hilate it for other purposes. Such a practical annihilation was involved in the appearance of Christ to St. Paul on his conversion. Such a practical annihilation is involved in the doctrine of Christ's ascension; if we may reverently so speak, what must have been the rapidity of that motion by which within ten days He placed our human nature at the right hand of God? Is it more mysterious that He should "open the heavens," as Scripture expresses it, in the Sacramental Rite, that He should then dispense with time and space in the sense in which they are daily dispensed with in the Sun's warming us at the distance of 100,000,000 of miles, than that He should have dispensed with them on occasion of His ascending on high? He who shewed what the passage of an incorruptible body was ere it had reached God's throne, thus suggests to us what may be its coming back and presence with us now, when at length glorified and become spirit.

In answer then to the problem, how Christ comes to us while remaining on high, I answer just as much as this, that He comes by the agency of the Holy Ghost in and by the Sacrament. Locomotion is the means of a material presence; the Sacrament is the means of His spiritual Presence. As faith is the means of our receiving It, so the Holy Ghost is the Agent and the Sacrament the means of His imparting It; and therefore we call It a Sacramental Presence. We kneel before His

heavenly Throne; and the distance is as nothing ; it is as if that Throne were the Altar close

to us.

Let it be carefully observed that I am not proving or determining any thing; I am only shewing how it is that certain propositions which at first sight seem contradictions in terms, are not so; I am but pointing out one way of reconciling them. If there is but one way assignable, the force of any antecedent objection against the possibility of reconciling them is removed, and then of course there may be others supposable though not assignable. It seems at first sight a mere idle use of words to say that Christ is really and literally, yet not locally, present in the Sacrament; that He is there given to us, not in figure but in truth, and yet is still only on the right hand of God. I have wished to remove this seeming impossibility.

If it be asked, why attempt to remove it, I answer that I have no wish to do so, if persons will not urge it against the Catholic doctrine. Men maintain it is an impossibility, a contradiction in terms, and force a believer in it to say why it should not be so accounted. And then when he gives a reason, they turn round and accuse him of subtleties, and refinements, and scholastic trifling. Let them but believe and act on the truth that the consecrated Bread is Christ's Body as He says, and no officious comment will be attempted by any welljudging man. But when they say "this cannot be

literally true because it is impossible," then they force those who think it is literally true, to explain how according to their notions it is not impossible. And those who ask hard questions must put up with hard answers. Mr. Froude gives one answer; I have given another, viz. that, though Christ's local presence be in heaven alone, yet that it is by no means plain that a spiritual Body may not as being a spirit become really present, without moving, that is, without ceasing to be in that one place where it is".

The whole question comes to this: we have no right to attempt to decide what the nature of the presence is, till we have defined the word presence, whether as said of material things or of spiritual.

And now the way is clear to add a few words on the relation of the consecrated elements to those Realities of which they are the outward signs.

The Romanists, we know, consider that the elements of Bread and Wine vanish or are taken away on Consecration, and that the Body and Blood of Christ take their place. This is the doctrine of Transubstantiation; and in consequence they hold

' Dr. F. remarks that congregations of plain understanding will join together the ideas of local and real, and either admit both or reject both. p. x. Yes; they will, till you teach that the separation between them in the Sacrament is a mystery. Might not a Socinian argue with him in the same way, "Plain men will think the idea of a Trinity irreconcilable with that of a Unity in the Godhead, and either become Unitarians or Tritheists?"

that what is seen, felt, and tasted, is not Bread and Wine but Christ's Flesh and Blood, though the former look, feel, and taste remain. This is what neither our Church, nor any of the late maintainers of her doctrine on the subject, even dreams of holding. The Lutherans say that, though the Bread remains, the Body of Christ is within [intra] the Bread; neither is this countenanced by any of the persons alluded to. They hold a spiritual Presence to be such as not to allow of being strictly co-extensive with place, in the way in which a bodily substance, in the way in which the Bread is. Therefore they cannot be said to countenance the Lutheran doctrine of Consubstantiation, according to which Christ's Body is so in the Bread as to be eaten by the unbelieving. What they do say is that Christ's Body is present, but they do not know how; it being a mystery, as I have said already, how it can be really present yet not locally or as bodies are.

It is true there is a passage in Mr. Froude's Letters in which he seems to assert that the Body of Christ is locally in the Bread; though this is, I apprehend, not really the case on a candid judgment of it. He finds fault with an expression in a Poem, which, speaking of the Lord's Supper, says, "There present in the heart, not in the hands, &c." He adds, "How can we possibly know that it is true to say, ' not in the hands?"" p. 404. that is, he much disliked dogmatic decisions of any

kind upon the subject.

He does not rule that it

is in the hands, but, with Hooker, he wishes the question left open; he disliked its being determined that it was in the heart in a sense in which it was not in the hands, seeing we know nothing of the matter. I am certain, from what I know of his opinions, that he did not mean, that the Body of Christ which is on God's right hand, was literally in the Bread.

But without limiting Christ's presence to the consecrated elements, it seems nothing but the truth to say that they are the immediate antecedents of Christ; so that he who in faith receives them, at once, and without assignable medium, is gifted with His Presence who is on God's right hand. As the breath is the immediate forerunner of the voice, as the face is the image of the soul, as a garment marks a bodily presence, so, I conceive, the elements are the antecedents of His Body and Blood, or what our Article calls, the "effectual signs, (efficacia signa,) by the which He doth work invisibly in us," or, as Hooker calls them, His "instruments." And hence, whereas He is unseen, and His Presence ineffable, and known only by Its outward signs, we say, when we take them, that we take the awful Realities which follow on them; when we touch the one, we touch the Other, when we eat the one, we eat the Other, when we drink the one, we drink the Other. We apply to our approach to the Sacred Gift all words, but those of

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