In the first place, then, whenever we think of the state and prospects of Christ's church, whether for good or for evil, it is most desirable that we should rightly understand our own relations to it. "The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel;" or, in the language of the New Testament, "Christ is the vine, and we are the branches." Men continually seem to forget that they are members of the church; citizens, to use St. Paul's expression, of Christ's kingdom, as much as ever they are citizens of their earthly country. But they speak of the church as they might speak of any useful institution or society in their neighbourhood, whose object they approved of, and which they were glad to encourage, but without becoming members of it, or identifying themselves with its success or failure. For example, they speak of the church as they might speak of the universities, which indeed are institutions of great importance to the whole country, but yet they are manifestly distinct from the mass of the community: they have their own members, their own laws, and their own government, with which, people in general have nothing to do. And so many persons speak and feel of the church, regarding it evidently as consisting only of the clergy: our common language, no doubt, helping this confusion, because we often speak of a man's going into the church when he enters into holy orders, just as if ordination were the admission into the church, and not baptism. Now, if the clergy did indeed constitute the church, then it would very much resemble the condition of the universities: for it would then be indeed a society very important to the welfare of the whole country, but yet one that was completely distinct, and which had its members, laws, and government quite apart: for men in general do not belong to the clergy, nor are they concerned directly in such canons as relate to the peculiar business of the clergy, nor does the bishop's superintendence, as commonly exercised, extend at all to them. But God designed for his church far more than that it should contain one order of men only, or that it should comprise commonly but one single individual in a parish, preaching to and teaching the rest of the inhabitants, like a missionary amongst a population of heathens. Look at St. Paul's account of the church of Corinth, in the 12th chapter of his 1st epistle to the Corinthians, and see if any two things can be more different than his notion of a church, and that which many people seem to entertain amongst us. Compare the living body there described, made up of so many various members, each having its separate office, yet each useful to and needed by the others and by the body,--and our notion of a parish committed to the charge of a single individual: as if all the manifold gifts which the church requires could by possibility be comprised in the person of any one Christian; as if the whole burden