that
which was already perfect did not need subduing--but to give to penance
a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ
consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure
unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us
when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of his own most precious
body. In the person of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue
of that which in his own person He actually performed when a man living
on this earth. Last of all, when time is drawing to its close with
us--when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near,
beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his
tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death,
but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without
special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He
sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the
grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in his last
anointing before his passion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem
to decay--to decay--but not all. Our natural body decays, being the last
remains of the infected matter which we have inherited from Adam; but
the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has made our life, and
is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but passes
off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where
there is no sin, and God is all and in all!

FOOTNOTES:

[C] From the _Leader_, 1851.

A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.[D]

In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry, the judicious
questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of
scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very
source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been
regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had
been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had
been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the
prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy
to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would
at present be found. Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and
the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New
diseases have shown t