idea of justification. The propositions maintained by the Anglican Church, in reference to Baptism, give the best support to the admissibility of infant baptism.

LXXXVIII. Even before the liturgical epoch, constituted by Gregory the Great, the Christian public service developed itself in three distinct and successive forms: the apostolic, the semi-mystical or early Catholic, and the wholly mystical. As to the old so-called liturgies of James, Peter and Mark, and those of Basil and Chrysostom, they contain nothing which could be referred to apostolic institution, although there are some elements which belong to the early Catholic form. As a body they belong, if not still earlier, (as is certainly the case with particular portions) to the third form, i. e., that under the influence of which the homiletical part of the worship was absorbed by the mystical, and the whole of the principal public service is treated from first to last as an act of sacrifice.

LXXXIX. In Christianity, when understood and practised in the spirit of the Apostles, the following conceptions are impossible That Christ, since he passed into glory, offers himself anew to his Father, through the intervention of his priests, as a sacrifico for the living and the dead; that Christ continues to this day to be offered to God; that the Church, through her priesthood, brings any other offering to God than thanks and supplication, or any other offering than herself in the individuality of her members; that the self-abasement of the Redeemer in the Holy Communion is regarded by God as a repeated act of his meritorious work.

XC. Christ, who henceforth dies no more, is no more subjected to sacrificial death or meritorious sufferings, nor does he again give his blood and life as a ransom for many; but since he has entered into the Holiest once for all, and wrought the everlasting redemption, his whole saving activity consists in the appropriation and distribution of his merit and salvation.

XCI. At first the Catholics understood by the bloodless sacrifice, the sacrifice of thanks and supplication and nothing else. The prayer of thanksgiving, however, had for its subject the not yet consecrated elements as the universal symbols of God's bounty, and for its object the divine blessing upon them. The prayer, as intercession for the living and the dead, sought its mediation in the merits of Christ's death,-and now the prayer

of thanksgiving itself passed over to the realization (or repetition) of that death in the consecrated elements. Thus, out of the eucharistical offering grew the sacrifice for sin, or the sacrifice of the mass; and this fluctuation or development of the conception of the offering may still be recognized in the formulary of the mass.

XCII. The withdrawal of the cup from the laity, with its ostensible motive, viz., the assertion of the concomitance, is one of the most telling proofs of the falling off of tradition from its natural and legal basis, and of the suppression of the true conception of the communion by the idea of priesthood and sacrifice.

XCIII. Purification in the future world is possible according to Christian conceptions, only that it must not be regarded as proceeding like a physical process; still less that the souls assigned to it have its intensity or duration diminished by the meritorious efforts of those who are still engaged in the struggles of this life.

XCIV. Christian love, where it is most considerate and lively, is so far from being satisfied with its intercessions for members of the Church militant that it can afford to desist from intercession for the dead.

XCV. All invocations of any other advocate or champion than the Saviour arise from ignorance or denial of the great promises which are given to Christians in Matt. xviii, 19, and John xi, 23.

XCVI. In mistaken security from the sensual, superstitious, idolatrous tendency, which is found in all other men and so easily runs to extremes, the contra-reformation gave its sanction to things quite foreign to primitive Christianity, viz., invocation of the saints and the worship of images and relics.

XCVII. The safeguard in the case of image worship which consists in the relation which the image holds to the idea it represents, is insufficient, for it is questionable in what degree that relation is passive and merely hypothetical or necessary and spontaneous.

XCVIII. There is an excess of religious exercise, because there is a deficiency of religion, which is the very cause of the

excess.

XCIX. The essential Christian worship is faith, hope, love; and for its instrument Christ has instituted the fellowship of word, prayer and sacrament.

C. These means, put into operation by believers, and adjusted according to the circumstances of time and place, in their natural relation to contemplative and active life, the general and personal interests, constitute Christian worship in the narrower meaning of the term.

ART. VI.-SOURCES OF DIVINE KNOWLEDGE.

A Posthumous Fragment, by the late ELIAS J. RICHARDS, D.D., Reading, Pa.*

(a) NATURE.—The created universe is a manifestation of Deity. The book of Nature is a material revelation,-God represented to the eye and the ear and the senses. From the earliest dawn of life Nature lies close to our senses. Our first ideas and impressions are derived from things seen and heard. We know the language of a mother's eye and the tones of a mother's voice long before we can interpret the meaning of words. We hold mysterious communion with earth and sky, with cloud and rainbow, with bird and flower, before any interest is felt in the printed book.

What an endless variety of objects of profound and curious investigation does the visible world present. Why did God create such a world and place man in it? Why should he make it so beautiful? Why lavish upon it such infinite wealth of adornment? Why should the fields be enameled with flowers, and the trees fragrant with blossoms? Why should the waves make music with the shores, and the winds with the forest leaves? And, above all, why should the starry heavens bend with such infinite majesty and glory? Another kind of world would have answered as well for a garden and a grainfield. No such display of material splendor and beauty was needed for subsistence, labor, or intercourse. But these attractive surroundings were

* This article is a portion of an unpublished work left incomplete at his death, entitled The Higher Life, or Religion in its Essential Nature."

not created in vain. They are designed to awaken thought and inquiry, to excite wonder and admiration. Here man is born, and amid these scenes and surrounded by these manifestations of divine glory his inner life is unfolded. The world was not designed simply to secure bodily ease and comfort, but to inspire, expand and enrich the soul. It is man's nursery and school. Nature offers herself as a picture, a poem, a glorious epic, waiting to be read and admired. The whole of our inner being is in correspondence with the objective universe. Everything around is meant to move us, and to move us towards God. Wherever we look suggestions meet our eyes, offering to lead us to the unknown; all the finite and visible refer to the Infinite and Invisible.

The profit we derive from the study of nature depends not more upon our mental than upon our moral qualifications. Man can be taught only what he is prepared to learn. If he does not find God first in his soul, he will find no God in the universe. Nature may conceal God as well as reveal him. While to one she is a pillar of fire, to another she may only be a pillar of cloud. It is sad to think how many pass through life without inquiry or reflection. They are as little moved by the marvels and mysteries of nature as the brute creation. Even their first emotions of childish interest and wonder, awakened by singing birds and opening flowers, by the lightning and the thunder, by sailing clouds and twinkling stars, soon subside by unreflecting familiarity. Dimmer and darker grows the eye, duller and more heedless becomes the ear, and more and more does the heart lose its susceptibility to impressions as life advances. With how many does the journey of life degenerate into a struggle for bare subsistence? Intellect is harnessed to instinct, and doomed to drudge in the service of appetite. The highest exercise of reason is summoned only to solve the problems of loss and gain. Utility determines all labor and study with the multitude. Health and riches, and the gratification of the appetites, are the chief and final good. "What profit shall we have in our labor,' is the grand inquiry. The good they covet is present and material good. The highest end of creation is to subserve present convenience and comfort. They study nature only to learn her uses and how to subdue and control her forces. Grandeur is nothing, beauty is nothing. Save for light, warmth and guidance, neither sun nor star would be anything to them. The re

volving seasons are only marked for the blight or bloom which they bring. The shifting glories of the sunset are observed chiefly as the prognostic of the next day's toil or travel. In the hills that skirt their horizon they see only possible quarries and ore beds, in the mysterious ocean a highway for trade and travel, in the broad and billowy prairie cornfields and pasture lands, in the grand old forests a covert for game or material for warmth and construction. Science is useless if it be not practical. Steam, light and electricity are mere utilities. It does not occur to them that nature was also intended to elevate and inspire the soul as well as to gratify the lustful eye of gain. "People speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands, food and raiment, were alone useful, as if sight, thought and admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their own way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body, who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water they draw are better than the pine forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move like his eternity."

Others have ends and aims purely scientific. They are inquisitive and curious to find out the reason of things. The universe is the great sphinx-riddle which they seek to solve. Whence is it? what is it? and how does it consist? Its wonders

and mysteries fascinate them. For six thousand years they have been busy interrogating Nature, with what measure of success we may learn from the crude cosmogony of the ancients, and the vaunted world-theorems of the moderns. Intellect is their chief organ of knowledge, and its methods are the logical and inductive. They have higher objects in the study of Nature than use and gain. Knowledge they seek for the love of it; science they pursue for its own sake. They find a glow of excitement in the search, and a glad surprise in the discoveries. But science unbaptized knows not God. Nature, like the Bible,