Saxon, French, and German, signifying the Rising-the day of the Lord's rising from the dead. But Dr. Miller tells us that "there was a great controversy in the second century about Easter," proving conclusively that it was not of Apostolic origin. Indeed! "So there was a great controversy," may the Baptists say, "in the third century about Infant Baptism, demonstrating that it was not of Apostolic origin." But let us sift this thing a little. Two hundred and sixty-six bishops met in Egypt to settle the question, not whether infants were to be baptized, but whether they were to be baptized on the eighth day: and the greatest proof of infant baptism, like that of Episcopacy, is that no Council ever established it, or even debated the question. So it was with Easter, or rather the time and duration of the preceding fast : it was a question of time; and, moreover, like baptism on the eighth day, a question between Christianity in the East, where the Jews controlled the details of discipline under the lenient permission of the Apostles, in innocent accommodation to their ancient predilections; and the freer Christianity of the West, which desired to combine the Easter with the Sunday. So it was with the question of Circumcision, and the seventh-day Sabbath, and various other matters. In this, as in many Jewish rites and prejudices, the Apostles had always allowed a latitude and liberty. The travelling of a Bishop and convert of St. John from the distant East, to produce uniformity between the Jewish Churches (so to call them) and the free Gentile Churches in the West, on the mere question of date and duration is of all proofs the best, that the Lenten fast and the feast of Easter were observed from the times of the Apostles. But why reason longer? To the cold, ultra-Protestant, more would not suffice: to the warm and bursting heart, who lives in antiquity with the Manger, and the Cross, and the Sepulchre, less is enough.

Thus I was compelled to listen, to the last, to all the mis

erable quibblings which, in the aggregate, might perhaps rec oncile me still to my separated sojourn, out of God's ancient Church. But now that I have been adopted into the glorious Household tracing its genealogies to the ancient ones, and living familiarly amidst the sweet anniversaries kept in the Family from the beginning: how beautiful and bright dawn the days as they come round. On Christmas we go with our children, and show them the little hands and feet of the mys terious Babe; and tell them the story of the manger, of Herod and the Innocents, and the cruel flight into Egypt: and make on them impressions they can never lose. We show them His star in the East, and keep alive His manifes tation to the Gentiles. We bring the fir, and the pine, and the box together to beautify the sanctuary, and make the place of His feet glorious, now, when the Lord whom we seek hath come to His Temple, and as our Simeons explain it, the glory of the latter Church is greater than the glory of the former. We fast-we must fast, we cannot abstain from fasting, for that were a more painful abstinence—as the awful mystery of His Passion is approaching. We keep, throughout the year, the Wednesday and the Friday Litanies, as if to robe in penitence the days of the Betrayal and the Crucifixion. We keep the forty days of Lent, to consider well the sins that procured this terrific Mystery, and to wash with our tears the feet that our sins had first bathed with blood. No sudden burst of penitence will satisfy the Catholic Religion: and once a year she calls her children to withdraw from the vanities of life, and spend a protracted period in sorrow and in prayer. We follow Him to the grave, and watch the Holy Sepulchre. We wait for His return from the place of the departed, whither His soul descended, while separated from the Body. On Easter morning, we pass the exultation round the globe, wherever there are voices to repeat "The Lord is risen!" The forty days of joy go over, and we follow

And on the tenth day

our second Adam into the heavens. afterward, we keep the joyful Pentecost. Then comes the feast of Trinity, the two Persons of the Godhead having visibly descended. And from that day onward the Church draws our attention to the precepts and practices, as she had done during the previous division of the year to the great facts and doctrines, of our Faith. All this is solid gold. We cannot

part with it for tinsel.

As the relative positions, and distances, and mutual relations and bearings of the heavenly bodies, present but one strange chaos to the vulgar eye: so, but a few years since, on opening a Prayer-Book, these objects stamped upon its pages were to me but a congeries of unmeaning, arbitrary ordinances. Now I see in them a heavenly science. For as the earth and sun and heavenly bodies return this year to the same relative position that they occupied a year ago, and begin the same course that they then began: so the Church wanders in search of nothing new, but is for ever laboring to keep her self and her children in the old beaten path, swerving never from her orbit. As we see, in our day, the same stars of heaven that Ignatius and Irenæus saw: so we hold the same truths that Ignatius and Irenæus held. The Incarnation, the Advent, the Redemption, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the manifold operation of the Pentecostal Spirit; these are her teachings, these the stars that glow and brighten in her sky while the still lesser lights of truth and grace twinkle and glitter as gems between. They always were her teachings, her lights that gave shine unto the world. And for fear that one of them should be eclipsed, she has ordained that every truth and precept of religion shall have, in turn, its blessed anniversary. Thus, as the sun comes and goes from tropic to tropic, or as the earth revolves from solstice to solstice so the unvarying round of truth returns again and again, continually from Advent to Advent, in an eternal

circle; while the old Church, like the old Earth, in all Her revolutions, and in calm or storm, points always to Her one, everlasting, Bright and Morning Star. When they cry, "Lo, here is Christ; or, Lo, He is there :" her voice is, “Go not after them." And they who quarrel with her exact immutability, or weary of her annual round, may as well quarrel with the fixed and unalterable laws of the universe, and with the established routine that they, with majestic regularity, for ever reproduce.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

RETROSPECT.

BUT for this via media-this via vera, too-I must have followed my own private reasonings into all the vagaries of German rationalism; or have been led, by the yearnings of a better disposition, into the mazes of Popish superstition. As it has been therefore, to me, a matter of life and death, perhaps I may be forgiven if I have sometimes given utterance to the exuberance of my joy:

"As the wave, while it welcomes the moment of rest,
Still heaves, as remembering ills that are o'er."

I. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion that taught me, before I could read, that "God, from all eternity, for his own glory, hath fore-ordained whatsoever comes to pass?"

II. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion that, before it would allow me to teach or preach, obliged me to confess that, "by the decree of God, some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others fore-ordained to everlasting death;" and that "these men and angels, thus predestinated and fore-ordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed, and their number is so certain and definite, that it cannot be either increased or diminished?"

III. Who shall blame me for renouncing a religion that