ourselves. We have not to confront any such difficulty. The Church does not impose on us any such exorbitant terms. The Bible comes to us without the admixture of human inventions. The clergy of our parishes or cathedrals, the schoolmistresses trained in our diocesan colleges, the nursing sisters in our hospitals, are under no allegiance to the Papacy. Men of high intellect―take, for instance, such a one as William Spottiswoode, the President of the Royal Society, on whose honoured grave in Westminster Abbey the flowers have scarcely withered-women, whose enlightened intelligence keeps pace with their self-sacrificing devotion to God and man, still find themselves able, nay grateful, to be allowed to live in full communion with their mother-Church.

With such privileges, with such opportunities, what a responsibility is ours! We shall be tenfold more guilty than France if we follow in her steps; if we blot out the name of God from our public acts; if we desecrate, as we have been so nearly doing at a recent date, His holy law of marriage, and trust to what we are pleased to call natural instincts instead of Divine commandments, and thus poison the fountain-head of all family life; if we withdraw religious teaching from our schools and secularize our Universities. For we are under no such difficulties, our pathway is not so perplexed, our light is clearer, our past with all its shortcomings less clouded. It rests with us whether our future is to be that of a nation which has flung away the richest heritage which any Christian nation ever had, or of one which listens to the Voice which is ever crying, 'If ye continue in My word, then are ye My disciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.'

ART. VI.-THE EVIDENTIAL ASPECT OF THE SACRAMENTS.

1. Principles of Divine Service. By the Rev. P. FREEMAN, Archdeacon of Exeter. (Oxford and London, 1873.) 2. The Evidential Value of the Holy Eucharist. Being the

Boyle Lectures for 1879, 1880. By the Rev. G. F. MACLEAR, D.D., Warden of S. Augustine's College, Canterbury. (London, 1883.)

THE ancient church of St. Cross, or Holywell, outside the city walls at Oxford, is probably not unknown to many of

our readers. In the old churchyard there is an interesting custom still observed, if it has not been discontinued within the last few years, which will serve as a very apposite illustration of the argument which we propose to make the subject of the following article. It is, or was, as follows. On Low Sunday in each year, at the conclusion of the morning service, the vicar and churchwardens, leaving the church, take up their position on one side of a flat tombstone, whilst a certain number of poor widows assemble at the opposite side, a large number of the congregation remaining to witness the ceremony. The churchwardens, who are provided with sums of money corresponding in number to the aged widows who are in waiting, then lay each sum separately upon the tomb, and they are taken up by each of the poor recipients as the roll of their names is called. The custom is one of considerable antiquity, probably some hundred-and-fifty or two hundred years, and is observed in compliance with the directions of the will of the person buried beneath the tombstone. We believe that the like ceremonial is observed in some other parishes of England, and it is possible that it may have originated in the desire of the testator that some memorial of his wishes should remain independently of the written document, such as might serve to perpetuate them should the will itself be lost or destroyed. At all events it is clear that it would have this effect, and might be quoted as very convincing evidence of those wishes, were the documentary proof wanting, and the intentions of the donor brought into dispute. In point of fact, it is probable that the officials engaged in it have never consulted the written documents, and for the most part act upon the traditionary evidence which the annual observance affords. Suppose, however, that the will was really lost, and that the vicar and churchwardens had no other proof at their command than this fixed ceremony, occurring at stated periods, administered by official persons, and annually witnessed by a considerable number of parishioners resident in the place, who had witnessed the same from their childhood: could there remain any reasonable doubt as to any of the following facts-viz. that the testator had lived and died, and left a certain amount of property, to be administered in behalf of certain necessitous people, and that by duly qualified persons? Our readers will probably have divined ere this the parallel which we propose to draw; but we think that they will be struck with the force and with the variety of points in which the analogy holds. We maintain that were all documentary evidence lost-and this of course

is mere hypothesis-yet the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, celebrated as it has been, beyond all fear of contradiction, from the very earliest period after the ascension of the Divine Founder, and that on stated occasions of great solemnity, and by official persons well known and specifically authorized for that very purpose, and in a form in its essential features unchanged, however much it may have been subsequently enlarged or surrounded with circumstances of dignity-we maintain that the Holy Sacrament thus administered in unbroken succession of time, and in every portion of the world into which the Church has successively spread, carries in itself irresistible evidence both of the life and death of Christ, and of the express purposes of that life and death; so that it is impossible to deny either the historical event of that most holy life and death, or the primitive and apostolic doctrine of their efficacy.

It will be observed that our argument here is entirely independent of any controverted point whatever; that we are viewing the question simply and exclusively as regards the evidential value of the Holy Sacraments; and, though beyond a doubt their evidence may extend beyond the facts to many particulars of doctrine also, yet that it is to the facts of the Christian revelation, and to its most elementary doctrines, that we desire to restrict ourselves at present.

We are aware that our line of argument has been to a certain extent anticipated by Leslie in connexion with the Passover, and that objection has been taken to his statement on the ground of the supposed uncertainty of the authorship of the Pentateuch and the consequent difficulty of tracing the Paschal observance to the date of the Exodus. We admit that so far as this difficulty exists so far the evidence is weakened. But we are very far from admitting that the difficulty is by any means as great as is represented. The internal evidence of the Mosaic authorship of the Book of Deuteronomy is certainly very strong, and in that book distinct reference is made to the Passover. And Leslie's argument still remains to be answered as to the difficulty of assigning any later date to its institution. At all events, no such difficulty can reasonably be suggested as to the primitive institution or observance whether of Holy Baptism or of the Lord's Supper as external rites of the Christian Church coeval and co-extensive with that Church itself.

In fact the evidential argument derived from the historical view of the Sacraments is but a part, though a most clear and important part, of the argument presented by the historical

existence of the Church itself. The strength of that argument is, as we imagine, well-nigh irresistible, and does in fact operate with great, though it may be latent, force upon many minds who may perhaps never have cared accurately to formulate it. For the fact is irrefragable that the Church exists, and has existed in unbroken continuity for 1800 years. Of course we are prepared to hear that the divisions and subdivisions of the Church have done much to weaken the force of its testimony. In certain respects we are constrained to admit that it is so; but not for the purposes of our argument. On the contrary, it is no small confirmation of this testimony that the Church's evidence as well to the leading doctrines as to the great historical facts of Christianity should have come to us through numerous channels, in some instances not only distinct from each other, but also jealously opposed. In fact, no stronger testimony could be borne to the primitive doctrines and observances of the Church than that which in many cases is supplied by the heretical sects who were her most bitter foes. No doubt the action of the Church upon the outer world is deplorably weakened by the broken front which she presents. The Voice of Truth is sadly obscured amid the discordant claims of rival communions, to say nothing of the loss or diminution of that supernatural blessing which undoubtedly is promised to union and unbroken fellowship. We would be understood to say nothing in palliation of the sin, or of the lamentable results, of disunion; but we do maintain that the divisions of Christendom do not materially affect the evidence to the historical facts or the fundamental doctrines of revelation. For the divisions arise, either on points of discipline, or upon such questions of doctrine as are of secondary character, how great soever their importance may be. If East and West differ upon the 'Filioque' clause, their very difference bears evidence to the primitive faith in the Person and Office of the Holy Spirit. If Episcopalian and Presbyterian dispute as to the Apostolical succession, which under different forms. they both claim, they at least unite in their testimony to an Apostolic ministry, and a divine constitution of the Church. If Romanist and Anglican are at issue as to the nature of the Divine Presence in the Eucharist, they bear equal testimony to the primitive institution of that Holy Sacrament, to the purposes for which it was ordained, and to the Sacrifice which it commemorates; whilst every sect in Christendom unites in the confession of our Lord's divinity, and in the appeal to Holy Scripture.

There is this further and most weighty consideration: that

the Christian Church which now for eighteen centuries has played so great a part in history, which has penetrated in every direction the mass of civilized society, and whose existence it has never been possible at any moment to ignore, traces its origin, not to some dark and impenetrable age of a remote antiquity, nor to the regions of myths and fable, but to the immediate confines of the Augustan era, and to the great seats of empire and of commerce. The eloquence of Cicero had scarce been silenced, and the strains of Virgil still charmed the Imperial Court, when the Divine Babe was born in Bethlehem. Corinth was still great in commerce and in art, Athens was still the famous seat of learning and philosophy, when S. Paul preached in their streets the faith of Christ. The deaths of Seneca and Lucan were not separated from those of S. Peter and S. Paul by an interval of more than two years; and when they died the historian Tacitus was yet a child.

Later, indeed, when the barbarians had overrun the empire, when political liberty and the light of literature were alike extinguished, and no other guarantee for either remained than that which this very Church supplied, a period ensued in which myths might have had their birth, and fable might have assumed the place of history; when monkish legends divided the domain of imagination with romance; and the chronicles of the Cid or the tales of Arthur might have exchanged the realm of Poetry for that of Faith. But long ere this the Church had assumed a distinct and consolidated form: its sacred writings had been carefully collected and scrupulously tested, and were enrolled in the sacred canon; its liturgies had moulded themselves upon certain well-defined models, and were, moreover, eminently of an objective cast; its hierarchy had long been established with an almost unvarying uniformity. It is possible that some may be tempted to regret the rigidity of the forms into which ecclesiastical life and worship so early crystallized, but we think that herein we may discern a most wise, and certainly not accidental, provision by which, in the dark and troubled ages which were to follow, the Church became at once the uncompromising witness to divine truth, and the one institution which, maintaining its essential identity under external circumstances the most various, and with doctrinal developments widely differing, still bore a distinct and unchanging testimony to the historical facts upon which it rested.

The poor hunted Christian of the catacombs who drew upon the walls of his simple oratory the image of the Good