I have allowed my thoughts to fall into a somewhat autobiographical form, because the appearance of egotism seems to me preferable to the real presumption of going beyond one’s knowledge, and also because I am anxious to show how unavoidably (and at the same time, I believe, innocently) one may become entangled in questions too deep and too perplexing for ordinary minds, in the mere honest endeavour to obey at once the teachings of Jesus Christ and of the Church. To myself it was the greatest relief, at a time when I had thus been driven to choose between obedience to my own conscience on the one hand, and outward communion with my fellow-Christians on the other, and when I had for two years, with pain and grief, excommunicated myself accordingly—it was at that moment the greatest relief to find a body of Christians who held the simple, and, to my mind, the one worthy view of Christianity, as a dispensation entirely spiritual in its nature; a state of enlightenment and true worship in which forms and shadows had passed away, and the substance alone was to be laboured for. It was in the quiet meetings already described that I myself first learnt the full meaning of the words, “baptizing into the Name ... and the communion of the body of Christ.” The outward observances by which these “holy mysteries” are typified in the devotions of other bodies had been to me rather a hindrance than a help. I cannot help suspecting that they are so to many. For if not a help, they must be a hindrance. It may, to people in some stages of education, or in some countries, be a natural and real way of receiving or expressing truth, to perform ceremonial acts. I cannot think that it is the spontaneous language of intelligent devotion in our own time and country. To my own mind the great crowning lesson imparted by our Divine Master, in the solemn farewell hours of His last evening with His disciples, is lowered and eclipsed when considered as the institution of a ceremony, and shines out again in its fulness of majestic pathos when regarded as an embodied or acted parable. His repeated warnings to His disciples against their inveterate tendency to take His words literally, and to interpret them as referring to the meat that perishes instead of as being spirit and life, sound in one’s ears when one feels oppressed by what (forgive me the irrepressible truth) to some of us seems the unintelligent practice of continually repeating a form used by Christ once for all to show forth the central truth of His life-giving life on earth.