Such, at least, was my own painful and long-continued experience. The injunction to “examine one’s self” as a safeguard against unworthy participation did but increase the perplexity and distress. For how can self-examination fail to increase the sense of unworthiness? and how is it possible for any one to imagine himself competent to be judge in his own case? I do not forget that the Prayer-book suggests (not to say prescribes) a refuge from such perplexities in an application to “some discreet and learned minister of God’s Word” for “absolution, and ghostly counsel and advice.” I quite recognize the consistency of this suggestion, which seems to me to confirm the obvious remark already made, that the sacerdotal and sacramental system hangs together, and must be adopted or rejected as a whole. In my own case, Protestantism was too strong to allow of my accepting this legitimate corollary of the Church of England doctrine respecting the Lord’s Supper. To have recourse to confession and absolution was an impossibility to me, as I believe it to be even yet to the great majority of Englishwomen, and as it is assuredly likely always to be to Englishmen. But I doubt whether any satisfactory resting-place short of it is to be found for those who fully adopt the Anglican view of sacraments. I do not mean to represent the perplexities and scruples I have spoken of as having constituted the whole of my experience in this matter, or to say that I was quite unable to meet them in a manner more or less provisionally satisfactory to myself. It is true that out of perplexities and scruples sprang doubts and questionings (with which, indeed, the very air I breathed was thick), so that during the twenty years in which I was a regular communicant in the Church of England, I was never able to feel that my own practice was based upon thoroughly clear and solid ground of ascertained truth. Yet in spite of, or rather alongside of, all scruples and questionings as to the real intention of our Lord—if, indeed, He had any intention at all—with regard to any special commemoration of His death by the use of bread and wine, I did earnestly, throughout those years, according to the measure of my ability, endeavour to solve the problem in practice—to make the act of outward “communion” a real occasion of renewed self-dedication, and of inward and spiritual feeding on the bread of life. Such times were, indeed, often occasions of deep spiritual blessing; but I never could discern that they were so in any other sense than that in which every real act of prayer, of penitence, of self-dedication, and of thanksgiving must necessarily be so. The whole blessing appeared to me to be of a spiritual kind, and due to spiritual causes. The connection between the use of bread and wine and these spiritual sources of blessing never became clear to me. The more profound the blessedness of communion with Christ and with His people, the less conceivable did it