The either heart or head be pierced by arrow or bullet. vital organs of spiritual life are faith, hope, and love. That we should maintain a conviction of the reality of unseen things, and of God's pardoning love in Christ; that, in the belief of this love, our hearts should reciprocally open towards Him and towards all His creatures; and that, notwithstanding all there is within and around to depress, to retard, to beat us down, we should still be sanguine of success through the blood and grace of Christ,—— all these are points essential to our spiritual safety. These points must be secured. The Apostle exhorts us to secure them, when he says to the Thessalonians, “Let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation."1 And the Collect sends us to God for this breastplate and helmet, teaching us to ask Him for grace to put them God's armour is not like that with which Saul arrayed David, a cumbersome impediment. When He arms us with His panoply, putting the helmet of hope upon our head, and the breastplate of faith and love upon our heart, and girding upon us "the sword of the Spirit, which is" His "word," He quickens us thereby, and makes us nimble and alert for the spiritual conflict. "It is God, that girdeth me with strength of war: and maketh my way perfect. He maketh my feet like harts' feet: and setteth me up on high. He teacheth mine hands to fight: and mine arms shall break even a bow of steel." on. Before leaving the Collect, observe how skilfully the writer has combined in it the two lines of Advent meditation, the retrospect of the first with the anticipation of the second Advent, and how judiciously he has thrown 1 1 Thess. v. 8. 3 See Eph. vi. 17. 2 See 1 Sam. xvii. 38, 39. each into high relief by its vivid contrast with the other. Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility;” “He shall come again in his glorious Majesty to judge both the quick and dead." "She brought forth her first-born son, and wrapped him in swaddling-clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn,"1—this is the "great humility. "The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God;"2 "When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats," this is the "glorious Majesty."-And to the contrast between the "great humility" and the glorious Majesty" our Lord Himself called the attention of the Jewish Sanhedrim by a single word, the force of which escapes the cursory reader, and sometimes perplexes the more thoughtful one. When adjured by the high priest to tell them whether He was the Christ, the Son of God, He replies; "Thou hast said" (an affirmation of His Messiahship and Divine Sonship); "nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven."4 What is the force of this nevertheless ?5 1 St. Luke ii. 7. 2 1 Thess. iv. 16. 3 St. Matt. xxv. 31, 32. 4 St. Matt. xxvi. 64. 5. This conjunction has the same force in St. Matt. xviii. 7 ("It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh "); in Phil. i. 18 ("Notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is preached"); Phil. iv. 14 (I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me. Notwithstanding, have well done that ye did communicate with my affliction"); and St. Luke xxii. 42 ("nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done"). It is less sharply adversative, and amounts to little more than "but," in St. Luke vi. 24, 35, and other places. ye It wraps up (like the "therefore" in St. John xix. 11) a Our Lord would say; "Let not whole train of thought. my present humble guise stagger you. Ye look on things after the outward appearance, and accordingly regard me as being, what I seem to the eye of sense to be, a bound criminal, defenceless and weak, in the presence and power of his judges. Nevertheless, believe me, ye shall one day form another estimate of things. Ye, as criminals, shall stand before Me as your judge, and acknowledge Me as the arbiter of your destiny, when I sit on the right hand of power, and come in the clouds of heaven-a second Joseph, before whom, when he was the governor over the land, his brethren bowed down themselves with their faces to the earth, and a Joseph widely different in appearance from the poor stripling whom they had sold into the hand of the Ishmeelites."1 This pregnant" nevertheless " has been the theme of many pieces of Christian hymnology; but nowhere has its force been more tersely or simply brought out than in the majestic Collect before us. Observe, finally, that this is perhaps the most doctrinal 1 See Gen. xlii. 6, and xxxvii. 28. 2 2 As for instance of Bishop Heber's Hymn for the Second Sunday in Advent (No. 1) :— VOL. I. The Lord will come! but not the same As once in lowly form He came, A silent Lamb to slaughter led, The bruised, the suffering, and the dead. The Lord will come! a dreadful form, Can this be He who wont to stray A pilgrim on the world's highway; By power oppressed, and mocked by pride? H of all the Collects, being indeed in itself a short Apostles' Creed; for here we have the Divine Sonship of Christ; His birth into this world, nay, and (implicitly) His sufferings and death too (for were not they the climax of His humiliation ?); His return from the right hand of God (inferring His previous resurrection and ascension); His judgment of the quick and dead; and, finally, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Add to which that, in the "Give us grace," there is the clearest recognition of the work of God the Holy Ghost.-What then shall we learn from the fact that this, the first Collect of the Christian Year, is also the most doctrinal? This lesson, at all events, will not be amiss nor unsuitable to our times, that the whole structure of Christian Prayer is built upon doctrine; that to cut away dogma-i.e. the definite statement of doctrine-from prayer, is (like houghing the horses of the Canaanite kings 1) to cut the very nerve and sinew which gives prayer its power of movement; for prayer, while indeed it is an affection of the heart, is not a mere sentiment, but a sentiment arising from the belief of some Divine truth. Prayer is nothing else than the voice of faith apprehending that truth, taking that truth to itself. 1 See Josh. xi. 6, 9. APPENDIX. On the terminations of the Collects and Orisons found in the Book of Common Prayer. THE termination of the Collect for the First Sunday in Advent, which, as will be seen below, has its peculiarity leads me to speak generally of the various forms in which the Prayers of the English Church are ended. As regards the forms used in the medieval Church before the Reformation, rules for them are given in great detail in a Latin memoria technica, at pp. 73, 74, of Mr. Chambers's “ Sarum Psalter, or Seven Ordinary Hours of Prayer" [Masters, 78 New Bond Street, 1852]. These rules are purely technical; and, according to them, the particular formula in which a prayer is ended is determined merely by some such accidental circumstance as Christ, or the Holy Ghost, being mentioned in it or not. Here is a free translation of five lines of the shorter memoria technica : If you address the Father in your prayer, say [at the close], "through the Lord." If you make mention of Christ [in the course of your prayer], you should say, "through the same." If you address your prayer to Christ, remember to say at the end," who livest," etc. If Christ be mentioned at the end of a collect, say, "who with thee," etc. If you make mention of the Holy Ghost, say, near the end," of the same," (i.e. in the unity of the same). Two points are to be noticed respecting these various terminations, as they appear in the Sarum Missal; one is, that the whole termination is never given at full length, as in our Book of Common Prayer. "Through," or "who livest," or "who with thee liveth," is usually all that is given. Hence there would be room for the officiating person to make slight variations of the words, although the one or two words in the Office Book would determine substantially what the concluding formula was to be. The second and more important point is, that in the mnemonic lines referred to above there is no mention at all of the |