fligacy that in the bosom of that kingdom encompass us. Is not, it may be fairly urged, the communion itself here forfeited, and what then remains to bind the degraded rebel to the heart of a servant of the living God?

I would speak with great humility when I venture on such a topic as this. Inwardly, and in the sight of omniscient justice, the communion of the body of Christ is, doubtless, suspended by wilful sin; outwardly, by the legitimate exercise of the Church's authority of extrusion. But as long as the avenging justice of God has not publicly declared His sentence irrevocable, I will dare to observe that, if you dismiss the claims of Christian brotherhood, as utterly annulled in those unhappy brethren whose thoughtless lives dishonour it, I firmly believe you think and feel not as Christ would have you think and feel. They may forget their calling, you never must! The most godless was once in baptism a child of God and heir of heaven; and no man can pronounce that the lost glory may not be regained. The prodigal son was not less a brother when wandering in the land of famine, than when sharing the blessedness of the father's mansion. Men can linger over the relics of a departed glory, and acknowledge that their very desolation possesses an attaching charm; such feelings, surely, were not given in vain. The ruined fane of even the pagan deity can win a tear; I will not refuse to weep over a fallen temple of the Holy Ghost. The inspiration may be fled and the shrine polluted; but, once consecrated, it is to memory and hope a thing set apart for ever. From the very depths of my brother's misery a voice reaches my heart, that proclaims him my brother, my lost, degraded, miserable brother, but to the last tremendous day of separation my brother still! Yea, and were I condemned to the utter solitude of a land of avowed unbelievers, or were it possible that the whole Church of Christ became apostate, the social spirit of Christ's kingdom would not yet expire. As it withdrew in disappointment from that outward world, in which it could find no resting-place, it would silently rise to the world above, and finding there the model of every spiritual beauty that blooms below, in Him who is the fountain-head of the Church's graces, would commit its affec

tions to the keeping of Christ Himself, until the blessed period might arrive when He again should permit His image to reappear in human faith and holiness on earth.

Such, brethren, are, faintly and briefly spoken, the feelings that bind the Christian to the universal Church of Christ, to the Church in its twilight of sorrow and infirmity, no less than in the noonday of its triumphant graces. If errors or exaggerations have clouded this great subject, I am not answerable for them; but assuredly it is a thing to move thankfulness, that, at all events, to this matter in its broad and general features, so many earnest thinkers in our age are awaking. The first requisite to renovate a nation is the national spirit; the Church may then alone hope for a brighter page in the sad story of her centuries, when men shall have risen to know the vastness of her purpose, the extent of her capabilities, and the splendour of the promises she inherits. And if these things be elements of Christianity, and not at all the less so that the unhappy perversions of the Papal system have discredited them by secula rizing their spiritual purport, surely our Christian education is complete only when it involves them; and however we may rejoice to hear of every diffusion of every truth, we shall feel, when we have a choice in our power, that it is our duty to prefer to the fragmentary and imperfect Christianity of even the scriptural school, the Christianity of Christ Himself, of Him who has founded a Kingdom, as well as given a law, and whose last sublime prayer, on the eve of the sacrifice, was scarcely more for the individual perfection of His people, than that they all might be ONE, as He and His Father were ONE!

SERMON XXVI.

CHURCH EDUCATION IN IRELANDa.

PART II-THE CHURCH'S CLAIMS IN THE MATTER OF EDUCATION CONTINUED— SOME OF THE ORDINARY OBJECTIONS NOTED THE ERRORS AND DEFICIENCIES OF EXISTING SYSTEMS OF IRISH EDUCATION.

ACTs, iv. 1, 2.

And as they spake unto the people, the priests, and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees, came upon them, Being grieved that they taught the people.

I'

T will not, I suppose, be questioned, that in the days when the events occurred which this passage and its context record, and to which on last Sunday I drew your attention so largely, the Church of Christ existed,—that it existed as a society under superintendence,—that its superintendents had received a specific commission, and that they were, through good and evil report, bound to execute it. This Church of Christ was unquestionably, at that period, a small and lonely company of believers; but that company of believers held the fortunes of the world: in the midst of all its feebleness and obscurity it carried with it promises and powers of boundless expansion. Now, this expansion was expressly predicted to be twofold,-expansion in space, and expansion in time; universality and permanence. Yet, whatever might be the cir cumstantial changes of the body, it was to preserve its immutable identity; the promises were not to churches, but to the Church; it was not to be more itself at the distance of one year, or of one degree of latitude, than at the distance of a

* Preached in behalf of the Church Education Society for Ireland, in St. Stephen's Church, Dublin, January 26, 1840.

The

thousand years, and across the diameter of the earth. identity through space is secured by the principle of Catholicity; the identity through time, by the principle of Succession; in both, the dispensation of Christ is transmitted from those who have to those who have not; countries are allied to this great fellowship by a spiritual colonization; ages are united in it by a spiritual inheritance. But through all the variety of its connexions, local and successive, the visible empire remains the same; the same to the eye of God by the enjoyment of the peculiar graces He promised to its communion; the same to the eye of man by the maintenance of the social constitution it originally received. The law of Union, whose inward ground is a divine grace, whose outward manifestation a divine life, whose actual development a divine love, being the great characteristic of Christianity, the Church was designed to exhibit this law in the form of a public polity,— a polity, then, whose main principle was uniformity of government, of sacraments, of discipline. Under the old dispensation, uniformity was secured by excluding all nations but one; under the new it is proposed by taking all nations into one. But both are systems of government, and as such both are intimately connected. I know not on what ground it is assumed that the peculiar ecclesiastical constitution which God had consecrated for 1500 years in His Jewish Church was at once rejected, when the Jews themselves were discarded; the people and their administrative polity are readily separable, nor is there any authority for supposing them confounded in a common fall; the principles of the divine kingdom remained the same, though their application was enlarged; and the object of the vaster dispensation was less to extinguish Judea for ever, than to erect a new and spiritual Judea in every district of the earth. In a vast proportion of all that calls itself the

b Do not the promises to the future Jewish nation, which certainly seem to include an enjoyment of their old religious polity in some sense or form, seem to indicate that the polity itself has not altogether perished? A complete Christian episcopate in Judea, recognised by a happy and devoted people, would perhaps satisfy this element of the predictions, with as much exactness as is usually required in the fulfilinents of figurative prophecy.

Church of Christ, this has been undeniably realized; in every diocese a spiritual Israel re-appears in its threefold orders, its sacraments, its services; nor has the widest corruption of the original polity (the Roman Papacy) been permitted by Providence to efface, in the countries subject to its authority, these characteristic features of the old Catholic constitution.

We do not, then, speak with exaggerated or superfluous earnestness, when we insist on the claims of the Church of Christ as a settled polity, or on the value of our own inheritance as included within its limits. The very terms by which Christ described the Church He was to found point to fixed subordinations of order and office,-His kingdom with its stated officers, His temple with its various apartments, His body with its members of more or less dignity; and if He Himself, by the peculiar solemnity with which He ordained His Apostles, and the Apostles, by the similar solemnity which accompanied their designations of men to the special service of God, and these last, in their turn, by the earnestness with which they are divinely warned to lay hands suddenly on no man,-impress, within even the narrow limits of the New Testament, the momentous importance of those official distinctions, which were to be the great visible features of this divine constitution on earth; if, till the hour of apostacy, the similarity of the constitution be the outward evidence of identity, the unbroken transmission of order and function its inward warrant; then may the Church of this day rejoice in the high and consoling assurance that it is vitally one and the same with the Church of 1800 years ago; that the immediate blessing of Christ is on its due ministrations, as truly as though we could hear His own voice declare to the missionaries of our dioceses and parishes, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost;" that, even beyond this official authority, there is no one privilege of ordinary grace, no strengthening promise of divine enlightenment and aid, which is not ours no less than theirs, except so far as our own wickedness, and worldliness, and negligence, may have forfeited them.

Privileges are ours, but duties too; the same perpetuity