And as the presence of a noble character is a more potent influence than words, so sacramental communion with Christ is man's chief school of faith, of hope, and love. There are worthy persons who turn, as from an unholy thought, from the emphatic announcement of the need of the best human qualities for the proper defence of the cause of God in the world. Such speech seems to them to be vain and unreal; for God is all in all, and man is nothing. But in our day it is easier to go astray in the direction of self-annihilation than in that of self-assertion; since the common tendency now of all false philosophies is pantheistic, and issues in unconscious contempt of individual life. If man is but a bubble, merging forth and re-absorbed, without past or future, then indeed both he, and what he seems to do, sink into the eternal flow of matter, and are undeserving of a thought. This certainly is not the Christian view, to which man is revealed as a lesser god, and co-worker with the Eternal, whose thought can reach the infinite, and whose will can oppose that of the Omnipotent. In Christ, God co-operates with man for the salvation of the world; and in the Church, man co-operates with God to this same end. The more complete the man, the more fit is he to work with God. Even bodily disfigurement is looked upon as an obstacle; how much more, then, shall lack of intelligence and want of heart render us unworthy of the divine office? I certainly shall never deny that love, which the Apostle exalts above faith and hope, is higher also than knowledge. The light of the mind is as that of the moon--fair and soft and soothing, without heat, without the power to call forth and nourish life; but the light of the soul, which is love, is the sunlight, whose kiss, like a word of God, makes the dead to live, and clothes the world in strength and beauty. Character is more than intellect, love is more than knowledge, religion is more than morality; and a great heart brings us closer to God, nearer to all goodness, than a bright mind. Education is essentially moral, and the intellectual qualities themselves, which we seek to develop, derive their chief efficacy from underlying ethical qualities upon which they rest and from which they receive their energy and the power of self-control. Inequality of will is the great cause of inequality of mind; and the will is strengthened by the practice of virtue, as the body by food and exercise. If this is a general truth, with what special force must it not apply to the ministers of a religion the paramount and ceaseless aim of which is to make men holy, so that at times it has almost seemed as though the Church were indifferent as to whether they are learned or beautiful or strong? She pronounces no man a doctor unless he be also a saint; and when I insist that the priest shall possess the best mental culture of his age,--that without this he fights with broken weapons, speaks with harsh voice a