Our churches have grown to be, to a great extent, the perfection of earthly sanctuaries. Our Services are nobler and heartier. Our church music is more worthy of the name. Better still than this, and more to the present purpose, our communicants have increased in numbers, our Communions in frequency. Our clergy, as a rule, are devoted, beyond the example of former times, to their duty, according to their conception of it. Schools are diligently cared for, and are fairly efficient; foreign missions grow; the home circle of charities is daily widened and rendered more effectual. And this is "progress," or "improvement," undoubtedly. And, were the Church a mere Machine, or a mere System, it would be perfectly reasonable to point with satisfaction to such progress or improvement. But the Church is neither the one nor the other. She is a Divine Body. And what if, while some operations of that Body are being performed with a certain increase of vigour, her very constitution, as divinely organised by God Himself, is being suffered to fall into habitual and chronic unsoundness? Surely, as it is the first duty of man to do _right_, and only his second to do _good_;--as health is the highest of bodily blessings, so that activity, apart from it, is but spurious and imperfect;--so is it the Church's _first_ duty to be _sound_,--_primum valere_,--and only her second to be, if God enables her, active and prosperous. And the Church being, as I have said, a Divine Body--the Body of Christ--it is plain that the first condition of her soundness is _full_ as well as vital union with Christ through the appointed medium, the Sacraments. Upon these are absolutely suspended her existence in the first instance, and her preservation and growth afterwards. What then, I would ask, can possibly be of more importance than that these sacred and wonderful ministries should be performed, _in all respects_, according to the Ordinance of Christ, such as he delivered it to the apostles? And if it be asked, How are we to _know_ what it was that Christ delivered to the apostles on this subject, seeing that Holy Scripture is confessedly brief and unsystematic in its teaching respecting it? the answer manifestly is, By looking at the universal practice of the Church in the time of the apostles, and during the earliest ages after them. We know, with sufficient accuracy, what that practice was. Their customs as to the administration of Baptism are known to us; their Liturgies or Communion Offices are in our hands. And, though diversities of practice, _outside_ of certain limits, are found existing in those ages, _within_ certain limits there is none. Now, among the points thus defined for us by universal early usage, is the ordained _frequency of celebration_ of both Sacraments. The law of Holy Baptism, viz. that it should be administered once only, was universally received. This is confessed on all hands.