is so moved by her tears that he robs the altar of its silver candlesticks and places them in her hands. Then he goes in the evening to confess what he has done and to ask forgiveness, if so be that he has sinned. As he prays before the altar a light shines round about him, and when he looks up, behold! the candlesticks are standing in their place; but now they are solid gold, and the face of Christ above them is full of tenderness. So they discern the Lord's body.

"Once a Christian," said Lacordaire, "the world did not vanish from my eyes, it rather assumed larger proportions, as I myself did. I began to see therein a noble sufferer needing help. I could imagine nothing comparable to the happiness of ministering to it under the eye of God, with the help of the Cross and the Gospel of Christ!" That is a just and balanced statement of the theory and practice of Christian service. Discover Christ's body in the world around, and you transfigure the world. It is not then so many people to be used, or endured, or criticized, or injured, or studied, or put in statistics; it is so many to be served-from the slow child and the hot-tempered person in your

own house, to the desolate life next door, and the multitude which has lost hope. The body of Christ is not merely in the sacrament on the Holy Table, it is in the hospitals and in the slums; it is in the persons of the poor and the outcasts of the street; it is in the oppressed and in the friendless. In them Christ waits to be ministered unto every day, and our ministry is the measure of our love. The sin of the Church has been the isolation from the poor outside her borders, and the contempt of the poor within her borders. Whatever excuse may be offered, or however difficult the problem may be, it cannot be right that some of Christ's people should be so well housed and others so miserably; that Christ's body in the Sacrament should be in so fair a building and Christ's body in the poor should be in a hovel.

The conscience of the Church is growing tender on this matter, and we are not so comfortable as the rich Corinthians were; but if the Church is to rise to her vocation she must not only have an enlightened conscience but a tender heart. There has always been a danger of separating between Christ and His body, discerning the Lord but

not His body, or discerning the body and not the Lord. No love has ever touched the human heart with so fine a passion as the devotion to the crucified and the risen Christ. It has been the spring of Christian art and poetry, of sacrifices and martyrdom. But it has been apt in some ages to end with itself, and to grow introspective and to lose itself in sentiment, so we have had the imitation of Christ without the service of Christ, Christ without His body. No practical movement again for the elevation and redemption of human life has been more hopeful or more efficacious than that of Christian charity; but in our day there is the danger that it should begin and end in action and have no spring of emotion. If the service of man is separated from the love of Christ, then it will grow hard, mechanical, unspiritual, and finally will fail as a plant without a root, as a river whose lake has dried up. It is the river of Christian service which has made green the wastes of human suffering, so far as its waters reach, but that river sprang from the Cross and the wounds of Jesus. It is a river whose water is mingled with blood, and therein lies its perennial strength.

It was for the love of Christ St. Philip Neri gave himself to the care of the lepers; it was because they were living in the fellowship of Christ that the mystics of the middle ages-the "friends of God," as they were called-took charge of the poor. It was from Christ Wilberforce received his inspiration to deliver the slaves, and Shaftesbury his commission to work for the poor of England. What we need is not more statistics, or more committees, or more blue-books, or more money, what we need is more personal compassion and more personal sacrifice. When our hearts have been melted in the furnace of the love of Christ our lives will flow forth in service; when we are in daily fellowship with our crucified Lord, we shall never fail to discern His suffering body.

For a tear is an intellectual thing;

And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King;
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe

Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.

XXIV

THE SOLIDARITY OF MAN AND GOD

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."-Matt. xxv. 40.

T is frequently pointed out that the sense of

IT

sin is decreasing, and for this charge there is considerable evidence. Confession to God has not the former accent of self-abasement and of personal guilt. People do not sing the hymns of penitence with the same reality; a verse like this seems to strike an unreal note to the modern mind

I am all unrighteousness,
False and full of sin I am,

and we weaken before an older and more strenuous hymn

Behold! I was shapen in iniquity,

And in sin did my mother conceive me.

Literature is sombre to-day with the shadow of sin, but it is not so much repentance towards God as the nemesis of broken law, and while the