is not so much that those who are thrown among evil surroundings are wholly to be excused, as that those of us who have had better advantage, have the deeper blame. But everywhere, and to each with the appropriate message, come the bearers of God's grace. When the man who is clothed in purple and fine linen and fares sumptuously every day, is basking in a sensual ease, some warning, whether it take the form of Lazarus or no, awakes him to remember better things. When the stricken child, to whom life never brought a sweeter message than the harmony of the outward squalor and the inward pain, lies wistfully drifting towards the welcome end, there are hands unseen that clothe upon its soul the raiment of a lovely patience, and light up within its eyes the radiance of an unearthly lesson. When the successful Philistine is blotting day by day from the tablets of his brain the memory of any spiritual possibilities, there is a hand that constantly renews the unconsidered lines, so that he cannot choose but sometimes see them. For every battle there is an ally, for every frailty a support; with every temptation, however fierce it seems to our not quite impartial judgment, there goes forth for us the possibility of bearing it. Conceiving thus of human life as a warfare wherein we daily fight with sin with the perpetual assistance of the grace of God, the Catholic Church presents to us, as the central fact of the world's history, the coming of the Christ. It is not uncommon to reproach us with our acceptance of the supernatural; and our critics seem to be quite satisfied that the admission of any belief which involves things not explainable by so-called “natural law," is mere superstition-as absurd as witchcraft, and less respectable than Spiritualism or the Mind Cure. I will not stay to discuss this general point of view, but I will content myself with the remark that there is no necessary antagonism at all between Naturalism and the Supernatural, rightly understood. If Free Will be a fact, that alone transcends at once all that in the narrow sense is spoken of as "natural law;" for every free act, if it be truly free, introduces a spiritual new creation into the sequence of material and organic forces. Why should not the same be true in a wider field? If there be a personal God, why may His will not also intervene and mould the stolid course of physical change and consequence ? And if there be such influence at all, why should we assume that it is opposed to Law? Rather must it be itself the action and evidence of a higher and more spiritual reason in things, which we perhaps cannot as yet follow, but which we too may some day see. To the Catholic, then, the cardinal fact of the whole world's history is the birth, and life, and death of Christ. The old world leads up to it: the new is its development and outcome. Unique in all the centuries-lowliest and yet most royal-that dying Preacher, who was crucified by Jeru salem and Rome for saying that He was the very Son of God, is the corner-stone of the world fabric-the key of the human mystery-the Lord of Life. Reading the simple narrative, waiving all question of inspiration. if you will, we can come to no other conclusion but that He claimed to be the Incarnate God. Not at all a wise Socrates—not in the least a later Isaiah-not a mystic nor a magician; but the very God-the Word made Flesh-the absolute "I AM." "Think, Abib! Dost thou think? The very God- The madman saith He said so-it is strange !" Upon this absolute and central truth of Christ's Divinity, the Church insists as the focus and radiating point of all her teaching. I have spoken of her wide philosophy of sin and grace. For both, she takes us back at once to Christ. His life and death-the perfect sacrifice, the purifying and the reconciliation of sin-stained humanity-bore in it the needed infinite redemption, built in the counsels of the eternal mercy, the golden bridge by which every sinner may return. In the mystery of that Life and Death, at once true human and inalienably Divine, is the origin of ali grace. He is the link between the Finite and the Infinite; therefore He is the Way whereby we come to God, and whereby God communicates Himself to us. In that, by reason of His humanity, we are the brethren of the Son of God, so are we heirs of the Heavenly Kingdom. In His Sonship is the eternal Fatherhood of God revealed. In that He died, He conquered death; in that He lived and liveth, He is the door of Life Eternal. On all this, I say, the Catholic Church insists—and with far keener and more eager vigilance than any other of the confessions. For if Christ be | not God, she feels, then is our hope vain. If He, who on a score of critical occasions claimed to be Divine, was but a madman or a fraud, let us not play at Christianity-let us rather eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. Because from the first she guarded this essential truth before all else, therefore she spent centuries in defining and maintaining the doctrine of the Trinity and the related doctrine of the Person of Christ, the Human and Divine. The elaborate formulæ of the Nicene theology and the rest are not scholastic subtleties or the quibbles of an oriental fancy: they are the necessary basis and security of the vital fact of Christianity. It is either these, or nothing. And as she has insisted always on the doctrine of the Trinity, so, for exactly the same reason, she has been careful to uphold the honourable prerogative of her, whom from the earliest centuries she has styled the Mother of God. Wonderful, indeed, it is to any Catholic to hear the stale invectives which are still bestowed on "Mariolatry," as if somehow the worship of the Divine were squandered on a creature; for there lives nc Catholic so ignorant as not to be able to tell you the true answer-that we honour her precisely because to do otherwise would be to ignore the real Godhead of her Son. Believing, then, that Christ is the "very God of very God," who took upon Himself the human nature and dwelt with us on earth awhile, the Church presents His earthly work under four different aspects-though these also are in truth the same. He is the Saviour of the world; He is he Revelation of the Truth of God; He is the Perfect Life; and He is the Founder of the spiritual kingdom. You will see that each and all of these grow naturally and at once out of the main conception of His nature and His office. In the world-reconciliation, it was needful that men should learn to know God better, and that they should be taught to do His will, seeing that the human wisdom and human good intentions had not sufficed. Equally, as I have sought to show you, was it necessary that an abiding institute should be created-not indeed a kingdom of this world, but yet a palpable, continuing, organic fact-a sure custodian and an abiding witness. On some of these points I have dwelt already-of all, there is abundant notice in the Gospel texts. To insist on them at length here would carry me beyond my scope. I pass therefore at once to say that beyond this fundamental insistence on the Divine character of Christ, there is another derivative sense in which the Catholic Church insists constantly upon the supernatural. I said that, in her view, the life of man must needs be constantly assisted by the spiritual help of God; and that she presents the life and death of Christ as being, in the design of Providence, the fountain of this unfailing Grace. Now it is her special pride and office to be a means of salvation available to all-to be a Church truly Catholic, to whom nothing of humanity is alien, from whom the beggar can draw spiritual wealth as surely as the prince or the professor, though they too find, if they will seek it, all the special help they need. To the end that there should be in the world such tangible and easy ways of entering into the Heavenly Communion, of appropriating, each poor nature for itself, the riches of the treasure of the Lord, the Church believes that Christ ordained that series of symbolic rites, adapted to the crises of our life, which we call Sacraments; and that it was His will to appoint concerning these that they should be to His disciples (apart from prayer) the ordinary channels of the communication of that grace and pardon and spiritual sustenance which in and through the office of our Saviour we claim from the Almighty. True is it, that this infinite ocean of Love is waiting for us all the while. Yet, in the spiritual order, Love, too, has its own laws, and this is one of them. That by Christ's appointment we draw its channels into our souls as freely and as fully as we will, or as our capacity for receiving it will allow, by obeying the sacramental ordinances of the Christian dispensation in faith and love and humble trust in Him. I need not tell you-for it is patent-that of this sacramental system the central fact is that which more than any theoretic point marks off the life of the Church Catholic from everything beyond it-the acceptance of the Real Presence of the Lord upon our altars under the sacramental form. To those who approach this as mere critics, bringing neither personal experience nor sympathy to aid them, no man can hope to say what it implies. To them I will only say, "You read the 'Imitation' and you hold it a great book--one of the treasures of the world—a mirror and revelation of the holiest in man. Read, then, the sacramental chapters of that soulswaying meditation, and go back and scoff at us, if you can." Or let them go, if they prefer life to literature, into any Catholic church --not at a fashionable midday Mass, but in the early morning, on some great day like Easter or the Birth of Christ-and watch the still, rapt gladness that has fallen on the meanest faces, watch the fellowship and democracy of the altar rails, catch the energy of better effort and of new beginning, and the enthusiasm of sincere repentance, and the nobility of high worship that makes the air electric, and tell us, if they can, that it is all no more than mummery and priestcraft, folly countersigned by fraud. All this may be deception, you will say; and undoubtedly, although subjective testimony may be much to us who have believed, to others it is at the best a noticeable phenomenon. Something more is wanted. must show a reason for our faith in this most startling or most mystic doctrine of a spiritual Presence that transcends not only sense but maddest imagination, of which yet there is no outward sign at all. Our first reason, naturally, is in the Bible text itself. We say, and J confess I cannot conceive that an intelligent atheist would doubt it, that Christ said neither more nor less than what the Church teaches concerning the Eucharist, not only when He founded that rite on the most solemn occasion of His intercourse with His Apostles, but at many other times; and, above all, in that test discussion which is recorded in the sixth chapter of St. John. But strong as is the Scriptural argument, the Church has another that is perhaps still stronger. The doctrine of the Real Presence, linked with that of the ordinance of the Last Supper as a mystic yet most effectual commemoration and representation of the Passion of the Lord, is the essence and import of "the Mass." Now that great act of common worship and of mystic sacrifice, of solemn commemoration and public prayer for all the living and the dead, is, and has always been, the central office of the Church-in every age and nation substantially, nay even minutely, the same. Being so notable a corporate act, it has been always safe-guarded by jealous provision for a settled liturgical form. There is no time in the history of Christendom when that liturgy is not before us as a palpable and most significant record; for in every age and under every variation it testifies beyond cavi to the belief in a Real Sacramental Presence of the Lord as the whole point and meaning of the great office. I suppose there are many able and learned persons who imagine, in a very careless ignorance, that the Mass is a "fond thing vainly invented" somewhere in the Middle Ages. Yet nothing is more palpably untrue. The case stands thus. There exist certain great types of the Liturgy of the Mass-all perfectly at one in their intent and doctrine and general plan, and even in their main forms of prayer and in unexpected coincidences of phrase and action, yet varying in practical arrangements and filled in with details evidently arising by local usage. Each of these is clearly parallel to and not derived from the others. Each is attributed by the local tradition to an apostle, who was the early founder of the local church. Each is carried up, by a separate chain of documentary and historical evidence, to a time not very many generations removed from the living witness of those who saw and heard the Lord. What is more clear as a mere matter of scientific historical criticism, than that these great trunk lines of liturgical tradition must have diverged from a common Apostolic type or norm-and that this type must have been, as they are, a central and sacramental and commemorative office, involving a Rea! Presence, and being to them in all essentials what the office of the Mass has been to us to-day? Probably many of you will be incredulous, but the proofs are very simple. At Rome, we have the Liturgy which is now the common, though by no means the only form used in the Catholic Church, and we trace it back so far, that details of its use are attributed to Popes who ruled between 100 A.D. and 120 A.D. The names of the Saints commemorated in the text are known to have been added by gradual accretion, and yet all of them, with a solitary exception, were martyred before A.D. 310 (the excepted date being 362), while the earlier names go back to Linus, Cletus, and Clement, the immediate successors of Peter's Chair. Ambrose of Milan, himself the editor of a special rite still preserved there, cites some of the Roman prayers soon after 400 A.D., as being taken from what he then called "the ancient rites." Like all the others, it was preserved in oral tradition, by reason of the Discipline of the Secret, until the fifth century; but we have on record, in the Epistles of St. Innocent I. in the fourth century, that Pope's opinion that the Liturgy was, in fact, the true tradition given by St. Peter to the Church at Rome. Turn now to the other great rite preserved at Alexandria, which in like manner was committed to writing by St. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, after 400 A.D., and ascribed by him and by the whole Church to the direct oral tradition of St. Mark himself. The internal evidence of the prayers, as they were then set down and have been since preserved, points to the period of persecution, say 300 A.D., as the date of some of the added prayers, the body of the rite being therefore earlier. The condemnation of the Eutychian opinions in 451 led to the schism which detached all the |