nished matter for the Epistles written from time to time to the Churches. The most important of these was: What was the relation of the Gentiles to the Jewish law?-of the New Dispensation to the Old? The mental and moral training and habits of thought of the Jew would naturally be averse from a surrender of that which had been their distinctive privilege as the peculiar people of God, the possession of the Divinely-revealed Law. The theoretical admission that it was some time to pass away, or disappear in a more glorious system, might, through the inconsistency of human nature, very well coexist with a denial of its being superseded by any particular dispensation at any particular time. The Jew, when he became a Christian, could not at once shake off the traditions of his forefathers, and St. James told St. Paul at a late period of the Apostolic History, that the members of the Church of Jerusalem were all "zealous for the law." No wonder, then, that Jews who came to Antioch and other Gentile cities, "taught the brethren, saying, Except ye be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, ye cannot be saved." This affirmation of necessity precipitated the controversy which was inevitable, sooner or later, between the Law of the Old, and the Life of the New Dispensation. Nor was the operation of the Judaizing Christian without great plausibility when the moral condition of heathenism was considered. Nowhere outside the race to whom the Old Testament was committed-neither among Greeks nor Barbarians-was there any certain affirmation of the moral value of any action, or certain criterion of the guilt of any crime. The Law, then, seemed to be the anchor of morality as well as the sanction of religion, and we may fairly concede to the honest Judaizer a moral purpose in his demand of conformity to the institutions of his forefathers on the part of the Gentile converts. It was reserved for Inspiration to draw the necessary distinctions which secured to the Christian believer "the liberty wherewith Christ had made him free," and led him to realize his emancipation in Christ, both from sin and from the law.

The instinct of the Church, arranging the Epistles of St. Paul according to their ethical and spiritual relations, rather than according to their chronological succession, gives us the practical theology of the Church in its logical order, as it was wrought out under the pressure of this controversy. The Council at Jerusalem upon the affairs of Antioch had given Apostolic sanction to the decrees which regulated the practice of the Gentile Churches; but the doctrinal basis of the whole subject needed to be wrought out, and this

gave to St. Paul the occasion for his magnificent discussion of the doctrine of Justification by Faith, in the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians. The implanted Divine Life-that spiritual gift by which the believer can say with St. Paul, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God"-the Life of the Regeneration, working out the obedience of faith, and so, through the grace of the Spirit, renewing the heart, and making legible there the palimpsest of the Divine Law, obscured, though not effaced by original sina transcript agreeing with the eternal moral truth enshrined in the Mosaic Revelation-that Life enables the man who so walks by faith to stand as accounted just before God, in Christ, without the ritual and ceremonial "works of the Law" of Moses. This is, in brief, the Apostles' solution of the double question, involved in the Judaistic controversy,—of the obligation of the old dispensation on the one hand, and of the guarantee, on the other, of a Christian morality among the Gentile Christians.

This great subject elucidated, other subordinate developments of Church activity and means of training the believer to perfection in Christ are treated of in the following Epistles. In those to the Corinthians, the reality of Church membership, even when not realized by the individual himself; the relation of Church authority to the member who does not realize it; the principles of judicial action, and the object of excluding the fallen member from the communion of the faithful; the unity of the faithful in the communion and fellowship of "the body;" the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, the special instrument and sacrament of that communion; the mutual dependence of the members on one another, and therefore the powers and responsibilities of discipline; the relation of supernatural gifts to spiritual graces, leading to the sublime exposition of Christian perfection in which the faith of our justification becomes the "charity" of our sanctification; and so, passing on to the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, to the doctrine of the unity of the Church in Christ, the Head; and, through the Pastoral Epistles, which treat more fully of the special organization of "the body," to the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the great High Priest, who has entered within the veil, is revealed as ministering for and in His Church, the root of its existence as the once promised and now realized "Kingdom of Heaven."

Into the discussion of the many and interesting subjects brought up in an examination of the Epistles, which is intended to be exhaustive so far as relates to the Church, we cannot follow Bishop

Cotterill, and, indeed, we have not bound ourselves closely to his method of treatment in what we have written, having rather pur sued our own train of thought, under the stimulus of his interesting volume. Recommending it to the perusal of those who may desire to acquaint themselves with the results of a careful exami nation of the structure and functions of the Church, as set forth in the New Testament, we may thank him, in conclusion, for pointing out, from the Apocalypse, the obvious, but often overlooked fact, that the unit of Church organization is not the Diocese, but the Province the latter and not the former containing in itself the means of propagating the Apostolic succession from age to age.

THE

HE object of the present article is to give expression to some thoughts on certain hymns in ordinary use, in which the writers pursue a line of thought so peculiar, and so dependent on incidental states of mind, or on existing or non-existing relations to "the household of faith," as to render impracticable the concurrence of any large body of Christian people in their use, except in an unreal sense, and by temporarily assuming for themselves a position, false in their own case, but identical with that presented in any such hymn.

In our view, reality and truthfulness lie at the basis of all Church teaching, Church usage, and Churchly piety. Faith deals with the real, not the unreal; it excludes opinion which is variable, and grounds itself upon facts and inspired truths, which are objective and unchangeable. Christian symbolism, ceremonial and worship, also spring from the real, not the imaginary; and, therefore, truthfulness is the measure of their perfection, and the essence of their derivation and being. All Christian piety and holiness of spirit must also be the outgrowth of a real Divine principle, without which, all religion runs into externalism, affectation, hypocrisy, or the acrimony of a morbid mis-culture of the emotions and the conscience.

The Prayer Book is everywhere profoundly real. In Confession, Prayer, Adoration, and Sacramental Offices, it never loses consciousness of its own truthful nature, or of its obligations as the exponent

of those verities which transcend all human wisdom, and are not subject to the variations of human thought. Unreality is, therefore, an element which the Church nowhere recognizes or provides for in Divine worship. It is foreign to her whole system, antagonistic to all her exhortations, and subversive of all her lessons of duty to God and man. Whatever, under such a system, may be the failings of the worshipper, either in praise or prayer, the Church has not, by her own words, led him into those failings, or lent herself to the cultivation of the unreal, by the utterance of words not likely to bear correspondence with the inward feelings of those who use them.

Much has been written, and ably written, concerning both the faults and the merits of the new collection of hymns called the "Hymnal." But the point we now have in mind, does not appear to have attracted the attention it deserves; and for this reason-disclaiming, at the same time, all disrespect to the compilers of the Hymnal, or to the work itself-we have felt induced to put into form some criticisms and suggestions supplementary to those already before the Church, in the hope that abler minds may consider them, and judge of their validity.

The name "Hymn" is applied throughout the work—as in many similar books-to poetical or rhythmical compositions of great variety, both in material and design. Many of these are properly so called, being songs of praise, or involving, more or less, the idea of Divine worship; while others are simply metrical essays, or dissertations on certain points of religion (Nos. 48, 404, and 445); paraphrases, or ornamental expansions of portions of Holy Scripture (34, 38, 95, and many others); rhetorical appeals, persuasive, deprecatory, or minatory, as the case may be (58, 378, and 386); brief lectures, or chapters of instruction (379, 382, and 501); soliloquies, or meditations on various topics (61, 161, 401, 467, and 478), with other miscellaneous matters, in such variety as to meet every ordinary want in this relation, both in the Church and at home.

On further examining these hymns, we find a large number well adapted in doctrine, sentiment, tone, and form, for use in the public services of the Church. These, of course, are beyond our present line of remark; and we only observe that ample provision has been made for all the festivals, holy seasons, sacraments, and occasional offices. There are other hymns, however, which seem to us unfitted to meet the requirements of congregational worship, by having special reference to certain conditions, not general, but strictly personal-conditions which are only occasional, accidental, sporadic,