Independently of its being an obedience to the Law, you, with many others, have restored Lights to their place on the Altar, as a much needed aid to revive something of that reverence and faith which is so grievously deficient in the English Church. I believe they have a certain limited power in conducing to this end. But a far more powerful, indeed as I think, the only efficient means, under God, of creating faith and reverence, is to have a clear, definite, positive, belief ourselves, and to endeavour to express it in the simplest and plainest language. There is no doctrine on which plain unmistakable language is more necessary, than that of the Holy Eucharist. I fear a vast number of Church people do not know what to believe. A great multitude of poor honest people believe the Eucharist to be nothing but a simple ceremony, and not a few, even of the clergy, believe the very contrary to the truth. Formerly, in my recollection, to believe in the Real Presence, was universally held to be the distinguishing and erroneous doctrine of Catholics, in opposition to Protestants. We have now advanced so far as to teach a Presence, which however no one can understand to be a Presence, obscured as it is with terms of “a spiritual presence,” and “the means of apprehending it being faith.” And thus in our Communion, the great service of the Church is almost entirely forsaken of the masses of the people, the great bulk of the people are uncommunicated, and have substituted for the Catholic faith and religion, a system of mere sermon hearing. But in reality the true doctrine of the Church is plain enough. The commanded Elements of Bread and Wine are placed on the Altar, they are then, simply Bread and Wine; in virtue of the words of Institution or Consecration they become, and, are Christ’s Body and Blood; present, not indeed in an ordinary, natural, physical manner, such as our external senses can take cognizance of, but in a special, mystical, supernatural manner, as we sometimes call it spiritual; not meaning hereby, mere spirit, in opposition to body, but as the Apostle tells us, “there is a spiritual Body.” It is not Christ’s _natural_ Body, subsisting according to the ordinary operation of what we call the Laws of Nature, but it is His glorified Body, that Body, which came suddenly, and stood in the midst of his disciples when the doors were shut; which vanished out of their sight; which was seen of S. Stephen, and appeared to S. Paul; the archetype of that perfection, in which our bodies were first created in the image of God, and to which they shall be restored and made like when He shall subdue all things to Himself. The Holy Elements having thus become Christ’s Body, they are the source of life, and grace, and blessing of every kind, to those who, to use the divine language, “eat,” become partakers of,--are united with them.