Sacrament of the Sustentation were a mere viaticum of the magician! May Almighty God direct some minds to a deep pondering of the subject, and open some hearts to its reception and to its decision! May He keep us alike from the sin of coming hastily and of refusing obstinately! May He add in every place, by any instrumentality which shall please Him— whether the instrumentality of Ordinance or of Providence, of Word or Sacrament, of blessing or chastening-to the number of those who realize the description given of old of the true Church of His saved ones— No more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God...Built upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone: In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit'! 1 Eph. ii. 19-22. ORDINATION. LUKE XXIV. 49. But tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high. AT one particular point in the Ordination Service, the Congregation are desired, secretly in their prayers, to make their humble supplications to God for the accomplishment of the good and holy purposes avowed by the persons about to be ordained: for the which prayers (it is added) there shall be silence kept for a space. At the close of it, that touching Hymn of the Church, the Veni Creator, expresses in sound, what the foregoing pause expressed in silence, and invokes that help from above without which no one good resolution is worth the effort which it demands. That pause is impressive in itself, and it is significant of a great reality. The mighty works of God, whether as recorded in Scripture, or as witnessed in the world, are ever prefaced by pauses. Of all of them, as of one, might the words be written, When He had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven by the space of half an hour1. Man, measuring his brief time by years and days, is impatient to be doing: God, with whom a thousand years are as one day, can afford to prepare for action. And they who have most nearly approached God in their life on earth, have been constrained to learn from Him this lesson. Why should Moses have been detained in the mount forty days and forty nights, when nothing was to be brought thence but two tables of stone and the pattern of a sanctuary?? Why, when the first tables had been broken, in the grief and shame of the 1 Rev. viii. 1. 2 Exod. xxiv. 18. |