of what the early Church really was. Nor again must we leave these two periods, the age of the primitive Church and our own, unconnected with one another. Seventeen centuries are the link between them; a continuous link, by which, if I may so speak, the electric power of the earliest age is continued on to us; yet having other properties in them than those of simply transmitting from the ages before them to the ages after them; something they have added, something perhaps taken away; and, if they have not affected the quality of that which is transmitted, they have at least greatly affected our character and circumstances who are to be the receivers of it. Their error was great, who, passing over nearly fifteen centuries, used to leap at once in their studies from the Apostles to the Reformers; but theirs would be much greater, who studying carefully the records of the Church from the first century to the fifth, were then to break off, and to apply their supposed knowledge and experience for the guidance of the Church

now.

Some, perhaps, will have already anticipated me in their application of these remarks to the words of my text. Those words contain a description of the Church at Jerusalem, almost immediately after the ascension of our Lord. We see and feel at once how different a state of things is here described from that which we actually witness.

We feel farther,—that is, all who can think and feel upon such matters, we feel farther that this description cannot be wholly indifferent to us, that the Church so soon after its foundation, with Christ's words as it were still sounding in its ears, guided by Christ's own apostles, and having so lately received the promised baptism of His Spirit, must be in many points capable of serving as our model that if we are wholly unlike it, the difference must in great measure at least be matter of regret or of blame. And then comes the natural and earnest question, How can we lessen or remove this difference? how can we bring ourselves back to the standard of primitive Christianity?

Then we look at all the facts which we can possibly recover from the darkness of time, relating to the early church; all its institutions, all its practices; the very names of its offices, the very style of its language. "All these," we may say, “belonged to the primitive Church; let us restore them all." But this is absolutely impossible; the very past will not live again. If we were to insist on restoring it altogether, it would be like those who should unbury the dead; we should restore not the living friend whom we loved and honoured, but only a lifeless corpse. But the thing is impossible. We do not raise our friends' bodies out of their graves; we cannot bring back the actual

image and exact outward resemblance of departed

ages.

Are therefore past ages for ever lost to us? Must we look at what is good and wise and holy in them, as on that which we must only lament in vain, and can never hope to restore? And this too, above all, in Christ's holy Church; as if God's hand were shortened now that He could not save, or as if our Lord was no longer exalted at God's right hand, with all power in heaven and in earth? God forbid there is no reason for such despair; there is no impossibility in the restoration of all that was good in the primitive Church. We may become the true descendants of our fathers, though we cannot become our very fathers themselves, nor make our age theirs.

"They, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart." Now compare the language of the Psalmist in one of the Psalms of this very evening's service. "One thing have I desired of the Lord which I will require, even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the fair beauty of the Lord, and to visit His temple.' The prayer of the Psalmist, and the practice of the early Christians are, we see, exactly in accordance. But do we not feel that this dwelling in

the house of the Lord which he so desired, and that continuing daily in the temple, which the first Christians practised, are both of them, so to speak, typical; we must go farther before we arrive at the very reality. That reality undoubtedly is the daily walking with God, the daily abiding in God. And if we do not so walk and so abide, we undoubtedly have not that blessing for which the Psalmist prayed, nor do we truly imitate the example of Christ's early Church.

Farther, the early Christians continued "breaking bread from house to house;" that is, they assembled continually in each other's houses, and as they ate and drank together, so once in every day their eating and drinking together was that solemn act of Christian communion, which in the highest manner bound them to one another and to Christ. And doubtless the end of that communion was the end of every other commandment, namely, the increase of love towards Christ and towards one another.

I have purposely put these two parts of the life of the early Christians in this manner, because I would wish to show where the spiritual interpretation of scripture becomes often dangerous, and leads us away from the spirit which it professes to follow, no less than from the letter which it does not scruple to neglect. I have said that the essence of the Psalmist's prayer, and the early Chris

tians' practice, was the walking with God, and the dwelling in God. I have said also that the essence of the Holy Communion itself is the increase of love towards Christ, and towards our brethren. But the error of spiritual interpretation consists in supposing that if we clearly see the antitype or reality, we may at once cast aside the type as incapable of affording any instruction. For instance, it may be said that the walking with God is all that is important; the walking in the actual earthly temple is altogether indifferent. No where is a point of the greatest difficulty, judging from experience, because the type has always been in danger of being idolized on the one hand, and despised on the other. The truth is, that the type itself is not wholly typical: it has a real affinity with that to which it points, greater or less in different instances, but always up to a certain measure. As in the case now

before us; the walking in the visible temple is, it is true, typical of the walking in heart with God; but then there is a real resemblance between them. The one has a tendency towards the other; so that he who never walked in the visible temple would never be likely to walk with God in Spirit. And thus the true imitation of the practice of the primitive Church would be no doubt that we should all walk with God in heart. But in order to do this we have need of helps and means; and