Grace, they overlooked the means of grace.

Defective in

their moral philosophy as well as in their theology, they even seemed to imagine that to insist strongly on the means of grace was to disparage the sovereignty of Divine grace itself; much as if an engineer were to think that the care bestowed on the mechanism of his locomotive showed an inadequate appreciation of the expansive force of steam.

The doctrine of the Anglican Revival was larger, wider, more comprehensive. As contrasted with the Evangelical its peculiarities were these. First it taught not merely the doctrine of human corruption, but of sin as a potent everacting force, requiring definite agencies to counteract its operation-agencies strictly supernatural in respect of the forces which were at work, but strictly natural in this, that they must work according to the laws of that human nature on which they operate. Next it held up to view the whole order of the Church as a divinely organised system for applying those supernatural powers to the quelling of sin and the development of holiness. It exhibited the Church in all its ordinances and rites, its sacraments and its ministry, as a system specifically adapted to our human nature, working by methods germane to the nature it had to influence, but at the same time charged with virtue from a higher world, and of a divine and spiritual order, since nothing less could avail for the counteraction of original corruption, for the suppression of actual sin, and for originating, sustaining, and fostering a new and divine life within the soul. It set forth the Church system as very complex and varied because it had to enfold the whole complex being and life of man, to touch it not only at its centre, but at every point in its circumference and every stage of its probation. And it set it forth as one in which the visible agencies were of necessity of the human order, while the powers acting through those agencies were of the Divine. In a word, the Anglican Revival supervened upon the Evangelical with the exhibition of the full-orbed round of the ancient doctrine of the Church and the means of grace, with all that those words involve of Christian sacraments, Christian priesthood, authorised forms of worship, stated means of communion with God, all of which should have the double force both of reminding the Christian of his privileges and of affording him the means and occasion of their participation.

Consider for a moment the contrast between the two systems. You seem to pass into a new world. Not that the latter is contrary to the former, but that in it you seem to enter―

nay, rather you actually do enter-a divinely ordered kosmos, a kosmos divinely ordered for the effecting that of which the Evangelical Revival had confessed the need while it failed to recognise the supply. For the weak point of the Evangelical Revival lay in this—that it did not sufficiently recognise that God had not merely vouchsafed His Personal graces to individuals, but also surrounded them with a system adapted to draw out into force and action the results of His secret operation-in a word, the Kingdom of Grace. It would be strange indeed if a doctrine so powerful and so far-reaching as this, coming among us after long suspension and answering to the felt needs of tens of thousands of souls-a doctrine so many-sided, and therefore affording so many points of misapprehension— should take its place without causing some disturbance in the mental and moral atmospheres, without suffering exaggeration at the hands of those who welcomed it, untold misrepresentations from those who rejected it. Far otherwise has been the experience of the last thirty years. But the experience has not been a discouraging one. Men who are not yet old can recognise not merely the wider area over which these truths are accepted, but what we consider to be at least of equal consequence, the larger number of aspects and departments of truth which are accepted, and the diminution of unhealthy excitement about the way in which they are regarded, in proportion as they have settled down among the everyday factors of Christian thought and life. Where now is the furious clamour about the true doctrine of Baptism, with the corresponding outcry at its taking its proper place in the service? Where now the confusion between the Church and the Establishment, and the passionate frenzy which was aroused at the bare idea of the Church uttering her voice in her own Synods? We need only refer to the revival of the true doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, accompanied by augmented reverence in its celebration, as well as an unparalleled increase in celebrations, to the revival of daily common prayer, to the restoration of churches; and, indeed, the reference would be needless were it not desirable for the younger among us to be reminded that each and all of these in turn have been the subjects of angry clamour and wild misrepresentation, while in every case the great secular world outside was prompt to range itself on the side of those who opposed the advancing truth. It is only natural, therefore, and in the natural progress of things, that the Doctrine and the Practice of Confession, as one of the agencies conducing to the subdual of sin and the increase of holiness, should become in its turn the object

of heated attack on the one side, and of an undiscriminating advocacy on the other.

We have already pointed out that the whole course of the Anglican Revival has been characterised by the effort at bringing back to their normal use and efficiency those means of grace whereby the soul of man is divinely aided in the struggle against sin and towards holiness. It was with perfect logical accuracy that the first great battle was on the subject of the initiatory Sacrament, that, namely, in which the soul is new born, in which the man becomes a child of God, in which, therefore, the barrier set up by Sin between God and the human soul is done away, and the privilege of sonship, right of access to the Father, is actually conveyed to that individual soul. We most of us remember the astounding caricatures of the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration by which it was sought to prejudice people's minds against the Church's doctrine and the Scriptural truth of Holy Baptism. But all was to no purpose. It was

of small avail that the Judicial Committee pronounced a judgment which needs no characterising here. The doctrine made its way, and probably there has been no period since the Reformation during which the truth of Baptism has been so widely and so intelligently held as since 1851. We pass over the Eucharistic controversy, and we come to our own immediate subject. The air is full now of angry vituperation and of heated misrepresentation, both of the doctrine and the practice of Confession, just as it was five-and-twenty years ago of that of Baptism. There are thousands and tens of thousands among us who know its value as a most powerful means of grace, but in the absence of authoritative definition, there is or may be almost as much (in reality we think far more) danger to be apprehended from a heated advocacy of it than from any, however violent, denial of its worth. An unjust attack on what is good always recoils upon itself, and benefits the cause it sought to crush, and its mischief passes away. An unbalanced advocacy leads to erroneous views and to erroneous modes of using the ordinance, and so leaves a permanent wound to the abiding injury of its usefulness for the end for which it was ordained. Its mischief lasts. On all grounds, then, first because of the popular excitement on the subject of Confession; next because of its holding a definite place in that economy of Grace of which we have thus far been speaking, and which place cannot be left unoccupied without damage to those for whose benefit it was divinely ordered; and then, thirdly, because of the mischief which may

accrue if a rash and insufficiently instructed zeal leads to false views of its nature or to wrong modes of its use—on all grounds we feel called upon to contribute what in us lies to a calm judgment on the subject.

Confession, with its correlative Absolution, has a definite place in the Christian system. In the language of the day, it supplies a want.' It is one of those 'means,' one of those 'Christian privileges,' by which souls are helped to appropriate to themselves and to utilise the divine help which God places at their disposal in order to enable them to overcome sin and to grow in holiness. The Church's system is a system of such helps, in which God has ordained certain things, persons, and rites to be-(1) witnesses to truths necessary to be believed, and (2) channels of His Spiritual help and strength which are necessary for our spiritual vitality. If men were all spirit, it might be that no such institutions could be required. In that case the regenerated soul once new born (as in Baptism) to be a child of God might draw its help and sustenance direct from God its Father. We do not say it would, we only say that, conceivably, it might. The specific privilege of sonship, as we pointed out above, is right of access, and accordingly were men all spirit, the child of God once made a member of Christ might conceivably communicate so directly with Christ its Saviour and with God the Father of spirits as to need no media whatever. We only put the case as a thing conceivable and in order to set what follows in a stronger light.

But we are not all spirit. To us ideas come and influences filter through the innumerable media which stand between us and that spiritual world whence flows that stream of spiritual force and influence which sustains our spiritual being. Consider the multiplicity, the endless variety of the media through which, under the existing conditions of our earthly life, influences filter in into our souls, and by which these influences are liable to be modified or obstructed as the case may be. There is our bodily organisation with its constant interference with our spiritual development; there is our mental constitution; there is the framework of society around us with its enormous influence on character (and our character is our self); there is the mysterious power of sympathy, by which man acts on man, by which the person or persons we live with modify our character and affect our being without effort, and without either their consciousness or intention. All these things are realities, and from the first commencement of what we may term Organised Religion it has been the Divine method, not only to act directly by the power of the Spirit on our human

spirits, but also to occupy these channels of influence, and (so to speak) to supplement and support His more immediate central action on the soul by the infiltration of Divine Grace and help through these ordinary channels of influence. Does the weight of the world's inertia as regards things spiritual, with its intense devotion to things temporal, oppress our souls and infect them with its own deadness? God plants His

children in a Church, the spirit of whose citizenship is the exact counterpoise to the danger, and the ennobling influence of our fellowship with the saints in the Kingdom of God, with all its sense of mutual loyalty to that kingdom, stands over against the mundane influences around us. The principle is of universal application, it is this which lies at the root of all visible institutions of worship, it is this which regulates and justifies the employment of art and poetry and music in the service of God, and it culminates in the palmary examples of the Sacraments of the Gospel and the Priesthood of the Church. For what is this principle but that God has chosen to take of the things and the beings He has made and consecrate them to a second and higher service unto Himself, and thus make them not merely declare His Glory, but also convey His Grace. All that exists is God's making, whether in external Nature, or in the nature of Man and of Society; and God is only claiming to use His own when he thus acts. It is mere Manichæism to regard such media either as beneath God's using or essentially unfit for His employment. And to speak plain truth, we believe that one lesson to be learned. from the religious history of England is that the chief obstacle to the full acceptance of this doctrine lies in that touch of Manichæism which we find in all the more Calvinistic forms of opinion, and which indeed strikes responsive chords in the very nature of many of us. Fanaticism takes kindly to that which is extreme and fierce and gloomy, and Fanaticism after all is but the religion of the untaught and the vulgar. There is much which appeals to the taste for spiritual dram-drinking in the view that

'Nature's corrupt throughout,1

A gaudy snake which must be crushed not tamed,

A cage of unclean birds deceitful ever,

Born in the likeness of the fiend, which Adam

Did at the Fall, the Scripture saith, put on.'

1 Thus the Calvinistic alteration in 1643 of our Ninth Article, made in order to render its sense 'more express and determinate in favour of Calvinism,' defines Original Sin as that 'whereby man is wholly deprived of original righteousness'—not merely 'very far gone from’—as the Article expresses it.