The dogma of the Incarnation and the Real Presence has again the closest affinity with that of the Priesthood. Christ is present in His Church, for the Priest in the tribunal of penitence is as God Himself. How vain, how worse than blasphemous, would be the attempt to absolve from sin,--surely the maddest infringement of Divine Power which mortal ever imagined,--had not He, the partner of our flesh and blood, said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost: whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them, and whosesoever sins ye retain, they are retained;" and "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." No blasphemy can approach the Church's blasphemy, if it be not God's truth; and if it be, so deeply touching the secret springs of discipline, in what state is a branch of the Church of Christ, which utterly neglects this truth in practice, and allows it with impunity to be denied, and derided, and calumniated? Whose children from their infancy have scarcely ever heard it? Whose full-grown men turn from it in all the hardness of rebellious manhood? And if it be what it is, either a Divine Power, or a diabolic deceit, can that be at once the Gospel, which has it and which has it not? Here then, again, we have no new thing to take up with, but simply to practise what we already solemnly profess. Thus the perpetual recurrence to the doctrine of the Real Presence, the prominence given to the Intercession of Saints, especially of the Blessed Virgin, and the real putting forth of apostolic power in the tribunal of penitence, are striking features in the Roman Communion. By these she proves that she has living power as a portion of Christ's Church, by living upon and dealing with the most awful powers: as she holds the true doctrine, "Believe that this is so, because I say it, and I say it because it has come to me from Christ through His Apostles," so she exhibits the convincing proof of her mission: "Believe that I am the Church, for behold me exercising the supernatural powers of the Church." This is that inward proof which convinces, which is nothing technical, merely intellectual, or matter of argument, but like St. Augustine's "Securè judicat orbis terrarum,"--"A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid." And the Anglican portion must prove, in act as well as in theory, her identity with this of Rome, from whom she has her succession, and with that other great Oriental Communion, the joint-witness herein of Catholic truth and practice. Her prayer-book has the deepest accordance with the Catholic system. Will she in act continue to put a false interpretation on the words of her own formularies, or will she read them practically in the sense of those from whom she took them?