as it is to restore the public reverence of the most Blessed Eucharist,—rather, would it have been necessary to make the attempt,-if the dogma of the Real Presence had not been clean obliterated from the minds of our countrymen by the abolition of ceremonies calculated to suggest it with overpowering force?

Now, in the Catholic Church, these and other great truths of holy religion are secured under the forms which express them. The Church bears her testimony to them in language too distinct to be garbled, and too expressive to be misunderstood. A priest must declare these doctrines before the world, whether he will or no. The forms which convey them are so many and so plain that mutilation, even were it possible, would be useless. No erasure could blot out the testimony which our holy offices bear to Catholic doctrine, but such as expunges those offices themselves from the documents of the Church. Our priests are bound by so many obligations, and encountered by so many rubrics, as to be continually protected against the dangers

* We read in the Gospel (Mark vii. 32-35) that Jesus cured one that was deaf and dumb by touching his tongue and his ears with spittle, saying, Ephphetha," Be thou opened." So in the baptismal office of the Church the priest, as the minister of Christ, wets his thumb with spittle, and touches therewith the ears and the nostrils of the person to be baptised, repeating the same word, to signify the necessity of having the senses of the soul open to the truth and grace of God.

of carelessness as well as the love of innovation. While I write these pages, I read in the public papers of a Protestant Bishop, at the dedication of a Church, administering the bread and wine "in solemn silence" to a rail full of communicants, and then reciting the form of administration once for the whole number. In the Church of the Gesù at Rome, there are on an average as many communions every day as there are days in the year. Let us but picture to ourselves the consternation which would prevail in that city, if one of the priests were to adopt such a method of abridging his work! And learning, from instances like this, the inestimable value of a definite form and an inflexible rule in the administration of holy things, let us beware of pronouncing any item to be insignificant which forms part of a whole so wondrous and divine.

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Know Popery.

A WISE man has observed, that the early Christians had proofs of the truth of Christianity which we have not, and that we have proofs which they had not. The early Christians did not see, as we see, the Church spread far and wide all over the whole world, as the prophets had promised. They did not see it, as we see it, exalted as a kingdom among all the nations of the earth: the Pope a spiritual sovereign ruling millions of spiritual subjects; the Bishops as princes in all lands;" the children of the Church acknowledging one government and "one head," as Osee (i. 11) and the other prophets had foretold. They did not see, as we see, the words of our Lord to the Samaritan woman fulfilled, in which He said, that “the Father” should no longer be "adored" in Jerusalem or on Mount Garizim ; for they did not see sacrifice, which is the supreme worship of God, abolished both by Jews and Protestants, and the "clean oblation," of which Malachi spoke (i. 11), offered only in Catholic churches throughout the world. Prayer may be, and is, made any where, in a Jewish synagogue or in a Protestant cathedral; but the great Christian sacrifice is offered only on the altars of the Catholic Church. In a word, the prophets had raised an expectation about the Church of Christ which the early Christians did not see fulfilled as conspicuously and as extensively as it was to be fulfilled in after times.

The sort of proof of Christianity, then, which we have, and they had not, may be said to come to this, that it answers the expectations it had raised. This proof at least exists with all its force for Catholics. Protestants, I suppose, must allow that Christianity, according to them, does not literally fulfil the expectations which the prophets had raised concerning Christ's kingdom; for they either ex

plain these prophecies in a figurative sense, or refer their fulfilment to some future dispensation. However, all will allow that it is a very strong proof, where such can be had, when a religion externally fulfils the expectations it had raised.

Again, there is another class of expectations which religion may be said to create; these are of an internal nature. Man is here in a state of weakness, want, and sin; and religion undertakes to provide remedies: it promises certain gifts, and tells us that it can satisfy certain desires and needs of our moral nature. Now, if those who embrace a religion assure us that they have found these expectations answered, here is another proof of the truth of that religion.

Some years back several Oxford professors began studying the Fathers of the Church, holy men who wrote during the first ages of Christianity. By studying these ancient writers they had certain expectations raised as to what the Church was and ought to be; and these expectations, I may tell you by the way, agreed in a wonderful manner with those which the Bible would naturally be calculated to raise, but which, as I have said, Protestants explain away. Now, these learned men looked about them in their own Church, and finding nothing therein to answer these expectations, they were led to inquire into the state of "Popery." Then they found that the "Popish" religion answered the expectations which the old Christian doctors, as well as the Bible, had raised, and was the sort of Christianity which those doctors had written about. This proof they felt to be so very strong that many of them ultimately embraced it.

But this was not all: the more they endeavoured to live in accordance with the commandments of God, and to realise the high gifts promised by God in His Church, the more they felt that their wants and desires could find no adequate satisfaction where they were. The Catholic Church promised to do it, and they tried it. Others, again, followed their example; some attracted by its external agreement with Christianity, as they had been led to conceive of it, some allured by its promises of an internal accordance therewith.