tue 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 all 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, the last
remains of which we have inherited from Adam, but
the spiritual body, that 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 in all! Such is the Philosophy
of Christianity. It was worn and old when Luther
found it. Our posterity will care less to respect Luther
for rending it in pieces, when it has learnt to despise
the miserable fabric which he stitched together out of
its tatters.

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PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES

In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or inquiry,
the judicious questioning of received opinions has been
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 treatm