14
wouldest have expended upon thyself; that so he who receives it may pray to God for thee."
It may perhaps seem strange to some that the present age should be thought wanting in self-denying charity. And yet let men but consider with themselves not what they give only, but what they retain; let them enquire a little further, not only what wants are relieved, but what remediable misery remains unabated; or let them but observe generally the glaring contrasts of extremest luxury and softness, and pinching want and penury; between their own cieled houses, and the houses of God which lie waste; or let them only trace out one single item in the mass of human wretchedness, disease, insanity, religious ignorance, and picture to themselves what a Christian people might do, what the primitive Christians would have done to relieve it,—and then turn to what is done, to what themselves do, and say whether means to promote self-denying charity can well be spared.
A further important object of the stated and frequent recurrence of the prescribed Fasts of our Church, is the public recognition of the reality of things spiritual. Here also very many have felt, (and it is a feeling whose strength is daily increasing,) that some public protest is needed against the modes of acting, tolerated (would one must not say, reigning!) in our nominally Christian land: that the Church, or the body of believers, ought to have some recognized mode of distinguishing themselves from those, who manifest by their deeds, that although "amongst us, they are not of us;" and who, on the principles of our Church, would have gone out or been removed from us. It has been with a right view of what the ideal of the Christian Church should be, its holiness, and its purity, although not, I must think, with a just conception of the nature of the Church, that men jealous for the honour of their God and their Redeemer, have in some measure formed Churches within the Church. The plan has, I think, been defective, sacred and praiseworthy as was the object contemplated. It is true, that the mere union in the celebration of the weekly festival of our Lord's Resurrection does not, as things now are, furnish a sufficient condemnation of the maxims and offences of the world; that the Church and the world are too much amalgamated; that while the light of the Church has in part penetrated the gross darkness of the
