this duty does not solemnly rest upon her, then the Lord's Table is a prey to designing men, and the Church herself is impotent to determine or preserve her own character." Corrective discipline becomes an impossibility. Many unkind and harsh things are said of those who practice restricted communion on the ground that Christians should not be separated at the Lord's Table. We should remember that the separation does not take place at the table. It takes place at the water. In the beginning it was not so, and for nearly three hundred years all Christians sat down together at the Lord's Table. The division took place over baptism. The Catholic Church arrogated to itself the right to change the ordinance from immersion to sprinkling, and did so. When the ordinances were given to the Church denominations were unknown, and so long as baptism was retained in its primitive purity as a public profession of belief in the burial and resurrection of Christ, no separation at the Table was thought of. But since the change from immersion to sprinkling, Christians have become separated into all sorts of sects and by all sorts of beliefs. So long as these differing sects and opposing beliefs are justified there can be no consistency in objecting to separation at the Lord's Table. If all Christians of all denominations can consistently come together at the Lord's Table, what justification is there for maintaining separate denominations? There can be no real fellowship at the Table unless all who sit down together have the same views of scriptural truth. “How can two walk together except they be agreed?" Oneness of belief is the basis of fellowship. How can there be any real communion when the basis of it is lacking? When Christians of every denomination shall come to admit what the scriptures clearly teach, and what the scholarship of the world is agreed upon, that the original mode of baptism was the immersion of a believer in water and that baptism is prerequisite to communion, the question "is communion a Church ordinance?" will be no longer asked. The Lord's Supper: Is It a Church or a Christian Ordinance and Who Should Partake of It? C BY The Reverend GEORGE HENRY HUBBARD, D.D. HRISTIANITY, as represented by Jesus Christ, was a thing of life. Forces, principles, ideas, were its constituent elements. It was essentially the manifestation of the Christly spirit in all the manifold relations of human society, in all the most commonplace directions of human activity. And it contained within itself the vital power which makes for continuous growth. Spontaneity, elasticity, adaptability, these were the characteristics which revealed themselves in the new religion as it came to men fresh from the hands of the Master, -these, wedded with a divine and transforming power. The Christianity of the Church, on the other hand, has ever tended towards forms and institutions, i. e. towards the mechanical and the lifeless. Indeed, something of this tendency is inherent in the very nature of the Church, which, in its organized form, is itself the first manifestation of the principle of crystallization in religion. There have been periods in Christian history when the Churchly ideal of religion has stood in marked contrast and even antagonism to the Christly ideal, when the disciples of Jesus have striven for the rigid perfection of the crystal instead of the growing perfection of the tree. We frequently speak of the Church as having been established by our Lord; whereas, in point of fact, the Lord did not establish an organized Church at all. Doubtless an organized Church is the natural, perhaps the inevitable outcome of His work and teaching. But we do well to remember that Jesus Himself only gathered a band of disciples and chose twelve apostles in the most informal fashion, without any definiteness of organization or corporate relation to one another. The only bonds by which He united them were the spiritual and living bonds of brotherly love. The only constitution He gave was the Gospel of human salvation. The only authority with which He invested them was the inherent authority of truth and righteousness. To these disciples, not as a body of men and women, but as individual followers of the Christ, drawn together by a common interest and held together by a common purpose and loyalty, He suggested certain simple rites as helps in the maintenance and upbuilding of spiritual life in themselves and in the world. The rites themselves were not prescribed in an exact and positive manner. They were not like the metal casting that must conform precisely at every point to the mould in which it is run. Rather were they given and accepted in a very free and natural fashion. And their purpose seems to have been individual, inspirational, educational; not as a badge of separation from the world or of union with each other. For example, In calling His disciples, Jesus simply uttered the invitation, "Follow Me," and, asking no questions regarding personal character, experience, or belief, imposing no conditions of special or corporate responsibility, He welcomed all who came to the fullest privileges and opportunities of discipleship. Then He held them to Himself and brought them into a growing relation of fellowship with one another solely by the power of personal loyalty. In Himself as the Son of God was the magnetic force which rendered all external bonds superfluous. In all things He was the Leader; and to whatsoever duty or danger or sacrifice or effort He called others, He led the way. The same elasticity characterizes all His relations with His followers. Take the matter of baptism. Notwithstanding the strenuous assertions of certain theologians and lexicographers, the rite of baptism was apparently administered at the first with great freedom. Its precise form is nowhere clearly defined; and the only absolute prerequisite would seem to be the |