appeal to something holier than "the desire of a remembered pleasure"? Individualism, and the Manchester School, and freedom of contract, and all the theories that sought justice in the war of interests and progress in the clash of infinite selfishness, are being carried out before our eyes to burial. Protestantism is fighting for its life with organic disintegration and intellectual doubt, to which it can oppose neither a reasoned philosophy of life nor any authoritative gospel. It cannot rescue the body politic, for it cannot save itself. The masses leave it on the one side, and the leaders of opinion on the other. Is there no hope at all, of light and leadership in the coming time?

I submit to you that the promises of the Messiah have not failed. His followers were the social saviours of the earlier Europe; it is not more difficult to help the centuries that lie before us. That which He promised to uphold, lives on; and, gathering up the ancient truth and the modern. hope, it points the nations, now as always, to that true Republic, where freedom is the law of duty; where all are equal as the sons of God; and where fraternity is the willing service of the brotherhood of Christ, when the Kingdom of the Lord shall come.

THE MASS.

By B. F. C. COSTELLOE, M.A.

I FELT that I was attempting a difficult task when I ventured to address you last year on the broad subject of "The Church Catholic." Your kindness and patience then have made me think it possible to accept your renewed invitation, and to speak to you of a subject harder still for me to deal with wisely and for you to rightly apprehend; for I suppose there is not one of the institutions of the world which has been, and is, so great a stumbling-block to modern Englishmen as is that great historic and spiritual fact which is the subject of this address.

I have taken it for two converse reasons. To all Catholics it is, and has been since Christianity began, the very heart and centre of the spiritual life. To the majority of Englishmen, and to most of you, it must have hitherto seemed to be a relic of barbarism and a psychological enigma. The very name of the "Mass" has been for centuries a byword among you, connoting to the unheeding generation of our fathers only an exploded superstition and an aimless mummery. In our own time, since Protestanism of the original type has begun to give way before the advance of a more consistent unbelief, the great names and uses of the Church have not been visited with so much obloquy,—perhaps, with some, because they have been relegated to a deeper contempt. Yet I dare to hold and say that what lack there is among you of sympathy, of respect, nay, of belief, is in the main the outcome not of an evil will, but of a lack of opportunity; and it is for that reason that I make bold to try if at least some poor beginning may be made by setting forth the Catholic beliefs in language. less strange to your own habits of thought than is the common language of our books of doctrine or devotion. That the task is too great for me, I know only too well. I have neither the knowledge nor the spiritual insight, neither the preparatory training nor the official authority, which that man must have who would state the truths of God to this hurrying generation. And yet, poor preachers though we be, there lies, I think, on all of us a duty, when occasion comes, to do our little spell of work in building up the roads of truth. In the day of beginnings we may be able to do little; but if we do our little work in God's own time, "that prophet" shall rise. London is not more proud of the swift advance of culture than was Florence in its new birth of knowledge and triumphant art; yet Savonarola led Florence captive, in the power of God. London is not half so hopeless of Christianity, not half so sunk in the mad endeavour to fill up the void of the spirit with the sweet things of the flesh, as was the Paris

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of fifty years ago; and yet all Paris was swept into reverent attention by the voice of Lacordaire. Pray with me, my friends, if you still pray, that God may send His prophet unto us also-if it be but as one crying in the wilderness, that after all the long confusion, the way of the Lord may be made straight again, and His good tidings preached abroad; so that they who have ears to hear-they who have not stopped the ears God gave them with the wax of self-indulgence or with the wool of slipshod, careless, idle ways of thought-may hear and understand.

I have said that to the majority of the English people the Mass is a byword; and yet there is a large and important section of them who have nevertheless been drifting steadily towards all forms of Catholic usage and belief. Those who are not of them may mix but little among them; but if they would reckon with the currents of the time, they cannot overlook the startling growth of a pro-Catholic party in England. I do not mean the mere triflers in ecclesiastical fancy work. I mean those who speak of sacramental, of eucharistic, doctrine in terms an outsider would not easily be able to discriminate from our own. The fact has its significance, even for the world of unbelief. If you count those who, since Newman, have joined the Church outright with those who have come so close to it that for this purpose they are our allies, you will find that there is a Catholic school of thought among you which may well claim a respectful hearing. Men who are eminent in politics ought to be no bad judges of a thing so human as religious tendencies-and it is a curious fact that the actual chiefs of both the political parties are earnest and avowed believers in everything probably which I shall have to say to-day.

It is not much to count heads, but we have startling things to say, which to many of you may seem but a midsummer madness. Therefore, we pray you to remember that, apart from other times and other lands, there are those among your political leaders, among your judges and your greatest lawyers, among your best scientific men, and in every rank and circumstance of English life, who, being no more fools than any of you, yet find it possible and imperative to believe these strange and startling things, as truths for which they would be well content to die, if need were, and by which, as their main spiritual stay, they live their daily life among you. This does not begin to prove that our beliefs are true; but it does prove that they are not incredible.

How shall I even begin to speak of it? To us of the family of the faith it is a fact so familiar, so closely woven in with all we know of God and of the spiritual experience, that we hardly put it into words. may haunt our ceremonies and know our printed prayers by heart, yet if you do not bring to them some Catholic sense, you will find but the tinkling cymbal and the sounding brass. In the first centuries it was preeminently "the secret "—that fact of the new life so holy, so beloved, that no profane eye should see it, and none but they who were prepared to love it should even know the mystery. We have fallen far, in these easy times,

below the fervour of their devotion; yet in our measure the same is true of us. To-day, as then,-in this city, as in the catacombs,--it is the secret of holy souls, the guarded heart of fire in many a commonplace, unnoticed life. Outwardly it may seem to you often a trivial thing, with tinkling bells and inartistic ornament; but equally in the silence and the song, in the poverty and in the pride, it is the tense communion of our myriads of souls, each for itself and in its own way, with the hidden presence of the Lord. The Mass is the one essential act of the public worship of the Church. It is designed to combine the new idea of a sacrament with the old tradition of a sacrifice. It is in truth a hundred things in one-as complete in its adaptation to every private need as it is rigid in its ritual adherence to the canons of the earliest liturgy. But, above and before all else, it is the commemoration of the death of Christ, and of that Last Supper when He left this ordinance to His disciples, as a momentous legacy and a last command.

There are two linked beliefs relating to that Last Supper which must be Dorne in mind by every one who would approach in any honest way the consideration of the Mass. They are the sacramental doctrine of the Eucharist, and the belief that Christ then founded by His recorded words and deeds an ordinance since followed in the Liturgies of the Church. The vindication of these involves, of course, all Catholicism: the testimony and value of the New Testament, the question of the person and office of Christ, the reality of any religion, the personality of God. The Catholic view of the world hangs together; you must take it or reject it as a whole. It is, as I have already sought to show you, the only consistent Christianity-the only escape from the quicksands of private interpretation or the deep sea of sceptical suspense. The proof or disproof of this claim is the ultimate question. For the present, however, I take it that your chief desire is to know what we mean; and therefore I say that, for the apprehension of our meaning, you must first realize that we do in truth believe in the world-historic scene in that upper room. It is in that narrative-the account, as we maintain, of a Divine Person-that we find the key to and the warrant for the office of the Mass; and I think that unbiassed readers will probably agree with us that, if the words recorded were said at all, their sense is not really doubtful. They certainly were not understood in any but the one way, either by the Apostles or their immediate pupils, or by the ages of the Church, or even by the countless heresies, until Luther and his friends went a-hunting for new interpreta

tions.

Recall for a moment the familiar story. The strange sending of Peter and John to claim the room "because the Master's time was near at hand:" the keeping of their last Passover, with all that it implied to them as the central office of the Jewish system, in which the lamb was slain in token of the saving of Israel out of the land of bondage in the early days; the memory in their minds of His repeated prophecies that He

would leave them soon, and of that recent scene when the Healer of Lazarus rode into Jerusalem amid the hosannas of the people, waving triumphal palms; the sudden shock when Jesus girt Himself with a towel and began to wash the feet of all the twelve, that, as He said, they might be "wholly clean "for some great event to come; the high words of commission that followed, "Verily I say unto you, He that receiveth whomsoever I send, receiveth Me, and he that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me;" and then the culminating words of institution,-concurrently recorded with religious care in the three synoptic gospels, designedly omitted in the Gospel of John,-commemorated by the testimony of the Apostolic writings, and by the unbroken tradition of the Church's Liturgies,—when (having said, "With desire have I desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer ") "He took bread, and giving thanks He brake it (euxapornoas exλaσe), and gave unto them, saying, Take and eat. This is My body which is given for you. This do in commemoration of Me."

You will know that when He says, "Do this," He uses a word appropriate to a sacrificial act, "Do this office, perform this rite, in memory of Me." You will notice also, that when He identifies the Eucharistic Bread with His body, He is careful, according to all the witnesses, to use the clear present tense, "My body which is even now being broken," or (as another puts it), "being given over to death" for you.

These were strange sayings, my brethren, either senseless or supernatural. But they understood. For they remembered that preliminary lesson which John has recorded in his sixth chapter, for the confirming of this very teaching in a later time, when much was in danger of being forgotten or misbelieved. They remembered-how could they forget it ?—when to those cavillers who asked for such a sign as was the manna to their fathers He replied, "I am the Bread of Life," "The bread I will give is My flesh;" and they cried out, "How can this man—this carpenter's songive us His flesh to eat?"

But His words beat down on them again, royal, imperative, unyielding. "Moreover, I say to you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, ye have no life in you. He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood, dwelleth in Me and I in him." And now not the Jews only, but almost all His followers, rebelled. It is a hard saying-who can hear it? "How can we eat His flesh?" Does He retract, or soften, or explain? Nay; but as He had begun by telling them that the work of God was to believe Him that He had sent, so now in this crisis of their faith He asks only for belief again. And many-all but the twelve, it seems-went back and walked with Him no more. Did He say, "Ye have taken a parable too literally"? Did He offer a hidden meaning? He only turned sadly, half wearily, to His twelve, and said, "Will ye too go away?" And Peter answered-not, "It is easy; not "We understand;" but with a cry of faith, confident through all strange teaching, even as are we Catholics toVOL. I.-pt. 2

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