Turn next to sacrifice. Now if there be any continuation in any form of a propitiatory sacrifice for sin we must all admit that it is of the utmost possible importance. If it be God’s institution there is no describing the loss of those who live without it. But here I am met with the remarkable fact that, when I look for the theory in the Word of God, I find no trace of it. There is no allusion to a priest, for the ῖεροργοῦντα of Rom. xv. 16, has manifestly nothing to do with the subject. There is no altar, unless Heb. xiii. 10, be referred to, which very few are bold enough to attempt to refer to a sacrificial altar in the Church. There is not a hint as to the persons administering the Lord’s Supper, which is very strange if all the virtue is really dependent on the transmitted priesthood of the sacerdotal sacrifices. And above all, there is not one word about sacrifice in the words of institution, unless it be that τοῦτο ποιεῖτε means, and must mean, “perform this sacrifice.” The whole system hangs on the unproved and unsupported sense, arbitrarily given to these two perfectly simple words, and I would most earnestly put it to those who believe in the continuation of propitiatory sacrifice,—is there any evidence for the doctrine which bears the least appreciable proportion to its intense and overwhelming importance. The same may be said of the real presence. I am not now speaking of transubstantiation simple, but of the statement that in each element there is present a real true living Saviour,—body, soul, and divinity. Now I fully admit that those who believe in this do not make at all too much of it. I do not see how it is possible to make too much of it. If that same Lord and Saviour who was born at Bethlehem and died on Calvary, is seated on the communion table, as really, and if I may so speak, as socially, as he was seated at the Paschal Supper, so that we may speak to Him there and then, as a person visible before us, I can imagine no adoration too profound, no love too deep to be consecrated to such a presence. If I believed it, my present thought is that I could never leave the Church and never cease to speak of it. It seems as though I must be ever telling those that look for Him, that I have found the Messiah. But here I am met with this most extraordinary difficulty,—that His own Apostles and inspired writers never once alluded to the subject. They often spoke, it is true, of breaking bread, and in one Epistle the Apostle Paul entered fully into the subject of the Lord’s Supper; but the only two texts that I know of as having been ever forced into a reference, are: “Not discerning the Lord’s body,”—which has no allusion to the living person; and the original words of institution: “This is My body and this is My blood,” which distinctly teach a separation in the parts, as opposed to a union of the whole in the person of a living Lord in either element. But I am not stopping to discuss particular texts.