world around us. It seems too low a sphere for such elevated spirits to notice. Flowers are banished both from the home and the sanctuary. Or if, perchance, they condescend a little from the third heavens, it is only to vouchsafe a melancholy quartrain on the curse which rests upon the ground for man's sake. How dif ferent this from the spirit of the Bible and of Christ. There is not a heartier delight in the outward world expressed in all the pages of Shakespeare or Wordsworth, than is to be found in Moses, David and Isaiah. Obedience to the command to "consider the lilies," and to "lift up our eyes on high," was never more urgently needed than in this "age of great cities," when the sky is clouded out by the smoke of manufactories, and the grass-bearing earth paved down with flag-stones and macadamized with fragments of granite. Millions of city men have almost lost the scent of fresh air, and the recollection of the sweet face of nature when lighted up by the beams of the morning sun. Few think, when they ascend the church steps, that they are going to adore that Eternal Beauty from whose immeasurable depths and heights the creative Spirit has sought out and brought forth the models and patterns of this glorious universe-that Mind in which all loveliness was present, as the object of eternal love, before ever it had founded the earth or the world. Not many, it is to be feared, of the vast crowds who throng the temple courts, remember that a delight in "the beauty of the Lord our God" is an essential element of perfectly acceptable worship, and few are taught to open their hearts to the sweet influences of earth and heaven enough to feel that God in very deed is there daily revealing himself as truly, if not so fully, as in the Bible. Perhaps one reason why natural religion, as it is termed, has been so extensively abandoned to "infidels" and secular poets, is that it is felt that some aspects of the character of the Divinity, as popularly represented, are not quite the same with those indicated to belong to the Architect of the creation by outward nature. In proportion as Christianity is corrupted it eschews natural religion as its basis. The gross and gaudy Romanism of France or Spain would vanish into the shade if heaven's pure noon of sunlight could strike through the roofs of its many-tapered shrines. And Romanism is not a more signal corruption of the spirit of Christianity than some forms of metaphysical Protestantism. The one stultifies the understanding, the others freeze up the imagination and the heart. Under neither influence can men sing aloud unto God their King, and make a joyful noise to the Rock of their salvation. When the soul conceives of the Deity as a Being chiefly solicitous for right verbal definitions in doctrine; right definitions on the Divine Personality (O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinity, three persons in one God, have mercy upon us, miserable sinners'); right definitions on the doctrine of justification, and so on; as if the main topics of everlasting thought were scholastic

creeds and articles; when, in a word, men are taught to "reason together" with their Maker in such a sense as to place their practical hope of salvation upon speculative theologic soundness, rather than upon the presence of that religious spirit of loving belief which is the same under all dispensations; how can such a system utter itself in song, or care to muse on those works of God's hands through which He "made David glad on the Sabbath day?" Accordingly, there might almost as well be no world, for any concern in its glorious beauty indicated in the mass of our commonly-sung sacred hymns. The iron despotism of mediæval theology, to be hated chiefly for its purely intellectual character, has entered into the soul. Difficult and gloomy thought has gone far to extinguish, in the common order of those who throng our tabernacles, the love of nature. In the ancient Greek mind metaphysical acuteness was balanced and corrected by a passionate love of beauty, and by the ardour of their social affections; but in our churches we have an imperfect imitation of the one, without any semblance of the other. Men have conscientiously disputed themselves into an intricate sectarianism, whose coldness no child-like love of nature softens, nor sense of the divinely beautiful in creation, scripture, and humanity, awes and purifies. All the while, the love of nature is one of the best remedies for that love of the world against which our preachers warn us. The Jewish priests were dressed in white and blue; and it is the glory of Christianity that it speaks in the name of the same benignant Spirit who summoned Israel to celebrate around his altars their joy of vintage and their harvest-home. But until our professional instructors can explain into closer union creation and revealed theology, we shall hear little of the poesy that nature prompts within the portals of the Church of God. pure emotions which spring up unbidden within us at the hearing of the lark amid the dews of morning, or which glow around our hearts when we gaze in silence upon the sun descending amidst clouds of glory-" piles of jet edged with a diamond wreath," into the western ocean, will find few utterances in the present hymnbooks of believers. For these subjects not many common metres are "suitable." "Mere poetry," says our sober, drab-buskined deacon, "has nothing to do with spiritual religion!" No, indeed, nothing as too often understood; but much every way to do with it as it is set forth in the Scriptures and in the soul of man. admiration of trumpery stained-glass, and carpenters' gothic, in much of our recent church and chapel architecture, forms but a substitute for that genial spirit of delight in the Divine works which should accompany and inspire a good man's delight in the divine Word. If, under Christianity, it were necessary to choose between the songs of Moses and of the Lamb-between the worship of the outer and of the inner sanctuaries-let us by all means

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prefer the purely spiritual strain; but since the veil has been rent in the midst from the top throughout, the two have formed but one temple for God's adorers; and the purple curtains of the Holy Place, embroidered with the beautiful forms of nature, are joined without a break to those golden walls of the Holiest, which flash with the interior light of truth around the Mercy Seat. Did not He that made that which is within make that which is without also?

There has however been a complete revolution in the measure of attention given to the work of vocal praise. In some instances, indeed, the "reformed psalmody" threatens to swallow up every thing, even the spirit of worship itself,—the people being valued according to the part which they take in the "congregational harmony," even more than for any moral distinction of character. Treble and bass outweigh the classification of evil and good. Such extravagances as this, however, are rare. There is sufficient improvement here to assure us that the other old dissenting superstition, that whatever is most unlike the prayers of the Church of England, is most acceptable to God, is on the wane. Is there not needed, in order to lift up the tone of worship, a return to the use of the Catholic forms of adoration, inherited by the Established Church from the previous ages of Christendom, and still enjoyed by all the Protestant communities except the English Dissenters? Distant be the day when the voice of spontaneous prayer shall be completely hushed in the congregation; but we have had sufficient experience of "free prayer now, to have learned that Baxter and the holy men of 1660 were right in desiring a portion of the service to be delivered in the words of noble and well known formularies. Those who employ forms of prayer in psalms and hymns, (and indeed in their own loosely constructed acts of devotion) must close their mouths from any pretence of principle, as if that were opposed to the use of pre-arranged words. There is no doubt that the use of a Reformed Liturgy, which should include responses and united prayer during the first part of the service, would restore to our assemblies that element in which they are so strikingly deficient. The people of Nonconformity are dumb under present arrangements. When the string of their tongue is loosed, they will find their joy in public worship redoubled. And why should they not be made partakers of that solemn delight of the Church of England service, the united vocal confession of the Faith, in the words which re-echo the belief of Christendom, the Creed beginning, "I believe in God, &c.," and even in the Nicene Creed? Such additions as these would impart a liveliness and loftiness to Nonconformist worship, to which it is a stranger at present, and do a great deal to conciliate the goodwill of devout persons of the Established: Communion towards an ulti

mate union.

But after all is said respecting the Form,-the chief thing is the Spirit, and for that no sufficient provision can be made in the public assembly. Personal and domestic preparation of soul are essential to public worship. The Father will "reward openly" those who have prayed to Him in secret. Let not sloth then be our Let us Sunday morning preparation for appearing before God. rise early enough to offer a private prayer to Heaven for the Spirit of aid. Let the house-mother so order her household, that Sunday morning shall not be celebrated by general lateness and disorder. In vain are good sermons and holy church influences, if the house influences are irritating, depressing, and ignoble. Our Nature is e. Body and mind must work together. A family must make the chief business of the week of it, if they intend to worship God; and if they do not intend to make a business of it, they had better not insult the Infinite Majesty with a slothful ministration. Whatsoever a man soweth that he also shall reap.

ON THE USE OF A LITURGY.

ONE of the most celebrated of modern Englishmen is reported to have said in conversation, that he "never felt the heavenly superiority of the prayers in the English Liturgy, till he had attended some kirks in the country parts of Scotland," On the ther hand, one of the most celebrated of modern Scotchmen has characterized the religion of our nation generally, as a "dramaturgic fugle-worship or "praying by machinery;" and it is evident that he refers especially to the services of the Church of England, for he cannot speak of "black and white surplices" withtt a sneer; he cannot bear the "Church tippets," as he scornfully calls them; and it is with the greatest relish, that he recounts the story of Jenny Geddes, and her famous stool. Now, to neither Coleridge nor Carlyle can we fairly deny the attribute of devout earnestness. Carlyle himself, in the midst of all his depreciation Coleridge, is bound to admit that his was a pious mind," calls him even a 66 sublime man, who alone in those dark days of black materialisms, and revolutionary dangers, had saved his crown. of spiritual manhood." And of Carlyle too, we will say that his also is essentially a "pious mind;" we believe that if he has not always spoken truth, he has, at least, spoken truthfully, that he is at heart an earnest and devout preacher, although he has clothed

his message to this generation in a peculiar and unfashionable garb; for, with all his antipathy to surplices, he too wears a surplice after his own strange fashion, and has grown so accustomed to it that he never now preaches without it; so that, moreover, not a few who lack his intense moral earnestness, have taken to preaching in his peculiar vestments. Essentially, we say, a pious and earnest man, although quite as unintelligible to many priests of the English Church, in his strange garb of nineteenth-century "camel's hair and leathern girdle," as they are unintelligible to him, in their "surplices at All-Hallowtide."

Here, then, are two men-Coleridge and Carlyle-both men of talent, culture, devoutness; yet the one sees in the Church service little more than a "fugle-worship," or "praying by machinery," whereas the other feels, nowhere more keenly than in a Highland Presbyterian Kirk, the "heavenly superiority of the prayers in the English Liturgy." Whence, we naturally ask, comes this difference of feeling? Doubtless many reasons might be assigned for it; but probably the influence of education and association, and of that prejudice which is so naturally born of both, has more to do with all such differences of feeling, than those who are at variance with each other are commonly disposed to admit. There are many Scotchmen of intelligence and education, who would tell us that they never felt the infinite superiority of their Presbyterian mode of worship, until they attended divine service in one of the great cathedrals of England. Such a service seems to them to be more of a performance than a worshipping of God; they complain that in all the intoning of the prayers, or the chanting of the psalms, there is nothing that lifts their hearts to heaven; their souls never get beyond the cathedral window, or above the cathedral arch; in their best moods, their taste only is gratified; in their worst moods, an unpleasant feeling of half contempt or half disgust is begotten. On the other hand, when the lover of the cathedral service goes into any of the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland, his complaint is, that the service is cold, dry, dull, uninspiring. The devout High Churchman and the devout Presbyterian each wants something that shall bring his soul nearer to God; but what seems to the one to increase the spirit of devotion, is felt by the other as only repressing it. We have good reason, therefore, to suspect that, in all Carlyle's denunciation of "praying by machinery," there is more of the Jenny Geddes prejudice than is quite becoming in a philosopher, and also that, had Coleridge been born and bred in Scotland, the "heavenly superiority of the English Liturgy" might not have been so apparent to his mind.

We deem it only fair to take an adequate estimate of the influence thus exercised by education and habit in predisposing men in favour