to the desirableness of a liturgy as a supplement to our existing services.

(a.) The use of liturgies is not the invention of any corrupt or Act of Parliament Church. There is distinct enough evidence that the Jews, long before our Saviour's time, had appointed forms of service-that upon the fashion of their synagogue worship the worship of the early Christian Church was grafted. Responses by the people to the prayers of the minister are recognized in the New Testament as an essential part of their common worship.-1 Cor. xiv. 16.

(b.) The intelligence and feeling of Christian worshippers at the present time, are such as to entitle and incline them to join more fully than ever before, in thoughtful, united expression of praise and desire to God.

(c.) The wish so to join in public worship is especially strong among the youth of our congregations.

These things being so, we say to the good people who urge this objection, "Do not for the sake of a mere prejudice-do not lend your influence to check an expression of religious feeling which approves itself to the young people of your timewhich is not contrary to the teaching of the Sacred Scriptures, and which has been the custom and delight of good men and women in all ages of the Church. You and I may wish our well-educated young men were constant in their attendance and co-operation at the Church's meetings for prayer. But, as a rule, young men even of undoubted Christian excellence, shrink from these. Since they are anxious to pray with their neighbours in the great congregation on a Sunday, throw no obstacle in their way."

3. But we are told that the introduction of a liturgy, even in the form of the simplest responses, is disturbing to worshippers who have long been accustomed to the silence of the congregation during prayer. And this, we confess, is to us the most weighty objection of the three. To appreciate its force we must recollect that many Nonconformists have from childhood, to a mature age, joined in no other than their present style of worship. A still larger number of them have not entered a place where a liturgy is used more frequently than could be told upon their fingers; and then, through the novelty of the

scene, and the perplexities of "finding the place" and the sound of many people subduedly, and the charity children very emphatically, saying their prayers aloud-liturgical service is, in their minds, associated with nothing more worshipful than Babel. And when the quiet of their decent Meeting-house is broken, even by the "Amen" required in the New Testament, "it makes them nervous"—whilst if the congregation joined in the Lord's Prayer it would be altogether too much for them. At the next church meeting they would feel bound to enter a solemn protest against the innovation. We must bear in mind that the people who thus feel response to be a disturbance, are sometimes to be found among the most devout and intelligent worshippers.

We have one argument to address to them, which should be potent:- You are strong, bear the infirmity of the weak, and be a little less anxious to please yourselves. You are strong-not only in your prejudices but in your religious convictions—in your charitable and honest nonconformity. Strong, above all, in your desire that the kingdom of God should come in the hearts and lives of the young people around you. And may we not add, you have a strong feeling that if many Statechurchmen whom you know could be brought to look calmly at your polity, and join in your worship, its simplicity—its accord with common sense, and with the spirit of the New Testament, would have a great and happy influence upon them.

The coldness-the dreariness, the one-man-ness of your worship estranges the young; and (as even Mr. Pearsall allows) when Anglicans are induced to attend Nonconformist services, if they confess that the preaching or teaching is greatly superior to that which they usually hear, they never fail to intimate that the prayers are greatly inferior.

X. L.

PETERS' CONFESSION OF LOVE TO CHRIST.

THIS

(JOHN XXI. CH.)

IS chapter, appended as a supplement to John's Gospel, written, perhaps, long after the Gospel was originally published, is one which we could not at all afford to be without. It records one of those occasions which reveal to men the mysterious identity of their ever-changing lives. Most men have known such occasions: when they have read old letters, or turned over pages on which long since they made their notes; when they have visited well-remembered scenes, from which the lapse of time, or a crisis of personal experience has separated them; when they have grasped the hand of old friends, and the hours have gone rapidly by while they listened again to the familiar voice, or indulged in the silent luxury of their presence. How subtle is the influence of such seasons! With what strangeness, yet with what reality do they recall the past! revealing us without an effort of selfexamination to ourselves, enabling us to estimate the changes the months have wrought upon us. Far-off, yet very familiar, seems our old life to us; we are not, we cannot be the men we once were; yet that life is truly our own, it has left its eternal mark upon us, helped to make us the men we are to-day. Thoughts that have passed away for ever are recalled-some dying, like the flower, never to be again; others dying, like the seed, to bring forth much fruit. Impulses are recalled; some that lived but a moment, others that became the habit of a life; resolves unfulfilled-resolves that now are the settled purpose of our being; failures and victories, mistakes and corrections all come up before us. The coincidences of life are designed by God to reveal us to ourselves, and to show what is God's guidance of our life. They need not be wasted in idle reverie; they may occupy a serious place in personal

education. They may always leave us wiser and better, humbler and more hopeful, more penitent, more earnest men. John is recording such a period in the life of Peter. The time is morning-morning, so full of memories, so full of hope and high resolve. The mists are clearing from the lake and shore; the darkness is passing away, stirred by the fresh breeze of dawn. There are together those whose names are so often found associated; Simon Peter, and Thomas called the Twin, and Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the two sons of Zebedee. They are on the sea of Tiberias, fishing just as before Christ called them to be fishers of men. The fruitless night-toil, and their success, when, in obedience to Christ, they cast their net on the right side of the ship, were fitted to remind them of his former miracle, and of their former call. John marks, as significant of a difference between this and the former miracle, that "for all the fishes were so many, yet did not the net break.” A hopeful difference, promising that their new mission should be better than the old. The months that have gone by, seemingly so fruitless; months during which they made so many blunders, and which appeared to come to so entire a close in the death of their Master-have not gone by for nothing. Their past experience, their blunders and anxieties, and sorrows, all will be seen to have fitted them for their new work, when again the Lord shall bid them to it. This, at least, will appear to be true of Peter: three times reminded of his weakness, three times made to feel the pains of penitence, he is each time bidden to tend the flock. He will be better able to tend the flock, because of what he has learnt of his feebleness and folly.

The narrative is full of subtle suggestions. It illustrates the Christian life, which is ever new, yet ever old; full of strange events, the meaning of which becomes, as we muse upon them, familiar and intelligible. In the dim morning light, the disciples knew not that it was Jesus who stood on the shore; perhaps some subtle change had passed upon him in the grave, the risen Saviour not appearing quite like the Master whom they had followed; but the miracle revealed that it was he. It was a new call with which he presently bade them; but it was the fulfilment of his first bidding-" Follow

me." It was a new miracle he wrought, a new experience through which they were passing now; but how thoroughly was it the same with what had gone before! It is this constant freshness and changeless identity of life, this novelty of circumstance having in it the old meaning of love and grace, the new duty which is but a repetition of the old call, which makes us rejoice in the one purpose we perceive ever enlarging and fulfilling itself. It is as we recognise, "I am the same, and God is the same amid all changes," that we rest amid ceaseless variation, and learn the lessons to which, day by day, God is opening our ears.

No wonder that that morning's meal was a silent one. Seated once more by the lake of Tiberias; the boat stirred by the morning ripple, the boat to which they had returned after so long an absence with Jesus; taking once more bread and fish from his hands; the miracle once more wrought which taught them first of Christ's power and call, they would be more disposed for meditation than for speaking. The past was with them; what were its memories for Peter? Of eager haste and painful failure; of love for Christ so true and yet so powerless; of self-confidence and of unfaithfulness. With chastened, humble spirit he must have sat and pondered; feeling that not in his devotedness to Christ, but in Christ's love to him; not in himself so boastful, yet so weak, but in his Lord, so watchful for his disciple, so wise to counsel, so tender and so earnest to warn, lay his hope that he might be faithful to his Apostleship, if he should be reinstated in it. And to these, his thoughts, Christ at length gives expression :-"Simon, son of Jonas," the name by which Christ had first called him and which he had so often used in tender solemnity-Simon, son of Jonas-not Peter, the rock-like confessor, but Simon the weak human disciple, "Simon, son of Jonas, esteemest thou me more than these ?"

There is a beautiful order in Christ's questions which is not at all indicated in our English version; which, indeed, scarcely could have been indicated, because we have but one word for love, where the Greeks had two. The distinctions between the uses of the verb αγαπαν and the verb φιλειν are various and delicate; but they may all be traced to the radical difference