It became necessary, therefore, that we should look to the Congregation alone; and, in one form or in another, ask those to support, who really love and use, this House of God. Hence our appeal to you this evening. And if on future occasions the appeal is commonly made to you in silence, without special enforcement from this place, yet let me hope that you will all register it in your minds as a just claim, and not suffer these periodical gatherings to lose their interest or to fail in their amount. _Why repair ye not the breaches of the House_? The subject expands itself before us, and we read the remonstrance as applying no longer to the fabric, but rather to these three larger and more sacred topics, the Congregation, the Church, the soul. 1. That anxiety which we do not feel about the fabric, for we are sure that you will attend to it, we cannot stifle as regards the Congregation. For indeed it is this which makes the House. The building is only valuable, only significant, for the sake of the inmates. When it is asked of us, _Why repair ye not the bleaches of the House_? we may look up indeed at our broken pinnacles, our not watertight roof, our falling flowers, our patchwork pomegranates, and think that these too require attention or deserve reproach; but, after all, these are not the real things; these altogether make not the House; the House, the Temple, now, in these days of spirit and Gospel, is the community, the congregation, the living body within. How is it with this? Are there no breaches here, visible not to an eye of flesh, but to One who seeth in secret? For example, my brethren, is there not too great a disproportion here between the real and the nominal worshippers? Is it not lamentable, is it not even discreditable, that so many should be present at one Service once on the Lord’s Day, and so few at any other Service either on this Holy Day or on any other? that so many should come together here this evening to listen to music or preaching, so few to pray and to praise, so few to break the Holy Bread, or to drink the Sacred Wine? Is not this one of the _breaches of the House_, the spiritual house, which wants _repairing_ amongst us? 2. But this carries me on to a somewhat wider field, which I have called not the Congregation, but the Church. And here, as is natural indeed in these eventful, these quickly moving times, my thoughts are upon our own Church, that communion which is the congregation of congregations; that communion which we have heretofore known as the Church of England by law established.