into the service, in order to enable mankind to attain that ideal.

A perusal of the following passage, which appears to us to strike the key-note for the whole article, will at once render our meaning more clear, and form the basis of our further remarks:

"It is too commonly assumed that, provided only we repair to our church or our chapel, as the case may be, the performance of the work of adoration is a thing to be taken for granted. And so it is, in the absence of unequivocal signs to the contrary, as between man and man. But not as between the individual man and his own conscience in the hour of self-review. If he knows anything of himself, and unless he be a person of singularly favoured gifts, he will know that the work of Divine worship, so far from being a thing of course even among those who outwardly address themselves to its performance, is one of the most arduous which the human spirit can possibly set about. The processes of simple self-knowledge are difficult enough. All these, when a man worships, should be fresh in his consciousness: and this is the first indispensable condition for a right attitude of the soul before the footstool of the Eternal. The next is a frame of the affections, adjusted on the one hand to this self-knowledge, and on the other to the attributes, and the more nearly felt presence, of the Being before whom we stand. And the third is the sustained mental effort necessary to complete the act, wherein every Christian is a priest; to carry our whole selves, as it were with our own hands, into that nearer Presence, and, uniting the humble and unworthy prosphora with the one full perfect and sufficient Sacrifice, to offer it upon the altar of the heart: putting aside every distraction of the outward sense, and endeavouring to complete the individual act as fully, as when in loneliness, after departing out of the flesh, we shall see eternal things no longer through but without a veil.

"Now, considering how we live, and must live, our common life in and by the senses, how all sustained mental abstraction is an effort, how the exercise of sympathy itself, which is such a power in Christian worship, is also a kind of bond to the visible; and, then, last of all, with what feebleness and fluctuation, not to say with what duplicity, of intention we

undertake the work, is it not too clear that in such a work we shall instinctively be too apt to remit our energies, and to slide unawares into mere perfunctory performance?"

This is all so terribly true, it recalls to us with such intense vividness our own experiences, that it is with almost trembling hand that we write, that we believe it to be totally at variance with the ideal of the worship of God, as practised and taught by our Lord Jesus. Such worship as is here delineated is the worship of the refined, the educated, the man of strong will, of him who can conquer his wandering thoughts, who can control his emotions. This is not a worship for the million, for the poor, the uneducated. Some might be disposed to answer, "Quite true; for them a less perfect worship must be allowed, but this is the ideal towards which all should tend.' Again we reply, "Such a notion is totally at variance with 'the simplicity that is in Christ.'" Neither His life nor His teaching lends a moment's countenance to such an idea. It is as true to-day as when He said it: "Unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." The last thing we learn is simplicity. How far is this "arduous work" of worship from the cry of the little child, 'Father, father"!

Can we seriously persuade ourselves that He, who came to bring us back in the simplicity of little children to our Father, purposed that we should never feel that we had rightly approached Him unless we succeeded in straining mind, affections, and soul into the "attitude before the footstool of the Eternal," which W. E. Gladstone tells us is "indispensable"?

On our part, at least, we are forced to admit that this is not the worship of Jesus of Nazareth. The worship of which He tells us is "entering into our closet, shutting the door, praying to our Father who is in secret." What ritual shall we need there ?

But it may be ged, than other worship is looked for from us than in the doset Quite true. Paul says, “Present your bodies & living sacrifice, a Loly, acceptable unto God, your reasonable service.' And He who was Pat's great Teacher red such a life as the His was a Life-Worship, and that Life-Wordip He evlendir ernstilered at He best accomplished by doing as He di-He went about doing good. And He tells us, in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, that in the last days He will gather some to Himself, an i banish others, not on the ground of their success or failure in esoteric prostration Lefore the Most High, but on the ground that they Lave, or have not, cultivated that Life-Worship of “doing good” of which He was incessantly setting the example.

In His life, or teaching, there is never a hint that He contemplated men gathering together in churches or chapels, and, with or without the aid of ritual, endeavouring to produce, by exercise of the will, that peculiarly difficult submission of the spiritual nature to Him whom we are endeavouring to worship, which is in this article suggested to be specially pleasing to Him.

It may or it may not be so, but certainly the endeavour after it is a self-imposed duty, entirely out of accord with the simplicity of the Gospel narrative. Our own feeling is very decided, that He who knows our frame, and remembers that we are dust, does not wish us to spend effort in so drawing nigh unto Him; that He prefers surely that we should worship Him all our life through, and be as constantly in communication with Him as a favourite child is with its father; telling Him of the hindrances with which we meet, within and without, in our Life-Worship of "doing good," and asking help to get over them; laying our plans before Him, and asking Him to mould and

modify them according to His wisdom; and, not least, asking that, bit by bit, as we grow more able to understand, He would show us how He is working in the spiritual world, that we might learn to be, as the Apostles were, "workers together with Him."

Indeed, the more we consider the purpose of our Heavenly Father toward man, the more we feel that if we once felt ourselves to be successful in attaining the "right attitude" toward which W. E. Gladstone says ritual is to help us, we should be in imminent peril of that pride which He seeks to "hide from man;" in fact, we should be dangerously near that which has been sung by another contributor to this quarter's Contemporary (Oct. 1874), Matthew Arnold, in the following words:

"When the soul, growing clearer,
Sees God no nearer;

When the soul, mounting higher,
To God gets no nigher;
But the arch-fiend Pride
Mounts at her side,

Foiling her high emprize,

Sealing her eagle eyes,

And when she fain would soar

Makes idols to adore;

Changing the pure emotion

Of her high devotion

To a skin-deep sense

Of her own eloquence:

Strong to deceive, strong to enslave."

But though in the Gospels there is no hint of Christian men and women gathering in churches and chapels, we are of course most ready to admit, that in the Epistles and elsewhere there is abundant evidence that, in the pursuit of this Life-Worship of " doing good," Christians did meet to "edify one another. But this was not regarded as being any more specially

an act of worship than the worship which they were doing all their lives through.

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They worshipped God by praying in the closet; by providing things honest in the sight of all men; by providing for the necessities of the saints; by announcing from house to house the good news that God's kingdom (or reign) had begun; by doing service (if slaves) as unto the Lord, and not unto men; and by edifying one another, when the exigencies of their daily life permitted them to get together, and give forth one a psalm, one a teaching (doctrine) one a tongue, one an unveiling of the truth, one an interpretation." Under these circumstances, says Paul, "let all things be done unto edifying;" and later on, after warning the Corinthians that two should not be speaking at once, but that they should prophesy one by one, he in conclusion adds, "let all things be done decently and in order;" and "on this," W. E. Gladstone says, Ritual is founded." Verily it is founded like a pyramid set on its apex--an overwhelming burden on a mininum of foundation. The word "Ritualism" had never been coined from "ritual," "ritual," if ritual had never enlarged beyond the apostolic ideal—namely, "Let not two speak at once in the same room," and "Let your women keep silence in the assemblies."*

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*It is worthy of notice that Paul's "ritual" is essentially negative-treating of things to be avoided, while the ritual in support of which W. E. Gladstone cites Paul is equally essentially a ritual of additions-instructions to add something to the worship which is the natural outcome of the Christian life.

In a magazine circulating almost exclusively in the Society of Friends it is scarcely necessary to point out that the "ritual" respecting the silence of women is not intended to prohibit them from praying or prophesying-as special instructions have already been given in this same epistle, as to the restrictions under which they might do these things. The prohibition had, without doubt, reference to the promiscuous conversation which then did, and still does, take place in the Jews' synagogues-on which model the early Christian assemblies were gathered.