fi!f«i,r,J(
 
 II 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 c
 
 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 IDEALS OF HOLINESS: 
 
 AN AID TO PREPARATION FOR HOLY COMMUNION 
 Crown 8vo. 2s. net. 
 
 THE WONDROUS PASSION 
 
 With an Introduction by the Bishop of London 
 
 Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net 
 
 THE HOLY GHOST— THE COMFORTER. By G. F. 
 
 HOLDEM, M.A., late Vicar of All Saints ', Margaret Street. With 
 Introduction by the Bishop of London. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 THE DIVINE FRIENDSHIP. By the Rev. Jesse Brett, 
 
 L.TH. Crown 8vo. 3s. net. 
 THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION. By the Rev. Leighton 
 
 PULLAN, M.A., Fellow of St. John Baptist's College, Oxford. 
 Crown 8vo. 4s. net. 
 
 *,• This book- contains an .iccount of the origin of Episcopacy, the three 
 Creeds, the Ancient Western Liturgies and other institutions of the Church. 
 Special attention is also fiven to the early history of Sacramental Confession and 
 to the principle of Authority in the Church of England. 
 
 STUDIES IN CHRISTIAN WORSHIP. By the Rev. 
 C. H. Robinson, d.d., Honorary Canon of Ripon. Crown 8vo. 
 Paper covers, 6d. net ; cloth, is. net. 
 
 THE CHURCH: HER BOOKS AND HER SACRA- 
 MENTS. By the Venerable E. E. Holmes, b.d., Archdeacon of 
 London. Crown 8vo. as. fd. net. 
 
 IN WATCHINGS OFTEN. Addresses to Nurses and 
 Other<;. By the Venerable E. E. Hol.mes, b.d., Archdeacon of 
 London. With a Preface by the Right Rev. Edward King, d.d., 
 late Bishop of Lincoln. Crown Svo, sewed, 2s. 6d. ; cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 PRAYER AND ACTION ; or, The Three Notable Duties 
 
 (Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving). By the Ven. E. E. Holmes, b d., 
 ,'Vrchdeacon of London. With an Introduction by the Bishop of 
 London. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. net. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY. AND CALCUTTA
 
 THE 
 
 WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 BY 
 
 F. W. DRAKE 
 
 PRIEST-IN-CHARGE OF !. JOHN's, WILTON ROAD, 8.W. 
 
 ffEW IMPRESSION 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 
 
 I914 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 3X 
 ^'5 SO 
 
 v-v- 
 
 Truly our fellowship is with the Father and with 
 
 His Son Jesus Christ. ... If we walk in the light as 
 
 He is in the light we have fellowship one with 
 
 another, and the Blood of Jesus Christ His Son 
 
 cleanseth us from all sin. 
 
 I S. John i. 3, 7.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THESE papers deal with the simph'cities of 
 Catholic Faith and Practice. They are ad- 
 dressed to those who are living the ordered Sacra- 
 mental life of the faithful Communicant. May they 
 help towards a fuller realisation of that saintly fellow- 
 ship which it is the privilege of Christ's Church to 
 
 initiate, to foster, and to fulfil. 
 
 F. W. D.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. The Call to Fellowship 
 
 II, The Fellowship of the Spirit . 
 
 III. The Altar of Fellowship 
 
 IV, The Altar and Private Devotion 
 V, The Fellowship of Prayer 
 
 VI, Our Private Prayers , 
 
 VII. Penitence 
 
 VIII. Meditation 
 
 IX. Death . 
 
 X. The Fellowship of Paradise . 
 
 XI. The Fellowship of Peace 
 
 XII. The Festival of Fellowship . 
 
 I 
 
 28 
 
 39 
 
 50 
 64 
 
 79 
 92 
 106 
 119 
 132 
 147
 
 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 THE CALL TO FELLOWSHIP. 
 
 ^-f^ OD has made us for Himself. That is the secret 
 V_J of the Way of Fellowship. Therefore God ever 
 claims our highest. He asks that we should love Him 
 with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our soul 
 and with all our strength. That is the measure of the 
 Fellowship which He seeks. In the secret springs of 
 will and affection, in the hidden depths of life, God 
 seeks the steadfast response of a growing consecration. 
 And the soul, thus aroused to the call of Fellowship, 
 God draws ever to Himself with that unchanging love 
 which He bears towards the least shadow of His own 
 Divine Goodness. It is a high ideal. We need en- 
 couragement to hold it ever before our eyes. For 
 there is no road so fraught with sorrows of disappoint- 
 ment, so beset with the perils of impatience and the 
 horrors of despair, as the path of the earnest disciple 
 who would make a whole-hearted offering of his life. 
 Here are some marks by which we can test the reality 
 
 B
 
 2 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 of our dedication and encourage ourselves in patience 
 and in hope, as God leads us forth to the higher re- 
 sponsibilities of closer Fellowship. ^ 
 
 A. 
 
 Fellowship makes a continuous demand upon the will. 
 This is the " patience of the saints." This perpetual, 
 ever-increasing effort is apt to be forgotten. There is 
 no height of saintliness at which this struggle ceases. 
 Ever the human will must be strained up to conform- 
 ity with the Will of God.^ The life of every saint 
 reveals the unbroken continuance of a conscious, 
 painstaking obedience, which can never become so 
 habitual as to cease to make a fresh demand upon the 
 will. It is a painstaking, not a painful, obedience. 
 It is an obedience of happiness and of joy, but always 
 a fresh-willed obedience, not simply the outcome of 
 habit, but the exercise of a new power of determina- 
 tion. For to love God is to bend the wz7/ consciously 
 in ways of conformity and obedience. The will is the 
 controlling element in our personality. It is that in 
 which we are likest God, the attribute which marks 
 us off from the rest of His creation. Here in the will 
 the soul sees the image of God. Every act of God is 
 instinct with will. And our acts, too, if they are 
 to be the acts of our whole personality, must be con- 
 scious acts of will. William Law has not understated 
 the principle of the devout life when he says it con- 
 sists in the ^^ intention to please God in every act as the
 
 THE CALL TO FELLOWSHIP 3 
 
 happiest and best thing in the world." We must, 
 therefore, put our wills to school, discipline, control, 
 subdue, direct them aright, and see that every act is 
 a deliberate exercise of will, not a mere act of impulse, 
 nor of habit only, not a mere happening into which 
 we have drifted. Listlessness and disappointment 
 creep over our spiritual life as soon as we lose the 
 sense of joy which comes from the daily exercise of 
 this strength of will. It is here that our fellowship 
 fails. It lacks renewal and becomes a memory of the 
 past, instead of an energy of the present. If we pur- 
 pose to serve God truly, let us be prepared for the 
 constant taking of fresh pains, the daily renewal of 
 our dedication. This is not the exception, but the 
 rule, of discipleship. No nearness to Christ, however 
 great the joy and sweetness which it brings, can absolve 
 us from this constant effort, this continual devotion. 
 The proof of our love is not the high emotion, not the 
 ecstatic rapture, not the holy aspiration, not even the 
 notable success, but the persistent, daily resolve to 
 do God's Will. " Our wills are ours to make them 
 
 Thine."/ 
 
 B. 
 
 rpellowship with God means a hidden life. To some 
 this may seem a truism. Perhaps it is. Yet it needs 
 to be emphasised. For we English people have a 
 peculiar dislike of contemplation, and spurn the ways 
 of quiet thought. We love activity, we love to culti- 
 vate all that calls for energy, all that makes for evident
 
 4 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 success, and produces immediate, tangible results. 
 And this temper of mind invades our spiritual life. 
 We are apt to value our devotion, to estimate its 
 reality, to judge of its fruitfulness and worth, by the 
 way in which it prepares us for some kind of religious 
 activity. We regard it not as a good thing, as the best 
 thing, /« itself, but only as a means to secure this or that 
 outward result. It is the outward activity in religious 
 service which we regard as the sure mark of fellow- 
 ship and devotion. Now it is perfectly true that many 
 of us are indeed called to a life of religious activity, 
 and are privileged to take part in a manifold round 
 of brotherly and unselfish service. It is true that 
 such energy of service can only be sustained and be 
 preserved pure and undefiled where there is a life of 
 hidden devotion. But that hidden life itself, in itself 
 and by itself, apart from all outward activities, is the 
 highest thing we have, is the real dedication, is in 
 itself the crown of our spiritual achievement. Behind 
 and beneath the vocation to this or that service is 
 the vocation to holiness. The call to individual conse- 
 cration is always the prior vocation for every soul. We 
 are called to be holy, before we are called to do the 
 things which befit a holy life. 
 
 And may it not be that sometimes we reverse the 
 order of vocation ? We must not expect to discover 
 our vocation to service before we have responded to 
 the vocation to holiness. When the thought of 
 God's call stirs afresh in our hearts, let us begin with
 
 THE CALL TO FELLOWSHIP 5 
 
 the certainty that the first call is indeed to sanctifica- 
 tion. And if God seems to withhold the revelation of 
 our individual call to service, and even for a while to 
 cut us off from some of our wonted activities, it may 
 be that He holds out to us a new opportunity of 
 realising that first vocation to personal holiness and 
 interior dedication. And there are some for whom 
 this vocation is the only call of God revealed in 
 this life. It is enough to satisfy the desires of the 
 most strenuous disciple of the Cross, if it be willingly 
 and heartily accepted as the first work, the greatest 
 happiness of life. 
 
 If some are wrongly inclined to measure their 
 acceptance of Fellowship by the fulness of outward 
 activity, there are others who would gauge its reality 
 by the conscious fervour and sensible joy of their 
 spiritual life. This is perhaps the greatest temptation 
 that ever besets us in our earnestness. Our demands 
 seem so reasonable. We love God. We worship 
 Him. We seek Him in His appointed ways of 
 sacramental fellowship. Is it too much to expect 
 that we should have, not the ecstatic rapture of the 
 great saints, but at least a real consciousness of God's 
 Presence, a realised sense of happiness at the 
 moments of His revelation ? This natural expecta- 
 tion is one of Satan's deadliest weapons for the over- 
 throw of the soul's peace. We have to learn that 
 the life of fellowship is a hidden life indeed. The 
 experiences of the soul in its communion with God
 
 6 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 are carried on in a sphere too deep and profound to 
 be measured by the emotional sensations which satisfy 
 us in the ordinary intercourse of human hfe. The 
 Hfe of the soul, in its inner depths, is a life of tran- 
 quillity. Where God the Infinite touches our finite 
 powers there is serene, unruffled peace. We walk by 
 faith and not by sight. To walk by sight would be 
 to have the conscious rapture, the realised joy, the 
 brightness of the unclouded vision. But we walk by 
 faith. We know, it is our certain conviction, that at 
 those high moments of God's approach, His grace 
 is assuredly given, and our souls are strengthened, 
 purified, and enriched by the access of new powers 
 of holiness. Though we cannot feel the joy of that 
 gift, the gift lies there in the secret treasure-house of 
 our personality. And we know that when the tempta- 
 tion has to be withstood, when the witness for God 
 has to be given, when the unselfish service must be 
 rendered, then, though we do not feel as though we 
 had the power, yet, by an act of will, out of the 
 depths of grace hidden in the subconscious treasuries 
 of the soul, we can raise up to the level of conscious 
 and realised experience just that very power of 
 obedience, holiness, and service which we need. 
 
 So we learn to measure the reality of our fellow- 
 ship not by the conscious feelings which we enjoy, 
 but by the persistent, lowly obedience with which we 
 receive God's gifts of grace. Patiently, thankfully, 
 and cheerfully to plod along the quiet way of obedient
 
 THE CALL TO FELLOWSHIP 7 
 
 and faithful reception of the sacraments of God's 
 grace — this is our acceptance of the Divine Fellow- 
 ship, this is the measure of our dedication and the 
 safeguard of our peace. 
 
 C. 
 
 Our first response to God's call for Fellowship has 
 its own glowing fervours and high enthusiasm which 
 can never be recalled. The ardour of that first love 
 carries us triumphantly through the initial difficulties 
 of the way. But as day succeeds to day and the 
 demand upon the will continues, the monotony of the 
 struggle brings new dangers and temptations, terrible 
 often just in proportion to our very earnestness. The 
 way of devotion becomes indeed the way of the Cross. 
 
 First, there is the danger of formalism and ex- 
 ternality. We know that we must make rules for 
 ourselves ; we must have method in our spiritual 
 life ; we must be definite ; we must bind our wills to 
 the punctual performance of duties. So we make our 
 rules, rules not carelessly nor lightly accepted, but 
 the outcome of deliberate thought and anxious care, 
 the result of reliance upon the inspiration of the 
 Spirit. Thus we bind ourselves to the renewal and 
 quickening of many a habit that has become dulled 
 in our life of devotion. And such careful and earnest 
 purpose is sure to receive the blessing of God. Yet 
 here, in the very heart of our spiritual discipline, 
 there lurks a subtle danger. We must be very careful
 
 8 THE WAY OF PELLOWSHIP 
 
 that our rules do not, in the end, drive out that very 
 spirit of reality and devotion which they are meant 
 to cherish and enrich. It is possible to keep a rule 
 in the letter, to maintain an unbroken external 
 obedience, and yet to break and destroy the very 
 spirit which the rule was made to embody. We must 
 not keep the rule just for the rule's sake, and let it 
 become a matter of personal pride and a source of 
 shallow self-satisfaction. But we must make, and we 
 must keep, our rules for God's sake, out of love for 
 our Blessed Lord. We shall fast, not only because 
 it is the rule of the Church, not only because it 
 is a natural expression of our sense of sin, but out 
 of love for our Lord, that by some voluntary action 
 of our own we may unite ourselves to Him in His 
 suffering. We shall give more earnest attention to 
 our prayers, not simply because we have made a rule 
 to do so, but because we do really want to hold our- 
 selves in closer conformity to His blessed Will, and 
 to enter more fully into the mind of Christ, and to 
 take our share in that redemptive intercession, which 
 is the privilege of His saints. We shall give alms 
 in more unselfish ways, because we have gained more 
 of the self-sacrificing, self-emptying spirit of the 
 Incarnate. Always, therefore, in the keeping of our 
 rules there must be the fresh act of faith, the new 
 impulse of love, the quickened act of will, always the 
 conscious dedication, the renewed sense of God's 
 Presence, the peaceful reliance upon His daily help.
 
 THE CALL TO FELLOWSHIP 9 
 
 ^ Next, there is the danger of impatience. I mpatience 
 is one of the most subtle forms of pride. At all 
 stages of spiritual growth it lies in wait for us. 
 First, we are impatient at our rate of progress and 
 our poor attainment. That leads us to make for 
 ourselves rules too hard and too impossible for our 
 present strength. We watch the progress of others 
 and think we ought to be doing all that they can do 
 Yet we are really behind them, and must go patiently 
 and lead ourselves on gently. It is very hard to 
 mark the line between indulgence and the gentleness 
 which comes from true self-knowledge. Because we 
 are humble with ourselves now, it does not mean that 
 our ideal is not high enough. But just because it is 
 so high, we know that we must rise to it slowly step 
 by step, and each step will be fully secured and safely 
 maintained before we move on to the next. In what- 
 ever we have already attained, we must secure abso- 
 lute reality, lest we be found to build upon a false 
 foundation. 
 
 Again, impatience besets us when we fail to fulfil 
 the hopes we had of holier fellowship and fall back 
 into the old sin which we thought we had left. It is 
 our self-love that is wounded and our self-will, when 
 we feel such sullen disquietude at our repeated falls. 
 For even our sin is not to make us discouraged or 
 over-anxious if we are really trying to do better. We 
 expect too much of ourselves and too little of God, 
 for we think that we are already above that sin and
 
 10 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 we fail to accept the full truth of God's offered par- 
 don/>, There are stings of conscience and feelings of 
 remorse which are not of God but of the devil, though 
 they seem to come from God. By their fruits they 
 shall be known. If they humble us, if they make us 
 ready for loving service, if they lead us to throw 
 ourselves at once into the arms of God's love, then 
 we may thankfully receive them as from God. But 
 if they make us fearful, hesitating, slothful, and 
 utterly dismayed, and leave us morose and sullen at 
 our repeated failure, then let us flee from them as 
 from the wiles of the evil one. Perhaps never so 
 much as at the moments of our highest effort, do our 
 faithful, persevering souls, toiling along the upward 
 path amid so many difficulties, need the comfort 
 which the pastoral insight of Scupoli offers in these 
 words :" Take this rule, whenever you fall into a 
 fault, be it great or small, though you may have 
 committed the same four thousand times in a day, and 
 always voluntarily, never allow yourself to fall into 
 a state of morose bitterness, and do not be disquieted, 
 nor waste your time in self-examination, but at once 
 acknowledge what you have done, and hiwibly re- 
 garding your own weakness, turn lovingly to God and » 
 say, ' Lord, this have I done, being what I am, and 
 naught else could have been expected of me, save 
 these and like faults. Nor should I have stopped 
 where I did, had not Thy goodness lifted me up and 
 continued with me. I thank Thee for that from
 
 THE CALL TO FELLOWSHIP ii 
 
 which Thou hast saved me. I grieve for what I 
 have done. Pardon me and give me grace never to 
 offend Thee more. May nothing ever part me from 
 Thee, Whom I desire ever to serve and to obey.' 
 Then, do not waste time in anxious thoughts, 
 im.agining that the Lord has not forgiven you, but 
 in a spirit of faith and peace, continue your prayer 
 and work, as if you had not fallen at all. And this 
 you must do, not only once, but a hundred times if it 
 be needed, and always with the same confidence and 
 peace the last time as the first. For so you will do 
 great honour to the goodness of God, Whom you are 
 bound to conceive as All-gracious and Infinite in 
 Pity beyond all that you can imagine." 
 
 And a third great danger is self-consciotisness. This 
 shows itself, when we are earnest, in a strange 
 disregard of others' happiness. Effort makes some 
 people so angular, so difficult, so awkward with others. 
 Only great hearts can be really generous. Never is 
 generosity needed so much as in a time of special 
 spiritual effort. The very endeavour to hold ourselves 
 in control in one direction drives us to exaggeration 
 in another. All our energies are taken up with the 
 task of self-mastery. So great is the task that we 
 want almost to be alone. In the company of others 
 we are easily ruffled. And sometimes when we feel 
 we are keeping our rules well, a sense of self-satis- 
 faction creeps over us, which is very nearly as ugly 
 and dangerous as the coarser forms of pride. We
 
 12 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 become very hard to others, while we want every 
 convenience prepared for ourselves. The work of 
 self-mastery is so important that the concerns of all 
 others must bend before our needs. What is the 
 remedy for this ? The remedy for self-consciousness 
 is always God-consciousness. We are forgetting God. 
 We forget Him first in our own lives. For we are 
 really trying to work in our own strength, forgetting 
 that the work of Fellowship in our souls is God's work, 
 not our own. We have just to give ourselves up to 
 Him and to let His grace work in us. We are too 
 effortful, too anxious, too reliant upon our own 
 energies of will and emotion. It is God that worketh 
 in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. And, 
 secondly, we forget His work in others. The Spirit of 
 God works in different ways in different souls. Each 
 soul is of value as great as mine. Never ought I to 
 be so conscious of the value of all other souls as when 
 in growing penitence I bow before the Cross and adore 
 the wonder of their redemption. Never must I be so 
 loving, so gentle, so patient, so winning in my ways. 
 Let that be the test of my growing surrender. Does 
 it take me out of myself? Does it make me live in 
 God? Does it make me more tender of others for 
 whom Christ died ? The world watches us in our 
 growing fellowship, not unkindly, but wistfully, ex- 
 pectantly, with an infinite hunger at its heart, and a 
 pathetic hope that when it sees us at our best, there 
 mav dawn upon its gaze a vision of beauty so
 
 THE CALL TO FELLOWSHIP 13 
 
 attractive, so unearthly, so compelling, that it can no 
 longer withhold its allegiance, but must itself be taken 
 captive by the love of God, and enter humbly on 
 that way of Fellowship which has ever been its high 
 destiny in the Heart of the Eternal. 
 
 D. 
 
 vSuch a Fellowship of love is the gift of the Holy 
 Spirit. Sometimes we miss the joy of our Fellowship 
 and the fulness of our dedication, because we try to 
 earn it or win it by ourselves. We do not allow 
 enough for the free grace of God's loving gift. We 
 do not rest enough in God. God's love is the secret 
 of our happy fellowship. If we need a new motive 
 to make us listen to the call to Fellowship, we shall 
 find it in the certainty of God's love. Let us think 
 less of our own love for God and dwell always on 
 God's love for us. Let us throw ourselves out upon 
 the certainty of God's love, and we shall lose that 
 clinging self-consciousness which spoils so much of 
 our religion. Let each day begin with a simple act 
 of faith in the love of God, and the atmosphere of 
 God's love will surround us all the day. Whatever 
 happens, God's love is the one thing each day which 
 we will never allow ourselves to question. That is 
 the pivot on which life hinges : that is the light which 
 is to irradiate every dark corner ; that is the driving 
 power of our enthusiasm, the secret of our peace, the 
 certainty of our happiness. And there is no fear as
 
 14 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 to the response of love which such a consciousness of 
 God's love will quicken in our life. Our prayers will 
 glow with a new power, because they are not so 
 much the conscious effort of our response of love to 
 God, but rather the realising of God's love for us, 
 our entering into His purposes of love for us and for 
 others, the offering of our wills to co-operate with 
 His Will of love. And every moment, whether of 
 difficulty, anxiety, or joy, will bear its own message 
 of God's love. Beneath the squalor and meanness of 
 the most miserable conditions of life, we shall detect 
 the quiet workings of God's love, the lowly adjust- 
 ment of the infinite resources of Divine pity to the 
 needs of sinful men, God's unceasing appeal for 
 Fellowship. There will be no failure in our response 
 to His call, while we thus keep the certainty of His 
 love before us day by day. We cannot fail to love 
 Him while we remember that He first loved us. i
 
 II 
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT 
 
 /^ I ^HE Fellowship with God for which we were 
 X made is first communicated to us through the 
 gift of the Holy Spirit. The Blessed Spirit is above 
 all else the Spirit of Fellowship. In the eternal 
 Fellowship of the Blessed Trinity, the Spirit is the 
 bond of mutual union, and when His work is revealed 
 to us in the things of time, He is still the Spirit of 
 Union both in Creation and in Redemption. ^ The 
 title, " Spirit of Grace," points at once to the con- 
 ditions under which we have gained our chief know- 
 ledge of His working. We know Him best as the 
 Minister of Christ, showing to us the Things of Jesus, 
 extending to us the work of the Incarnation. Grace 
 and truth came by Jesus Christ. The Holy Ghost is 
 the Spirit of the Incarnate. So necessarily and so 
 intimately is the work of the Spirit for us bound up 
 with the revelation of Christ, that in most of his 
 short phrases of epistolary greeting, St. Paul deems 
 it sufficient to mention distinctly only the first two 
 Persons of the Blessed Trinity. " Grace and Peace 
 from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." 
 The mention of the grace of God Incarnate, Jesus 
 Christ, carries with it the implicit recognition of the 
 Blessed Spirit, through Whom alone the grace of the 
 
 IS
 
 1 6 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Incarnation is shed abroad in the hearts of men. 
 The Holy Ghost is the Minister of Grace. In that 
 Fellowship with God, which is created by grace, the 
 Spirit is the prime mover and first agent. It is He 
 Who first brings us into fellowship with God. He 
 is the Finger with which God touches us. So S. 
 Basil of old recognised when, in the first great 
 treatise ever written on the Holy Spirit, he said, 
 " The way of the knowledge of God is from one 
 Spirit, by the one Son, to the one Father." While in 
 the historical order of God's revelation of Himself to 
 man the Blessed Spirit is the last to be made known, 
 in the actual order of our own human experience 
 He comes first. He is our first point of contact with 
 God. That is why S. Paul, ever alert to the practi- 
 cal corollaries of theological truth, generally adopts 
 the order of our spiritual experience, and when he 
 speaks of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, 
 mentions the Blessed Spirit first. Thus in the Epistle 
 to the Corinthians the order is, " The same Spirit — the 
 same Lord — the same God." And in the letter to the 
 Ephesians, " One Spirit — one Lord — one God and 
 Father of all." Thus the Spirit comes first in our 
 experience of the life of Fellowship. 
 
 B. 
 
 The ways of the Divine Approach to man have 
 always been ways of lowliness and condescension. 
 At the Creation, God limited the immediate exercise
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT 17 
 
 of His own sovereign Will by the gift of freewill to 
 man. In the mystery of the Virgin Birth and the 
 life of human limitation, which Christ accepted, the 
 same lowliness is revealed. And as the Spirit of the 
 Incarnate, the Holy Ghost naturally conforms to, 
 applies and carries forward the very methods of 
 humility which Jesus revealed in His Incarnation. 
 The sacrifice shown in Creation, the condescension of 
 the Incarnate Life, are repeated in the humility of 
 the Holy Indwelling, which the Holy Ghost assumes 
 in the very heart of weak and sinful humanity. 
 It is, indeed, as S. Peter says, the Spirit of Glory and 
 of God that rests upon us. The Glory is veiled, and 
 it is a God that hideth Himself Devout thought 
 can recognise how truly the full glory of the Divine 
 Spirit is " straitened " within us, until the Will of God 
 be fully accomplished in our lives. Paradise will 
 show the growing glory of that Divine Indwelling. 
 Heaven alone will reveal its unveiled beauty and 
 imperishable power. 
 
 As the very principle of the Incarnation is the 
 hallowing of the material for the uses of the spirit, 
 so the ministries of the Blessed Spirit now per- 
 petuate the life of grace by the means of outward 
 sacraments. Before the Incarnation, the Holy Spirit 
 had been ever at work in humanity. Man had been 
 made for happy and sinless fellowship with the 
 Blessed Spirit. But in sinful man the Spirit could 
 find no foothold for permanent abiding. Here and 
 c
 
 1 8 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 there elect souls responded to the quickening inspira- 
 tion of the Spirit, but there could be no indwelling, 
 until Christ's perfect human nature had provided in 
 man himself a worthy abiding home for the Spirit of 
 Holiness. ; Then the Spirit, which had ever been 
 with man, could find a place in man. As our Lord 
 had promised, " He dwelleth with you and shall be in 
 you." Thus the Indwelling is assured by the out- 
 ^ ward Sacrament of Baptism, and sealed in all the 
 fulness of Divine strength by the Sacrament of Con- 
 firmation. Influences quick and effectual, manifold 
 inspiration, impulses, promptings of the Holy Spirit 
 there may be in other ways according to God's 
 loving Will and the bounty of His uncovenanted 
 mercies. But permanent, abiding indwelling, with 
 the chartered certainty of the Blessed Spirit's con- 
 tinual Presence and the assured gift of Sonship, can be 
 by Baptism alone. That is the way of the Incarnation.^ 
 
 C. 
 
 We need to recall the ever-quickening powers 
 of the Holy Spirit's Indwelling. The very humility 
 of His Presence is one cause of our forgetfulness. 
 And when we do make ourselves think of it, the 
 very marvel of it almost overwhelms our faith. His 
 Indwelling is indeed one of those gifts that pass 
 man's understanding, which God in this world has 
 prepared for those that love Him. Mostly we are 
 weak because we will not realise the Sonship of
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT 19 
 
 Baptism as a permanent and actual fact in our lives. 
 The Holy Spirit comes, not as a temporary inspira- 
 tion, a momentary impulse, but as a permanent abid- 
 ing tenant of the soul. " He shall give you another 
 Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever." 
 Coming into our souls before the full dawn of con- 
 scious life, the Spirit provides the atmosphere of 
 holiness in which the first motions of our will may be 
 shaped, in which the earliest aspirations of the heart 
 may be moulded and the tendencies of thought and 
 mind rightly directed. But ever it is a humble in- 
 dwelling. The Spirit's Presence is God's closest and 
 most effective appeal to man, but always an appeal, 
 never a compulsion, always an interior attraction 
 working from within, never an external domination.) 
 And so subtly is the influence of the Blessed Spirit 
 interfused, so intimately is it interwoven with the 
 promptings and impulses of the natural man, that it 
 is hard to say where nature ends and grace begins. 
 An old saint has expressed the great truth of the 
 Indwelling of God in our souls in memorable words. 
 " Worshipfully," says Lady Julian, " He sits within 
 our souls, for in us is His homeliest home and His 
 endless dwelling." " Worshipfully," because He ever 
 respects the dignity of each human soul ; " His home- 
 liest home," because for His Fellowship we were made; 
 " His endless dwelling," because He abides in us etern- 
 ally, leading us on by sure processes of gradual 
 sanctification to full and perfect bliss. To recognise
 
 20 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 the truth of His Indwelling, the certainty of His 
 Fellowship, is to be equipped with power to meet 
 all the trials and dangers of life. We must not 
 expect to realise it by any evident consciousness of 
 strength, by any happy feeling beforehand of being 
 adequate to meet temptation or any emotional 
 sense of spiritual ecstasy. At times, doubtless, the 
 rapture of the Spirit's Presence may carry us away 
 and lift us up beyond the sense of difficulty or the 
 fear of defeat. But this is not the rule of our 
 religious experience. Normally it is by faith and 
 not by sight that we walk. And we have, bereft 
 indeed of all sense of strength, to throw ourselves 
 back upon the sheer certainty that we do actually 
 possess already within us that victorious power, the 
 stirrings of which we cannot yet feel, but the reality 
 of which will be evidenced the moment that we call 
 its unfelt forces into play, and put them into vigorous 
 exercise. It is the arm yet withered that God asks 
 us to stretch forth, and in the obedient stretching 
 forth of the arm, out of the very misery of its 
 powerlessness, its actual power is realised. To start 
 the day, therefore, with an act of deep faith in the 
 certainty and power of the Spirit's Indwelling, to 
 recall the reality of that Presence in the face of each 
 temptation, or opportunity of service, as it comes, is 
 to brace ourselves with courage for all our needs, and 
 to assure for ourselves victory and daily increase in 
 the Holy Spirit.
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT 21 
 
 ( Daily increase in the Holy Spirit means steady 
 development of all the powers of our personality 
 according to the purpose of God for our perfection.-' 
 For it is only by the Spirit's fellowship that we can 
 attain to that ideal of individual character which God 
 has marked out for each one of us. It has been said 
 of us that we are born originals, but die copies. Our 
 individuality, in all the wealth of its manifold possi- 
 bilities and original genius, can only be truly developed 
 along the line of co-operation with the indwelling 
 Spirit. Most of us are conscious of a self that is 
 strangely divided, the seat of strangely contrary im- 
 pulses, the battle-ground of warring passions. Unity 
 of purpose, singleness of aim, harmony of movement, 
 are needed for the .development of character. It is the 
 work of the Holy Spirit to bring peace to the soul, 
 to reconcile the conflicting impulses of the life, to 
 satisfy the multitudinous longings of the heart and 
 to achieve the unifying of all the faculties of the 
 personality. This is the perpetual influence of the 
 Holy Spirit, enriching all the powers of the life, 
 fructifying all its energies, quickening all its activities, 
 so that "we all with unveiled face reflecting as a 
 mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into 
 the same image from glory to glory, even as by the 
 Lord the Spirit." ,■ 
 
 It is not hard for us to-day to realise more fully 
 than our forefathers the wide range of the Holy 
 Spirit's work in our lives. For Personality means so 
 
 \/
 
 22 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 much more to us than it did to them. We have 
 learned that there are regions of our personaHty 
 which He too deep for fully conscious recognition. 
 We are taught that there is the subconscious tract of 
 our personal life, which lies below the threshold of 
 our sensible experience. The impulses that stir, 
 the movements that originate in that deep sphere of 
 life may be beyond the range of our accurate defini- 
 tion or certain detection. But we know that they 
 exist. The revelations of modern psychology open 
 out to us a new and wonderful field for reverent 
 speculation. For we can be sure that over all the 
 regions of our personal life, conscious or sub- 
 conscious, the Holy Spirit may hold full and rightful 
 sway. And it may be an added encouragement to 
 our faith to realise that the life of the Spirit in man 
 is too deep, and touches too profound a region, for us 
 to be ever fully conscious here of the extent of His 
 /working in us. He works at the very heart and 
 centre of our personality, in a sphere too deep, too 
 tranquil in its unruffled calm, for our surface emotions 
 or our shifting moods and sensations to be the con- 
 scious measure of His presence and His power.) 
 Heaven alone will effect the entire emergence into 
 realised and fully conscious experience of all those 
 powers of the Holy Spirit's indwelling, which here 
 have been so largely subconscious, and therefore so 
 much a matter of faith. 
 
 In one direction, especially, is it of help to recall
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT 23 
 
 the subconscious work of the Holy Spirit In our 
 life of prayer there are times when we must rely 
 almost entirely on the Advocacy of the indwelling 
 Spirit to voice our praises and to utter our petitions. 
 And this is an advocacy which we can only realise 
 by faith. To rely upon the Spirit for this ministry 
 requires a profound oblation of the will. 
 (^There are times when our usual habits of prayer 
 become impossible. Severe illness or advancing in- 
 firmities of age may bring decay of memory or 
 impair our powers of concentration of thought. 
 This necessitates a change in our method of devotion. 
 Sometimes a spiritual lassitude or lethargy, often the 
 sequel of some great strain or some great sorrow, 
 seems to take away our ordinary power of prayer. 
 Then it is, in those moments of great crisis, that 
 we can fall back upon the indwelling Spirit, Who 
 " helpeth our infirmities " by voicing those groanings 
 which it is beyond our unaided power to utter. 
 Then in all simplicity and faith we can cease attempt- 
 ing the usual verbal prayers to which we are accus- 
 tomed, and our prayer consists in a full oblation of 
 the will to God, with a definite act of faith in the 
 power of the Spirit to undertake for us the expression 
 of our prayer. Thus we may rest in God in the 
 very midst of our infirmity and weakness, and know 
 that through the merits of our Blessed Advocate in 
 Heaven our devotion is presented before the Throne 
 of the Father by the Divine Advocate Who dwells
 
 24 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 within our hearts, the pledge of our unbroken Fellow- 
 ship with God. It is natural that this higher form of 
 mental prayer which relies so faithfully upon the 
 inner work of the Holy Spirit should be hard for 
 many to realise, but to those who can thus stir up 
 the gift that is within them, this ministry of the 
 Holy Spirit is of inexpressible comfort. 
 
 D. 
 
 ( The Church of God, as the great Spirit-bearing 
 Body, is the ideal of human fellowship. The posses- 
 sion of the same indwelling Spirit is an actual link 
 which binds souls together in the reality of an eternal 
 union. Just as in the days of His earthly Ministry, 
 the sacred Humanity of our Blessed Lord was in- 
 spired by the Holy Spirit given to Him without 
 measure, so the Church, which is His mystical Body 
 to-day, is quickened by the same Spirit of Fellow- 
 ship and bound together by His indwelling in an 
 inviolable unity. In all the ministrations of the 
 Church, the Spirit pursues His one work of Fellow- 
 ship.?) The Sacraments of New Birth, of Spiritual 
 Strength, of Reconciliation, of Holy Communion 
 are all acts in which the Spirit links the soul of man 
 afresh to God. The nature of His work may be 
 most clearly seen in the greatest Sacrament of all, 
 the Sacrament of the Altar. There in that greatest 
 offering of the whole Church, the Spirit of Fellow- 
 ship has a twofold part to pla}'. He consecrates
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT 25 
 
 both us who offer and the gifts which we present. 
 It is He Who places in our hands the very Offering 
 which we plead. There is a beautiful phrase which 
 finds a place in the Liturgies of the East. After the 
 Consecration, the priest elevates the Blessed Gifts 
 with the words, " Holy things for holy men." It is 
 the visitation of the Spirit that has consecrated the 
 creaturely elements and has made them the Body 
 and Blood of Christ. It is the Presence of the 
 Blessed Spirit which has given to men the power of 
 holy approach. 
 
 And we cannot forget that it is His Indwelling 
 which has made us Sons of God and given to us that 
 frank, glad approach of filial assurance and radiant 
 love. It is the very right and privilege of all the 
 Baptised always to join in the Offering of the Church 
 in the Blessed Eucharist. Perhaps we think chiefly 
 of the personal holiness with which His Presence en- 
 dows us, so that we are made worthy to approach, 
 prepared to offer with clean hands and pure hearts. 
 But we must think less selfishly than that and widen 
 our horizon at such a moment. The purging and 
 sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit does not aim 
 solely at the consecration of the individual. The 
 real object of all personal holiness is not selfish, but it 
 is to enhance the perfection and the purity of the 
 Offering of the whole Body. And the Body, the 
 Church, makes the great Offering, not selfishly, but 
 vicariously and prophetically, as representative of all
 
 26 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 that the whole of mankind can be and shall be. It is 
 the Holy Spirit Who in that whole Body, as the 
 Offering is made, is the hidden, pervasive, divine in- 
 dwelling Power Who pleads, making intercession, 
 helping human infirmity with groanings that cannot 
 be uttered. He is the indwelling Advocate, abiding 
 in the Body for ever according to Christ's promise. 
 And as it was through the Eternal Spirit that the 
 Son offered Himself without spot to God, His Sinless 
 Humanity being equipped for its perfect obedience by 
 the Holy Ghost, so it is through the inspiration and 
 indwelling of that same Eternal Spirit that we sinful 
 men are able to plead that Sacrifice, and, under cover 
 of that perfect Offering, to offer our own selves, our 
 souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively 
 sacrifice. Recognition of this special work of the 
 Holy Spirit will add strength and assurance and joy 
 to every Eucharist. And as the Blessed Spirit both 
 preparesus for the Heavenly Feast and Himself spreads 
 the Banquet for our humble partaking, it is easy to 
 see how the very Communion of the Body and Blood 
 of Christ is indeed, according to the words of the old 
 prayer,a"Communionofthe HolyGhost." Foritisthe 
 receiving of that perfect Humanity which is not only 
 inspired by the Holy Spirit without measure, but has 
 also been glorified in fullest majesty by the Eternal 
 Spirit. The Blessed Eucharist is, therefore, always to 
 the faithful soul the quickening of all the activities of 
 the indwelling Holy Spirit, the increase of the grace
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SPIRIT 27 
 
 of His sevenfold gifts, the ripening of the manifold 
 fruit of His indwelling, the purifying of that body 
 which is the temple of the Holy Ghost, the rousing 
 and cleansing of all the faculties of the soul to a more 
 ready and radiant response to the inspirations of the 
 Holy Spirit of Fellowship.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE ALTAR OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 THE Altar of God is the sacred trysting-place 
 of Jesus with His own, the very shrine of 
 Fellowship. The Blessed Sacrament is the strongest 
 and most permanent bond of unity between men. 
 
 A. 
 
 And this unity is the natural corollary of two 
 great truths which the Holy Eucharist exemplifies. 
 
 The first truth is that each Eticharist is the Offering 
 of the Whole Body of the Church. There is no such 
 thing as an isolated, a lonely Eucharist. Each 
 Eucharist, however small the congregation present, 
 is the offering not of one Priest only, not of a few 
 faithful souls, but of the whole Body. The Priest 
 is the Priest not of the congregation, but of the 
 whole Church, and through its Priests at every 
 Eucharist it is the whole Church that offers. This is 
 a wonderfully uplifting truth. For as we conceive 
 of the Priests in the Mission Field, with their small 
 congregations scattered in the far-off places of the 
 world, we see a new dignity added to their Euchar- 
 istic Sacrifice. It is not the offering only of those 
 few faithful souls, gathered so painfully out of the 
 darkness of Heathendom, but it is the offering of 
 
 2S
 
 THE ALTAR OF FELLOWSHIP 29 
 
 the united fellowship of the Church — the one 
 common Act in which the whole Body takes part. 
 Nor can the happy dead be excluded from this 
 fellowship. The Land of Paradise cannot be for- 
 gotten. Surely even there Sacrament in some sort 
 must reign until the full and unveiled Vision of God 
 be granted and Heaven begin — the Lord's death 
 must be shown forth " until He come." And what- 
 ever be the method of their Sacramental approach, 
 in whatever way it be that the souls in Paradise 
 continue their offering of the All-Atoning Sacrifice, 
 it is not in loneliness, not apart from us that the 
 worship of Paradise is offered. It is the Offering of 
 the whole Church. As we offer upon the earthly Altar, 
 they join with us, and in the ineffable and unknown 
 mysteries of the worship of Paradise, we too have 
 our share. Always it is the whole Body that offers. 
 
 The second truth which underlies the unity is that 
 each Eucharist is the receptio7i of the One Sacred 
 Humanity of Christ. This means the explicit re- 
 jection of all those low and unworthy ideas of the 
 Sacrament which are represented by the teaching of 
 those who regard the Eucharist as a bare memorial 
 of the death of Christ. The Eucharist is not merely a 
 memorial-feast, no bare remembrance either of the 
 agony or of the victory of Christ. It is not merely an 
 act by which we pledge our own common faith in His 
 atoning redemption. Suchalove-feast would be indeed 
 a beautiful expression of unity and a mark of common
 
 30 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 sympathy, but it is no new, fresh, vital act of deepen- 
 ing fellowship. Such a service would be a movement 
 of spiritual sympathy, a sentimental rapprochement, 
 an effort towards a link with the past, but could afford 
 no really new and permanent bond of unity. 
 ^ But Holy Communion, as the reception of the 
 One Sacred Humanity of Christ, is a real act of 
 fellowship, a new strengthening of ties, a fresh par- 
 ticipation in life, a real increase of common love, as 
 our union with Christ Himself in actual fact becomes 
 more real and perfected. Thus the sacred power of 
 that Communion, the grace of that Eternal Life, will 
 break down the barriers of nature and of social con- 
 vention which separate heart from heart. One 
 Presence, quickening, purifying, strengthening, glori- 
 fying all with its grace, will bind all together. As we 
 go forth from the Altar we shall see Christ in each 
 other. We shall look to see what God Himself sees 
 in each of us. We shall so dwell on that Presence 
 that all other things fade into insignificance. That 
 is what really tells. We can look away from the 
 faults we know to the one common Life which has 
 begun a new work of Sanctification. As we have 
 known the all-conquering power of that Grace in our 
 own hearts, we shall trust the working of that Sacred 
 Humanity also in the hearts of others. Thus are we 
 bound afresh together in a real Unity of Love in the 
 Blessed Sacrament. The Unity which begins for us 
 at the Font is perfected at the Altar.
 
 THE ALTAR OF FELLOWSHIP 31 
 
 So is it with the Departed. The centre of Unity 
 is here at the Altar. Christ's Sacred Humanity is 
 the bond. The same Hfe is filling them. They are 
 not omnipresent. They are creatures only, they have 
 not burst the bonds of finite human nature though 
 they be quickened in spirit. But they " follow the 
 Lamb whithersoever He goeth." He is the centre of 
 their life. In His Humanity we are linked with their 
 deepening life. It is not a vague spirit-world, whose 
 forces are indeterminate and incapable of precise and 
 actual application to our lives. The powers of their 
 intercession, their worship, their penitence, their praise, 
 their growing glory, which are all the fruits of Christ's 
 grace, are actually apprehended by us in Christ, are 
 definitely ours in the Communion of the Altar. As 
 we make the Sacred Humanity of Christ our own in 
 the blessed intimacies of the Holy Eucharist, we 
 appropriate all those powers of the unseen world. 
 As at that sacred tryst we place our hands in the 
 pierced Hands of our Redeemer, in the hollow of 
 that sacred grasp we touch the hands of our dear 
 ones who live in His nearer Presence. There is no 
 surer intimacy, no closer fellowship, no more abiding 
 mutual joy than that. 
 
 Yes, the Eucharist is the one permanejit and uni- 
 versal bond of fellowship. It would be possible to 
 describe the history of the world, the progress from 
 savagery to civilisation, as the search after an enduring 
 fellowship. Man is always struggling towards union,
 
 32 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 seeking a stable bond of brotherhood. But in all the 
 ancient systems of society there was decay, decadence, 
 no true basis of unity. God Himself could find in 
 man no foundation of permanent unity : everywhere 
 the forces of disintegration and disunion prevailed, 
 until in the Spirit-filled and sinless Humanity of the 
 Incarnate was at length found the long-sought organ 
 of Unity and Eternal Fellowship. Here is a Unity 
 which survives all political separation, which tran- 
 scends all differences of race and country and bursts 
 the barriers of time. The Eucharist, as the extension 
 of the Incarnation, applying the same One Sacred 
 Humanity to the needs of age after age, is at each 
 moment a new power of fellowship, a perpetually 
 active bond of union whereby the brotherhood of the 
 Saints is ever being perfected. It is the Altar of 
 enduring Fellowship. 
 
 B. 
 
 There are three places in our Communion Service 
 where the thought of fellowship is very definitely 
 expressed in actual words — in the Prayer for the 
 Church, in the Prayer of Oblation, and in the 
 Thanksgiving. And each brings into prominence 
 a different aspect of Fellowship. 
 
 (i) There is the Fellowship of Prayer. When we 
 " make prayers and supplications and thanksgivings 
 for all men" when we bless God for those that are 
 departed this life in His faith and fear, and pray that
 
 THE ALTAR OF FELLOWSHIP 33 
 
 we with them may be partakers of His heavenly 
 kingdom, we recognise that we are Hnked with tlie 
 Departed in the Fellowship of Prayer. No need is 
 there at this moment to enlarge on that which is so 
 familiar and so happy a truth. Our own prayers are 
 deepened by the remembrance that the prayers of 
 Paradise, which rise for us there in the fellowship ot" 
 the Body, are prayers which have a greater efficacy 
 in virtue of their growing unselfishness, their deeper 
 insight into God's Will, their greater holiness. And 
 as there are no prayers so effectual and availing as 
 those which are offered with the pleading of the 
 Eucharistic Sacrifice, so we realise that our own 
 prayers are most like theirs, and our fellowship of 
 Prayer is truest, at the Altar. 
 
 (2) There is Fellowship of Penitence, In the 
 Prayer of Oblation we ask that " we and all Thy 
 Whole Church may obtain remission of our sins and 
 all other benefits of His Passion," This opens to 
 our view the Penitence of Paradise. In that ever- 
 growing spirit of deep penitence which marks the 
 souls in Paradise, they are increasingly bound more 
 closely to us in this special way, that they attain to 
 that wonderful power of penitence for corporate sins 
 of the whole Body which it is so difficult for us to 
 reach. Here, because of the pressure of our own 
 individual sins, even the best of us must keep our 
 penitence very much to ourselves ; we find it diffi- 
 cult, on the one hand, to express our individual 
 
 D
 
 34 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 penitence in such a way that the whole Body may 
 take some open share in it, and, on the other hand, 
 difficult also to realise sorrow for the sins which are 
 not actually our own, but are the sins of the whole 
 corporate Body. Our penitence here can never be 
 vicarious, but through the mercy of Christ it can 
 have redemptive power, leading others to penitence. 
 When I repent, all the whole Church must feel the 
 impulse of holiness which my true penitence gives. 
 As the souls in Paradise receive through the merits 
 of the All-atoning Passion the perfect remission 
 of their sins, each step in forgiveness is a quickening 
 of penitence, individual and corporate. And as 
 Christ Himself, in the wonderful conception of Dr. 
 Moberly, has been called the only perfect Penitent, 
 because He is alone sinless, so we can understand 
 how those who are growing the more fully in Holi- 
 ness become the:Tiselves increasingly capable of a 
 more perfect and more corporate Penitence. Thus 
 there is a real fresh Fellowship through the spirit 
 of Penitence in the Eucharist. For the gift of Com- 
 munion does not merely bring grace to hearts that 
 are prepared with diligent penitence for Christ's 
 coming, but it is an actual Remission of Sins, an 
 access of Holiness, and therefore adds a gift of a new 
 power of penitence, linking us on more closely to 
 the wonderful Penitence of Paradise, quickening our 
 union with the fellowship of all the Saints. 
 
 (3) There is also the Fellowship of Life in the
 
 THE ALTAR OF FELLOWSHIP 35 
 
 Bod}'. In the Prayer of Thanksgiving we thank 
 God that as the result of the gift of the Eucharist, 
 we have gained a new power as very members 
 incorporate in the mystical Body of His Son, which 
 is the blessed company of all faithful people. That 
 is the quickening of the one Life within us, which 
 is Christ Himself. It is a real increase of the power 
 of life and fellowship through the reception of the 
 Body and Blood of the one Christ, leading to a new 
 realisation of corporate fellowship and a new energy 
 of activity within the Body, by which we are enabled 
 to continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such 
 good works as God has prepared for us to walk in. 
 It is a present fellowship of life and glory. It is not 
 a gift of life handed down, like the flaming brand in 
 the old torch races, from hand to hand to successive 
 runners, but a present participation in actual life 
 enjoyed and shared by all alike at the same time. 
 Every quickening of the life of holiness in the 
 Church beyond the veil has its influence on the life 
 of the struggling Church below. Every Eucharist 
 is a present fellowship of life which quickens the 
 energies of the whole Body. 
 
 C. 
 
 There are very practical ways in which we may 
 apply to our preparation and to our Communion 
 these thoughts of fellowship at the Altar. 
 
 (i) The Altar is the Altar of Intercession. Let us
 
 36 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 approach the Throne of Grace in the spirit of true 
 fellowship with others. We come too often with 
 only our own needs. Our deadncss in devotion at 
 the Eucharist is in part due to our selfishness. Let 
 us bring others with us in spirit and plead their 
 need. Whole classes of workers there are, who can 
 seldom come to the Eucharist. Thousands do not 
 know what it means. Hundreds know, but do not 
 care. Let us bring these with us. We can have a 
 definite plan of intercession by which we do not 
 come lonely to the Eucharist. We will not leave 
 our intercession unprepared, but, as part of our pre- 
 paration for Communion, we shall know distinctly 
 and definitely whose needs we are to bear in Remem- 
 brance. And we shall know for certain that such 
 intercession is a real work of fellowship, and has its 
 immediate and sure effect on the lives of those for 
 v/hom we have thus pleaded the all-sufficient Sacrifice. 
 (2) It is the Altar of Hope. We must come with 
 the highest ideals of what is possible for ourselves. 
 We have a high part to play in the life of holy 
 Fellowship. Reflecting upon the cloud of witnesses, 
 recalling the victories of the Saints and the mar- 
 vellous sanctification of life which we have actually 
 seen in others, we renew our own ideal of saintliness 
 as we approach the Altar. We know well where we 
 have failed. But we know also where grace is to be 
 found. Here, we know, God waits to give just that 
 spirit of love, humility, courage, purity, wisdom or
 
 THE ALTAR OF FELLOWSHIP 37 
 
 zeal which we are wanting. Know definitely what 
 special grace you seek at each Eucharist. God will 
 give more than you ask, and no one grace can be 
 given without helping the growth of other graces 
 too, but mark specially the one definite intention. 
 Desire it with all your heart, and as you leave the 
 Altar, thank God that He has actually given it to 
 you, and go forth and use it at once. The Church 
 is the very home of Hope, and the Altar is the Altar 
 of Hope for those who would truly grow in the 
 fellowship of saintliness. 
 
 (3) It is the Altar of Love. Our love must begin 
 at the Altar. How often those who come frequently 
 to Communion persuade themselves that they are 
 somehow privileged to indulge a special misunder- 
 standing or private animosity. The faults of others 
 are so patent, so irritating, so aggressive that we can 
 hardly be expected to overcome every single dislike. 
 But there can be no reserve. As we leave the Altar 
 we must look at the Christ in each of our fellow- 
 communicants. That Christ-life is what they came 
 to seek. That Christ-life is what God sees and re- 
 gards in them. You must know that, with all their 
 defects, that Communion Grace is the fact of para- 
 mount importance and determining influence in their 
 lives. If the Eucharist means what it should to you 
 yourself, if you yourself know it to be the guiding, 
 controlling, purifying power in your own life, you will 
 look to see the Christ-life only in all other Com muni-
 
 38 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 cants too. You will know that they have the new 
 gift which they have sought like you at the Altar. 
 There can be no true fellowship without love. Culti- 
 vate an intense desire to see the fruits of the Eucharist 
 in others, and you will be surprised what a new power 
 of fellowship and love flows into your life from the 
 hours spent before the Altar. If only we Communi- 
 cants can realise amongst ourselves in this simple 
 way the life of love, effective indeed will be our daily 
 witness before the w^orld to the transforming power 
 of the Eucharist as the Fount of Love, and men will 
 know that we are Christ's disciples because we love 
 one another. 
 
 (4) It is the A liar of Life. Christ in the Eucharist 
 does not merely give us life by an arbitrary act of 
 kindness. But He Himself is Life. And He gives us 
 Himself So we grow in the powers of Eternal Life 
 at the Altar. It is our surest Fellowship with 
 God on Earth. We have not to wait till the world 
 beyond opens to us. We are already in the Heaven- 
 lies. Eternal Life has already begun to vivify our 
 souls. In Paradise the souls have gained a fresh 
 access of the same life. The Altar is the pledge 
 of eternal bliss which shall be consummated when 
 we are fully come unto Mount Sion, the city of the 
 living God. 
 
 With such thoughts let us grow in love for the 
 Altar of God, and may God crown our love with 
 an ever-growing spirit of Altar-Fellowship.
 
 IV 
 
 THE ALTAR AND PRIVATE DEVOTION 
 
 THERE is no test of the value of our private 
 prayers so severe and so true as the relation 
 they bear to the Holy Eucharist. And to those 
 who are earnest, no part of their life of devotion 
 gives such frequent anxiety and causes so many 
 searchings of heart as the prayers which gather 
 round their Communion. The reason is obvious. 
 The Eucharist is the crown of all earthly devotion. 
 It is the meeting-place with God. It is the Throne 
 of Grace on earth. It is the Prayer of Prayers. It 
 is the sum of human Thanksgiving. It is the highest 
 expression of man's self-oblation. It has in it the 
 hope of glory. And with its light and grace and 
 glory, every other act of devotion shines and glows. 
 All our prayers derive their energy, their happiness, 
 their power of persistence, their ardour of unselfishness 
 from the joy of our Eucharistic Worship. It is the 
 certainty of our Lord's Blessed Presence in the 
 Eucharist that gives stability, conviction, sincerity, 
 and radiance to all our life of Communion with God. 
 All our prayers are touched with the glory of His 
 Eucharistic Presence. For either they look forward to 
 His coming and we prepare our hearts in penitence 
 and love and faith to welcome Him, or else we look 
 
 39
 
 40 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 back with glad thanksgiving and high faith to our last 
 holy tryst with Him, and renew our flagging worship 
 with the recollection of His Presence. And all our 
 daily acts that are really our own strenuous acts of 
 will, the outcome of our whole personality, are strong 
 and holy and effective with the invincible power of 
 His Eucharistic Grace. For they are the acts of 
 a will refreshed with the tireless strength and holy 
 purpose of His glorified and perfect Humanity. So 
 every way our life of devotion, whether of prayer or 
 deed, shines with the glory of Christ's Eucharistic 
 Presence, 
 
 A. 
 
 First, there is our Preparation for the Blessed 
 Sacrament. The scruples that beset us here, and the 
 uncertainties which perplex us as to the worthiness of 
 our preparation, are often due to forgetfulness of the 
 fact that the best preparation of all is a good life. We 
 make too great a distinction between our daily life 
 and our prayers. So true is this, that sometimes we 
 expect by the length and fervency of our prayers of 
 preparation to atone in some way for the want of high 
 endeavour and holiness of character and conduct in 
 the hours of our daily work. Our work as well as 
 our moments of prayer must be an integral part of 
 our preparation. We must spread over the hours 
 of the day a more constant realisation of God and 
 live more consciously in His Presence, whatever be 
 the duties or engagements of our life. There is no
 
 THE ALTAR AND PRIVATE DEVOTION 41 
 
 preparation like that. Many a busy worker, who 
 finds Httle leisure for quiet meditation or long hours 
 of prayer, may take comfort in remembering that 
 every hour of work, which is consecrated with the 
 desire to serve God and the will to do all as in His 
 Presence, is a real and worthy preparation for the 
 Blessed Sacrament. To many, the thought of this 
 will be a reminder that our preparation begins further 
 back and strikes deeper than it has been our habit to 
 realise. For so often we make a real divorce between 
 our work and our prayers, and think that our prepara- 
 tion begins and ends with the moments we spend 
 upon our knees in anticipation of our next Eucharist. 
 Our preparation is our life, which embraces alike our 
 daily work, our daily conduct, and our daily prayers. 
 Indeed, preparation for the Eucharist is just oblation, 
 and includes the exercise of all our activities, whether 
 of hand or heart or soul. Our first step in worthy pre- 
 paration is to realise more consciously the Presence 
 of God in our daily life, and to respond more ardently 
 to His call for obedient, strenuous, and happy service 
 in the very work to which His Love has called us. 
 
 After that, and as the fruit of such a realisation of 
 God in our daily life, comes the special preparation 
 of prayer and penitence and thanksgiving. Such a 
 preparation will not be difficult, but will be natural 
 and without scruple, for those who are living and 
 working in the daily fear of God. It will be difficult, 
 it will be artificial, it will be full of hesitation and
 
 42 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 wanting in the true spirit of humble assurance, for 
 those who think of God's Presence and of the 
 Eucharistic Gift at such moments only, and regard 
 their devotional preparation as something apart from 
 their ordinary daily life. Many will have very little 
 time for such devotional preparation, but where the 
 life itself has aimed all the while at being prayer, the 
 soul is able to gather up all its faculties in a very few 
 moments of devotion, and to prepare itself with true 
 worthiness to receive once more the Eucharistic Gift. 
 Let us look at the elements of such a preparation. 
 First will be an Act of Humility. An Act differs 
 from an ordinary praj-er in this, that it is not so much a 
 petition as the expression of a resolution of the will, a 
 declaration of the attitude of the soul towards God, a 
 direction of the mind under the impulse of some special 
 thought about God. By our Act of Humility we 
 express our immediate and real sense of personal un- 
 worthiness for so great a mercy as the gift of Christ's 
 Presence. It should be a simple fresh effort of the 
 mind to make very real to ourselves the wonder of 
 God's condescension. That leads up to a definite 
 Act of Repentance. Naturally, fully, and in words of 
 our own simple choosing, we declare the sins of 
 which we are conscious — not great sins, perhaps, as 
 the world counts sinfulness, but for ourselves just the 
 wilful failures and tolerated weaknesses that hinder 
 our perfection. In the power of the Holy Spirit, we 
 ask to be allowed to see them as Christ Himself sees
 
 THE ALTAR AND PRIVATE DEVOTION 43 
 
 them, and we take shame to ourselves afresh, as we 
 spell them out into the ears of the Divine Compassion, 
 Then we would make a short Act of Love. This is 
 the simple awaking of a new power of affection, not 
 merely the declaration of a long-standing devotion, but 
 the calling out of something deeper in our love which 
 has never yet been stirred. It is not the repetition 
 only of a well-worn formula, however beautiful and 
 true, but the arousal of a new will for a closer union 
 with Him Who is Love Incarnate. Then a brief -^r/ 
 of Faith, in which we pledge our whole being to the 
 unimpeachable certainty of our Blessed Lord's 
 Presence in the Sacrament, and arouse in ourselves a 
 new realisation, that this is the ordained means by 
 which the Divine Approach is made to our own 
 lives. Simply we state afresh our conviction that 
 here is the gift of Christ's Glorified Humanity, the 
 source of our daily strength, the highest object of 
 our reverence and worship, the "Pouring of Heaven" 
 into our "Shut house of Life." That leads to our last 
 Act of Intention or Desire, in which we express the 
 deliberate purpose of aid or comfort or guidance, 
 with which we are at this time seeking the Divine 
 Presence. Our friends need our prayers, there will 
 be thanksgivings to offer, graces for ourselves to seek, 
 difficulties of our own to be solved, dedication of 
 mind or heart in some special way to make. We 
 would not come aimless to the Altar. It is not 
 sufficient to come with a merely indefinite desire to
 
 44 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 be better, but we must know the immediately pressing 
 need we would have gratified. We must have a 
 fervent desire to gain this particular help, a convic- 
 tion that this special spiritual need will here and now 
 be satisfied. So we come with our mind prepared 
 and in this way wonderfully guarded against dis- 
 traction. And we shall close our Preparation with 
 some Psalm appropriate to the thoughts of the 
 Eucharist, such as Psalm xv., xx., xxiii., xxvi., xxxiv., 
 xl., xliii., li., Ixxxiv., Isxxv., cxi., or cxxx. By long 
 years of unbroken use the Church has sanctified 
 the Psalms to the service of Eucharistic Preparation. 
 Quite a new light breaks over the meaning of the 
 Psalms as we read into their large phrases and 
 hallowed w^ords all the immediate needs and hopes 
 of which our hearts are full. 
 
 B. 
 
 And at the Eucharist itself we have our own 
 private acts of devotion, the happiness of which is 
 essential for the due fruitfulness of our Eucharistic 
 Worship. With a very definite act of the will we 
 lay aside all the anxious burden of our cares as we 
 enter the House of Peace. " In this place will I give 
 peace " is written for us over the Sanctuary. Here in 
 God's Presence we shall be hidden from the provoking 
 of all men. But that sense of Peace will not steal 
 over us unsought. We must exert our wills con- 
 sciously to sttain it, deliberately driving out all dis-
 
 THE ALTAR AND PRIVATE DEVOTION 45 
 
 tracting thoughts. That is why a prayer for the 
 Holy Spirit's help will be one of our first acts. We 
 will arouse the energies of the indwelling Spirit, We 
 will drive out all other interests but those of worship 
 and prayer, and set the angels of God to guard all 
 the avenues of thought, and keep for us the way of 
 peace. Then, in a moment, we will renew the 
 thoughts of our earlier preparation, and set our will 
 working once more along the lines that our own 
 private devotion has suggested, kindling afresh our 
 expectation, renewing our conviction, deepening our 
 surrender, aiming afresh at making God's Glory the 
 first motive and the last happiness of our service. 
 
 Here especially we need to make a very real and 
 fresh Act of Faith in the Eucharistic Presence of our 
 Blessed Lord. " Draw near with faith." It is true 
 of most of our religious belief that it is not often 
 enough renewed with fresh acts of conviction and 
 certainty. We are content to live on with a belief 
 that is not daily refreshed, nor confirmed and ratified 
 anew with daily acts of will. We have had no reason 
 consciously to question any element of Faith. We 
 imagine its power of inspiration, its effective stimulus, 
 will remain unabated if we leave it to itself. We 
 have recited the Creed regularly and gladly. But it 
 has been a formula of faith only, not a fresh act of 
 faith. Each repetition must be a new act of will, 
 binding all the faculties of our being anew to the con- 
 viction of its certainty. So the facts of the Christian
 
 46 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Faith become a daily inspiration and work their 
 happy issue in our lives. This is true of our Faith as 
 a whole. It is true also of our belief in the Real 
 Presence of our Lord in the Eucharist. The Presence 
 of Christ is the crown and climax of the Eucharistic 
 Mystery. We need above all to make a really fresh 
 act of Faith in His Presence each time we approach 
 the Eucharist. 
 
 Such a habit helps us in two ways. First it helps 
 us to a deeper spirit of worship. Worship and 
 Adoration are not easy for us either to exercise or to 
 express. The fresh realisation of the personal Pre- 
 sence of Christ helps the soul to a fuller expression 
 of its devotion. Secondly, such an act of Faith pre- 
 vents a disappointment and helps us to the right use 
 of the Grace of the Sacrament. How often disappoint- 
 ment takes possession of us at the very hour of the 
 Eucharist itself. We expect a sensible joy and 
 spiritual ecstasy. But God has given us a spirit of 
 dryness. We looked for vision and the opening of 
 the heavens. We are cast back upon Faith. It is so 
 natural for us to expect that the moment of the 
 Divine Approach will be a moment of rapture and 
 sublime emotion. Yet experience has taught us that 
 such exaltation is rare, however persistently our hope 
 of it abides. God would have us remember that here 
 in this life, even at those high moments when Heaven 
 breaks through, we yet walk by faith and not by sight. 
 Vision, rapture, ecstasy is not the rule of our earthly
 
 THE ALTAR AND PRIVATE DEVOTION 47 
 
 Communion. Faith takes for us the place of sight. 
 Faith is sight. And the spirit of disappointment 
 that so often hinders the joy of our Communion will 
 be dispelled as we throw more and more emphasis on 
 our Act of Faith in our Lord's Eucharistic Presence. 
 I would remind myself afresh, then, with all the 
 intensity of the most earnest conviction, that this is 
 the ordained moment of the Divine Approach. Here, 
 apart from all sensible emotion and joyful realisation, 
 is the certain Presence of Christ. At the very 
 moment of Communion, deadness, spiritual numbness, 
 coldness of devotion may be all that I have to offer. 
 But then I do know, with the most absolute certainty 
 of a renewed and living faith, that my Lord has in- 
 deed come to me, There has been an actual access 
 of grace, a new communication of life, a gift of power. 
 Unrealised at the moment and unrecorded by any 
 emotional experience, the Grace of God has yet sunk 
 down into the profound depths of my innermost 
 being. It has enriched that subconscious life which 
 forms so large a factor in our earthly development. 
 And I know that, though I do not feel the sensible 
 workings of that grace and cannot measure its activity 
 by any organ of the emotions, yet, when the need 
 comes, the hidden power of Grace will reveal itself 
 openly in conquest and happy perseverance, which 
 will enable me to do God's pleasure and glorify His 
 Name. There is no greater need in our Eucharistic 
 devotion than this quickening of our faith. We
 
 48 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 know indeed that the Blessed Presence is objec- 
 tive, outside ourselves, and not the creation of our 
 faith. But the actual fruitfulness of that Presence in 
 our own lives, whether as the opportunity of our pro- 
 foundest worship, or as the fountain of new grace and 
 power, does depend upon the energetic exercise of 
 a living faith. To make such an act of faith is to 
 safeguard ourselves against the most frequent and 
 the most dangerous temptation which ever besets us 
 at the moment of our Communion. 
 
 Thus all the random thoughts that flash across the 
 soul at the most solemn moments, are sobered into 
 impulses of prayer or praise, as the will is brought to 
 bear on the certainty of Christ's Presence. So Christ 
 lays His spell upon the life, consummates its sur- 
 render, hallows all its interests and leads all its 
 faculties to harmonious perfection in the realised con- 
 sciousness of His Eucharistic Presence. 
 
 C. 
 
 And after the Eucharist too, we have our moments 
 of private devotion. We make an A ct of Thanksgivivg. 
 This becomes definite and real in proportion as our 
 special intention has been clear and well-sustained. 
 Best it is, if possible, to use our own simple words. If 
 we use the words suggested by any manual, if we use 
 alsothefamiliar and appropriate A^««^Z?zV/zV/z>,wemust 
 be careful to be very deliberate and attentive to what 
 we say, and try to instil a new and present reality into
 
 THE ALTAR AND PRIVATE DEVOTION 49 
 the well-known words. Our Act of Thanksgiving is in 
 itself an act of faith in the fulfilment of all that God has 
 promised. But it is well to add a last Act of Faith, 
 in order that we may carry right into the midst of 
 the activities of the day, the conviction of Christ's 
 Presence. For want of this faith, continually renewed, 
 we fail to use the grace that has been given. We 
 wait to feel its working in our hearts, and to have 
 some sensible sign of its operation, before we actually 
 put it into use for the immediate needs of our daily life. 
 We must remind ourselves that, apart altogether from 
 all feeling of happiness or consciousness of strength, 
 the grace is there and just waits to be used. We are 
 stronger than we feel. We have powers of holiness 
 and influence of which we are not conscious. They 
 are only revealed when we put them into actual use. 
 Thus we fulfil the bidding " Feed on Him in thy heart 
 by faith with thanksgiving," as we recollect, and call 
 up into use, the gifts of grace with which His Presence 
 has enriched us. In this way we can understand how 
 our real Thanksgiving, like our true Preparation, 
 passes beyond mere words of prayer into an attitude 
 of the soul, and acts of the will, in the life that follows 
 Communion. Our Thanksgiving is not ended, but is 
 only just beginning, as we rise from our knees at the 
 Service. Each day will have its memory of that 
 Communion. Each day will be bright with joyful 
 anticipation of the next Eucharist towards which God's 
 Love is leading us. 
 
 £
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PRAYER 
 
 AT every advance in our life of devotion we extend 
 jr\. our conception of Prayer. At first it generally 
 means for us just our petitions. Soon it embraces 
 thanksgiving, then praise of God and our own words 
 of penitential abasement ; and then the horizon 
 widens, and we see that Prayer includes acts as well as 
 words, conduct as well as creed, and covers all our God- 
 ward relations — the deepest, most serious, crucial, and 
 eternalpartof our life. Itistheacknowledgmentof God 
 in the life, which cannot be confined to any one faculty, 
 but embraces mind and heart and will, and which 
 cannot be restrained to one mode of expression, but 
 includes deed and thought as well as word. William 
 Law's definition is the true one: "Devotion is neither 
 public nor private prayer. But prayers are particular 
 parts of devotion. Devotion signifies a life given or 
 devoted to God." 
 
 A. 
 
 Prayer is conscious fellowship with God — not 
 merely communion with God, but co-operation with 
 God. In the neglect of this truth lies the origin of 
 most of our difficulties about prayer. Co-operation, 
 
 so
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PRAYER 51 
 
 not compulsion, is the secret of our true prayer. 
 Often our first idea about prayer is that it means our 
 strenuous effort to alter and change the direction of 
 the Divine Will. We see what we need. We would 
 impress that need upon the mind of God, and the 
 intensity of our prayer is in proportion to our deter- 
 mination to bend God's Will. But prayer calls us not 
 to compel God, but to co-operate with Him, calls us 
 into fellowship of will with Him. The proper under- 
 standing, then, of the relation of the Divine Will to 
 the will of man is the first condition of true and fruit- 
 ful prayer. 
 
 First we must recognise that there is a Will of God. 
 God does will, and will perfectly. Every attribute of 
 God is instinct with will. The Divine Will is a 
 sovereign, supreme, tranquil, ever-operative, all-per- 
 vading power, an active, energetic, undying force. It 
 characterises all the Divine perfections. God's Holi- 
 ness is not mere passive sinlessness and utter stainless 
 purity, but an active energy, creating holiness in others. 
 His Wisdom is not the mere possession of all know- 
 ledge, but a penetrating, active power of Revelation. 
 His Love is the very expression of the Divine Will in 
 its outgoing towards all His creatures. In the case ot 
 man, we know Will to be the supreme, characteristic 
 element in his nature, which separates and marks him 
 off from all the rest of creation. Man's will is that 
 part in him which reflects the image of God. The 
 human will, as we see it in the perfect Man Christ
 
 52 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Jesus, is a mirror of the Divine Will in its supremacy, 
 its steadfastness, its pervasiveness, its persistent 
 tranquillity. And that human life alone is strong, 
 steadfast, and tranquil which is lived in the conscious- 
 ness of the Will of God. As all our acts are acts of 
 will, so every activity of God is the activity of a per- 
 sistent, supreme, eternal, and unchanging Will. And 
 we can live happily and securely, only as we know 
 there is a conscious purpose in the Power that rules 
 the world, and recognise that the activities, the im- 
 pulses, the aspirations of to-day are not just the blind, 
 mechanical and necessary consequence of the duties 
 of yesterday, our affections are not just the haphazard 
 outcome and chance development of unconscious 
 instincts, but are meant to be caught up into the 
 strong current of the sovereign energies of the Divine 
 Will. ' It is Prayer that lifts up our lives into fellow- 
 ship with the Will of God. 
 
 And the question rises. Do we know the nature of 
 God's Will? Is it a Will of Love, a Will of Goodness? 
 And the answer is, Yes, unreservedly yes. The Will 
 of God is ever a Will inspired by absolute knowledge 
 and by perfect Love. Of necessity the Divine Will is 
 the perfect expression of the Divine Nature. Therein 
 the Will of God differs from the will of man. Our 
 wills are often arbitrary and capricious ; we take up 
 into our purpose things outside ourselves, choosing as 
 ends for our actions things other than and apart from 
 ourselves, whether worthy or unworthy. That is the
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PRAYER 53 
 
 result of our finite nature. But with God there can 
 only be one end for all His activities, and that end is 
 Himself. God, because He is God, can only will one 
 thing — that is, Himself He cannot deny Himself. 
 God alone can be His own end. Selfishness in that 
 sense, if we dare put it so, is the prerogative of the 
 Divine Goodness. God alone has the love of satisfac- 
 tion, not of desire. We are very apt to think that 
 man's happiness is the first end of the Divine Will. 
 The first end is God's own glory. True it is that 
 God's glory is also our highest happiness, but it is a 
 great step to recognise at the very beginning that 
 " man is not God, but has God's ends to serve, a 
 master to obey." We do, then, know the nature of 
 God's Will, for it is just the disclosure and manifesta- 
 tion of Himself, and God is Love. The Will of God, 
 therefore, is always the highest good. We begin with 
 an act of faith in that. 
 
 But while we recognise that God's Will is always a 
 Will of Love and ever a Will of perfect Wisdom, we 
 must not forget the hindrances which man's will sets 
 to the fulfilment of God's purposes. "^ The cloud which 
 so often hides from our view the vision of God's good- 
 ness, and casts its dark .shadow over our faith, is the 
 cloud of our own sinfulness. Because the sphere in 
 which God's goodness is revealed is the history of 
 man, among the interchange of many independent 
 wills with their complicated and intricate play of free 
 causes, the immediate fulfilment of God's Will is
 
 54 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 hindered by human ignorance and sin. Sin, which 
 prevents so many things, has confused our recognition 
 of what the Divine Will is. 
 
 But the very method of the Incarnation and all 
 its conditions show how God can adapt Himself to 
 the changes which the action of man's freewill causes. 
 Take, for instance, the case of the individual sorrow, 
 bereavement, failure, spiritual distress that come to 
 me, not, as far as I can see, through my own direct 
 sin, perhaps with alarming and crushing suddenness 
 and in circumstances of unusual misery. Am I to 
 say this is God"s Will for me, and bend before Him 
 with sullen acquiescence, as before some ruthless, 
 irresistible, and unknown fate? No. I will say, 
 God's only Will for me is my good, my happiness, 
 union with Himself, which is His glory. The evil 
 that I see about me, which surrounds, envelops, 
 mesmerises, almost crushes me, is not God's primary 
 Will, not His absolute Will. But it is His Will of 
 permission, the result of His refusal to take away 
 man's birthright of freewill. I will say that under 
 the present conditions of the world's sinfulness and 
 human fellowship in sorrow and pain as well as 
 in joys and blessings, happiness for me and mine and 
 the glory of God can only be achieved through this 
 way of pain. God's Will is only goodness, only love. 
 And the Wisdom of God is ever able so to adjust, 
 and order the effects of the sin, which the preserva- 
 tion to man of his freewill makes ever possible— the
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PRAYER 55 
 
 Wisdom of God is able so to introduce new develop- 
 ments in that which has gone astray, that in the end 
 His holy plan of goodness and happiness will be 
 freely and fully achieved. The resources of God are 
 always adequate to meet the new necessities of man's 
 sin, to repair the ravages of his disordered acts. We 
 call it the Divine Economy. That is, not the simple, 
 uninterrupted and absolute course of the fulfilment 
 of the Divine Will, but the Will of God fulfilling 
 itself in perpetual and successful adaptation to the 
 consequences which result from the misuse of human 
 freedom. In the utmost distress, then, I look beyond 
 the present pain and see the fulfilling of a Divine 
 Will of Goodness and Love. I am assured of the 
 Triumph of God's Will in its perfection, and I say : — 
 
 " 111 that He blesses is our good, 
 And unblest good is ill. 
 And all is right that seems most wrong, 
 If it be His sweet Will." 
 
 Prayer is my acceptance of the Divine Will, my 
 entrance upon the knowledge of God's purposes, my 
 co-operation with His Goodness. 
 
 B. 
 
 If Prayer, then, is not a changing of the Divine 
 Will, where is the use, the help, the comfort of pray- 
 ing? If God's Will must in all events be fulfilled, 
 would it not be sufficient if we be dumbly resigned 
 and bow our heads meekly before the sovereign
 
 50 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 magnificence of the Divine Will ? Those questions 
 are always being asked. And the solution lies in 
 realising that the essence of Prayer is Fellowship. 
 / It is the free and full entering of the human will 
 into conscious fellowship with the Will of God. This 
 must always involve a great effort and a continuous 
 strain. In the prayers of Christ Himself we can see 
 this. The very fact that He, in all His Perfection, 
 should pray, and pray so earnestly and so often, is 
 significant of what prayer must mean for us. The 
 nights spent in prayer, the hours of solitude, the 
 agony of blood, are eloquent of the demand upon the 
 will which true prayer must ever make, as man rises 
 into fellowship with God. 
 
 (^ Prayer is thus a great act of will. It is the right 
 use of our will. " Our wills are ours to make them 
 Thine." Prayer is the acceptance of the responsibility 
 that attaches to the possession of freewill. Prayer 
 is the right direction of the redeemed will. It is the 
 uplifting of the will by which we desire above all 
 things the consummate fulfilment of God's Holy 
 Will of Wisdom and of Love. We bend all the 
 forces of our personality that way. We will it 
 vehemently. It is the active outgoing of ourselves 
 with all our faculties of heart and mind and will to 
 co-operate with God. " Thy will be done " is the 
 supreme prayer. 
 
 Sometimes we are prompted to ask, " Do we ever 
 need to say more than ' Thy will be done'?" Ideally
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PRAYER 57 
 
 it might be sufficient, but practically it is not enough 
 to ensure the reality of our fellowship. For to be 
 real and definite in my act of will, I must offer in 
 detail, and submit to God, the knowledge, the wisdom, 
 and the love that I myself at this moment possess in 
 relation to the particular need which inspires my 
 prayer. I have knowledge of God's ways and of my 
 friend's needs. I have love of God and love of him. 
 I must realise to the full the contents of both. So 
 we articulate that desire " Thy will be done " accord- 
 ing to the needs and the knowledge of the moment. 
 For instance, I desire that my friend shall recover 
 from serious illness. I do not know )^et whether it 
 be God's Will. As far as I can tell, there is every 
 prospect that it should be. I know that God does 
 not love suffering for its own sake, though I know 
 He can overrule it to infinite good. I know, per- 
 haps, how much suffering the illness brings to others. 
 I can see the loss of a great and powerful activity in 
 many works of kindness and charity, and I do not 
 yet realise in what better way it could be employed. 
 I should miss a companionship which has meant 
 very much to me in moral strength and happi- 
 ness, and I do not yet see how I could make up 
 for the loss of it in my daily life. I see many 
 others depending on that same strong and cheery 
 personality. As far as my knowledge of God's 
 Will and my love of God can guide me, it seems 
 to me that the glory of God is served better by
 
 58 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 his life than his death. I ask God that he may 
 be spared. I ask for his life. I do more than 
 ask. I do all I can by effective act and deed to 
 further what I conceive to be God's Will. I am 
 ready to provide the best medical advice and in 
 every possible way to aid his convalescence. And 
 the effort of my will, by God's gracious ordinance, 
 sets free the energies of the Divine Wisdom and Love. 
 God was waiting for the submission and surrender of 
 my human will before He could grant His full bless- 
 ings. But His blessings, when they are granted, will 
 not be according to the poor measure of my own 
 weak wisdom and love, but according to the perfect 
 measure of His own Divine insight and infinite love. 
 He will grant the best, just the best for that soul, 
 what is best for him, for the whole Church and for 
 God's own glory. It may be longer life. But 
 suppose it be death? Then I do not say that my 
 prayer is unanswered. My truest prayer has been 
 abundantly answered. And I learn thereby that 
 God has joys of which I know not, into which He 
 calls that soul. God has called me to seeming loneli- 
 ness, but it is to be the gateway of a wider fellowship. 
 I rise up to the great call of God. I do not chafe at 
 the Divine Will, and mope in misery and sullen, listless 
 resignation. I know that God is Wisdom, that God 
 is Love. I know that God has revealed His Will, 
 and calls me to co-operate with Him in the fulfilment 
 of His wider purpose. With a fresh act of faith I
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PRAYER 59 
 
 strive to enter hopefully into this new knowledge of 
 God's Will, and thus my prayer has led to the great 
 blessing of my friend and to the enrichment of my 
 own personality, which sets all its growing faculties 
 afresh at the disposal of God's Will and is lifted up 
 into a fellowship of greater love and greater under- 
 standing. 
 
 C. 
 
 There is one, condition to all our prayer, which is 
 very often forgotten. It is variously expressed in 
 the words of our Lord and of His Apostles. " What- 
 soever ye shall ask the Father /;/ My Name, He will 
 give it you." "If we ask anything, according to His 
 zvill, He heareth us, and if we know that He heareth 
 us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the 
 petitions which we have asked of Him." That is to 
 say, he who prays must be in sacramental union with 
 Christ, if he is to have effective Fellowship in prayer. 
 The indwelling of the Holy Spirit is the source of all 
 power to pray. He bestows upon the soul that gift 
 of Sonship which is the characteristic feature of all 
 prayer to our Heavenly Father. It is His guidance 
 that helps us to read aright the purposes of God, His 
 holiness that purifies the desires of the heart, His 
 strength that braces the will. In all the ways oi 
 prayer the Holy Spirit "helpeth our infirmities." 
 And the condition "in My Name" is only fully 
 realised when our prayers are embodied in the offer- 
 ing of the Holy Eucharist. The Altar is the earthly
 
 6o THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Throne of Intercession, Praise, and Thanksgiving. 
 This is the highest act of the Spirit-bearing Body, 
 the Church. The Eucharist has always been the 
 great moment of the Church's corporate intercession. 
 Then our prayer in Christ's Name is most efficacious, 
 most pleasing to God, most fruitful and most blest, 
 because the whole Eucharist is a Prayer in Act. In 
 all other prayers we make the verbal pleading 
 "through Jesus Christ our Lord." He is the sole 
 Alediator and Advocate, and the merits of His per- 
 fect Obedience and sacred Passion are the sole ground 
 of our beseeching. But here, at the Altar, it is not 
 a mere verbal offering, but an Act, a visible Act of 
 Offering, which we make, as we lift up before God 
 the Spotless Sacrifice of Christ, that perfect Manhood 
 which pleads by Its Presence, not only where It lives 
 on Heaven's eternal throne, but also here, where in 
 mystic rite He gives Its Presence to His own, Every 
 element of prayer, be it praise, thanksgiving, humility, 
 intercession, or holy oblation of the will, finds its 
 highest expression in the Holy Eucharist. That is 
 >i the great Act of Prayer which the whole Church 
 offers, rising in obedient conformity of will into new 
 Fellowship with the will of God. For He Who left 
 to His Church the great command, " Do this in re- 
 membrance of Me," must ever regard the Eucharist 
 as the highest effort of the redeemed to offer un- 
 ceasingly to the Father that very prayer which He 
 gave in His own express words, " Thy will be done." /
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PRAYER 6i 
 
 D. 
 
 ' Where there is Fellowship, there must be likeness. 
 If the God to Whom we pray is Holy, there must be 
 a moral affinity in the will of man who is to co- 
 operate with Him., With God's Holy Will it is 
 evident that only wills of holiness can co-operate 
 With Him every holy will must co-operate, working 
 effectually, even though unconsciously, for His holy 
 purposes. Holiness of character must be the condi- 
 tion of effectual prayer, not, of course, consummate 
 holiness, but a will that pursues what it knows of 
 holiness. The desire to rise to the highest and best 
 one knows, the real effort to identify self with all 
 that is beautiful and good, the absolute repudiation 
 of all that is known to be wrong — that is the condi- 
 tion of true prayer. Thus prayer shows itself in the 
 life, and the life becomes prayer. To remember that 
 prayer is more than words, that it is the verj' attitude 
 of the life, the very spirit of our work, is to have 
 both a warning and an encouragement. The warning 
 comes to us to make us beware of hypocrisy. Prayer 
 is not a mere charm of words, nor a momentary 
 mood of dissatisfaction with sin, set in the midst of 
 a life that is averse from God. St. Augustine speaks 
 in his Confessions of the prayers which he said with 
 his lips, while his heart and life were deliberately 
 turned away from God. " O wretched youth that I 
 was, I begged of Thee the gift of chastity, but I said,
 
 62 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 ' Give me chastity and self-control, but not just yet.'" 
 There is no spell in words of prayer which are not 
 the expression of a will that seeks to be holy and 
 good. The life may not be divorced from the prayer. 
 The life is the prayer. Experience shows that all of 
 us need to take this warning home to our hearts 
 from time to time. The ideal of prayer and the ideal 
 of life must be one and the same. There must be 
 no artificial separation between petition and practice. 
 But there is also encouragement for many an 
 anxious soul. Many of us have lives that are filled 
 to the brim with busy activities, that wear out brain 
 and soul and tire out hands and feet. While we 
 know and feel the need of quiet hours to be alone 
 with God, the day gives no chance of more than the 
 merest moments, if the work is to be fully done — 
 work that gets us up early and sends us weary and 
 late to bed, work so absorbing that our energies are 
 worn out by its strenuous demands. Then it is good 
 to remember, that if our work is consciously dedicated 
 to the glory of God, it is prayer. It is the oblation 
 of the will along the lines that God has marked out 
 for us. It is the means of our Fellowship with God. 
 And though, because of the mental stress of the 
 work, we cannot at each moment be actively con- 
 scious of God, yet it is work which at the beginning 
 has been dedicated to Him, and again and again we 
 are able to make short acts of realisation of the 
 Presence of God. Such work sanctifies us, and
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PRAYER 63 
 
 unites us to the Will of God and deepens our Fellow- 
 ship with the Will of God, Who eternally works. 
 Many an earnest scruple may thus be relieved, if, 
 when we know that such all-insistent and exacting 
 work is going to engage all the energies of the day, 
 we are careful at the beginning to inspire that work 
 with the spirit of oblation and lift it up into prayer. 
 In this way the humble work of countless toilers 
 sends forth day by day an energy of holy influence 
 which strengthens the Fellowship of the Saints, and 
 proves itself very Prayer, " the ascent of the soul to 
 God, the beginning of that blessed converse which 
 shall be the fulness of eternal bliss."
 
 VI 
 
 OUR PRIVATE PRAYERS 
 
 IF we look for a period in the history of our 
 country when the spirit of devotion had been 
 wellnigh lost and signs of deep moral enthusiasm and 
 heartfelt sincerity of purpose, in public and private 
 life alike, were wanting, we turn to the eighteenth 
 century. In that age, when religion lay bound in the 
 grip of a cold and heartless intellectualism, when the 
 spirit of apathy was lulling the souls of men to easy 
 slumber, it was William Law who broke the spell of 
 Satan and roused the dying spirit of religion with 
 his Serious Call to a Holy and Devout Life. No 
 English Book of Devotion has ever been so opportune 
 in the moment of its appearing, none has exercised 
 so great and so lasting an influence. Not only did 
 Law's work at once dispel the mischievous notion 
 that piety must always be associated with intellectual 
 weakness, but it awakened a spirit of glowing con- 
 viction, a habit of personal devotion, a passion for 
 the Christian ideal and a practical enthusiasm in 
 daily life, which have ever since characterised the 
 best moments of our Church's witness. 
 
 And the interest of this lies in the fact that the book 
 is a book on Prayer. It is the best, the most real, the 
 most practical book on Prayer that has been written. 
 
 64
 
 OUR PRIVATE PRAYERS 65 
 
 A. 
 
 And this very fact illustrates(the truth, that if we 
 want to have strong, vigorous, calm, devoted. Christ- 
 like lives, we must set great store by our prayers, we 
 must take great pains with them, we must take pains 
 not only now and then, at special crises, but ahvays. 
 We must make for ourselves the habit of taking pains. 
 That is generally our first failure. We have expected 
 our prayers to take care of themselves, and have 
 spent no regular, no increasing pains over them. This 
 is the commonest trouble with us all. And William 
 Law, with that rare and subtle insight of his, with his 
 own felicitous charm of language and gently caustic 
 wit, describes some moments at least in the lives of 
 most of us, when he draws the picture of Mundanus. 
 
 " Mundanus is a man of excellent parts and clear 
 apprehension. He is well advanced in age and has 
 made a great figure in business. Every part of trade 
 and business that has fallen in his way has had some 
 improvement from him ; and he is always contriving 
 to carry every method of doing anything well to its 
 greatest height. Mundanus aims at the greatest 
 perfection in everything. The clearness and strength 
 of his understanding, which he is constantly im- 
 proving by continual exercise, by often digesting his 
 thoughts in writing and trying everything every way, 
 has rendered him a great master of most concerns in 
 human life. Thus has Mundanus gone on increasing 
 his knowledge and judgment, as fast as his years 
 
 F
 
 66 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 came upon him. The one only thing which has not 
 fallen under his improvement, nor received any 
 benefit from his judicious mind, is his devotion. This 
 is just in the same poor state it was, when he was 
 only six years of age, and the old man prays now in 
 that little form of words which his mother used to 
 hear him repeat night and morning. This Mundanus, 
 that hardly ever saw the poorest utensil, or ever took 
 the meanest trifle into his hand, without considering 
 how it might be made or used to better advantage, 
 has gone all his life long praying in the same manner 
 as when he was a child, without ever considering how 
 much better or oftener he might pray, without con- 
 sidering how improvable the spirit of devotion is, how 
 many helps a wise and reasonable man may call to his 
 assistance, and how necessary it is that our prayers 
 should be enlarged, varied, and suited to the particular 
 state and condition of our lives. IfMundanussees abook 
 of devotion he passes it by, as he does a spelling book, 
 because he remembers that he learned to pray so many 
 years ago, under his mother, when he learned to spell." 
 
 ^e must be ready, then, always to take pains with 
 our prayers. Then the moment we have begun to 
 take pains, we are generally confronted with another 
 trouble, the trouble of growing dissatisfaction. We 
 never feel satisfied with what we can do. This we all 
 have felt. It is one of the regular difficulties of the 
 religious life. Our ideal always outstrips our attain- 
 ment. We are always learning to be patient with
 
 OUR PRIVATE PRAYERS 67 
 
 ourselves. Patience is better than satisfaction. And 
 in our prayers Patience is so valuable because it 
 throws us back upon God. Satisfaction generally 
 means content with self Patience means content 
 with God, and what He gives. For the Spirit of 
 Prayer is His Gift. And joy in Prayer is His Gift. 
 Doubtless, however great the pains we spend, we 
 shall often lack the conscious and joyful sense of the 
 Divine acceptance, we shall often miss the comfort of 
 immediate assurance, we shall always have the pain 
 of falling short of the highest ideal. But then the 
 thought of God's Patience will awake our patience. 
 We shall remember that quite apart from the joy and 
 happiness of prayer, there lies upon us the simple, 
 utter duty of prayer, as the natural offering of the 
 creature to a faithful and loving Creator, And no 
 lack of conscious joy, no sense of the difficulty of our 
 prayers, or the miserable impotency of our highest 
 efforts, will prevent us from taking the utmost pains, 
 nor dim in our hearts the glad and growing conviction 
 that God hears and loves our prayers. 
 
 B. 
 
 For those who are ready to take pains with their 
 prayers a few suggestions may be offered — simple, 
 practical hints that have just the merit of being ap- 
 proved by experience. Our difficulties in prayer are 
 fundamentally the same, and these suggestions will be 
 found to meet some of the difficulties most often felt. 
 
 First, we must be careful to think out the order of
 
 68 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 our prayers. General discontent with our prayers arises 
 from indefiniteness as to the way in which we should 
 approach God. However short our prayers may be, 
 there is a right and a wrong order of approach. Our 
 morning and our evening prayers need to be care- 
 fully thought about, that they may not be mere heed- 
 less repetitions of one another, but each may have 
 its fullest appropriateness to the different hours of 
 the day. Perhaps many of us might sketch out a 
 simple plan of morning prayer like this : — 
 
 (a) Realise the Presence of God. This is the 
 beginning of all prayer, the conscious realisation 
 by the direct effort of our will that God is present. 
 Perhaps we shall be able to do this without the aid of 
 any word, by the simple concentration of thought, 
 directing all our mind upon God. It means that 
 whatever comes to us as we kneel will be seen only 
 in the light of God's Presence. This realisation of 
 His Presence is not merely a momentary act pre- 
 ceding our prayer. It directs the soul into the attitude 
 which is to be continuously preserved all through the 
 time of prayer. That is why it is an effort, and why 
 it is indispensable. If we cease to hold ourselves in 
 that Presence, we cease to pray. If we find our 
 thoughts wandering, and we cannot recall them, we 
 had best get up off our knees and not accustom our 
 bodies to kneel when we are not praying. Day 
 dreams and idle fancies will soon tear out the heart 
 of prayer, if we are not jealous of the sincerity of our
 
 OUR PRIVATE PRAYERS 6q 
 
 kneeling posture. And this act of realising the 
 Presence of God will prevent that repeated careless- 
 ness of attention, which allows the mention of a 
 familiar name in intercession to open a door, through 
 which the imagination flies far away from the remem- 
 brance of God's Presence. When we realise God's 
 Presence, we shut up ourselves with Him, we exclude 
 all else, not in the sense that we remove ourselves 
 from our daily surroundings and are transported 
 from the realm of earth, but in the sense that we see 
 things as they truly and really are, in' their fullest 
 being, in their proper worth, in their true relations, as 
 they are before God. The joy, the gladness, the 
 strength, the beauty of God's Presence — this is the 
 atmosphere of prayer. To hold oneself in the Pre- 
 sence of God is an effort. And perhaps we shall 
 have to shorten the length of what we are at present 
 attempting in prayer, in order to regain a spirit of 
 true and unbroken attention. There are words of the 
 Psalmist which, repeated over and over again, may 
 help to confirm in us this realisation of God's Pre- 
 sence. " We wait for Thy loving kindness, O Lord, in 
 the midst of Thy Temple." — " In Thy Light shall we 
 see Light." — "Thou shalt hide them privily by Thy 
 Presence from the provoking of all men." — " Into 
 Thy Hands I commend my spirit." — "I have set God 
 always before me, for He is on my right hand, there- 
 fore I shall not fall." — " In Thy Presence is the 
 fulness of joy." Thus we are saved from dashing
 
 70 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 heedless into the sacred Presence, and thus we train 
 
 ourselves to approach humbly the Throne of Grace. 
 
 (b) Praise God. The realisation of God's Presence 
 merges into the acknowledgment of His Glory. 
 This seems the most natural order, though many 
 may prefer to begin with an act of Penitence, and 
 then, from that, pass on to Praise. Each has his own 
 experience of what proves most effective, but, whether 
 it come now or later, the Praise of God must be the 
 outstanding feature of our prayer. Our prayers fail, 
 they grow listless and dull, they lack interest, because 
 they miss the note of unselfish adoration and radiant 
 praise. They scarce reach in their scope beyond 
 ourselves. First, we must praise God for what He is. 
 Quite apart from all our own temporal needs, all our 
 own misdoings, all our friends' sorrows and interests, 
 our first and simple duty, to say nothing of our 
 privilege and joy, lies in the humble acknowledg- 
 ment of the Majesty and the Beauty and the Love of 
 God. For this we must train ourselves by thinking 
 more about God. There are familiar forms of adora- 
 tion and praise ready to our lips— the opening verses 
 Djf Ihe Te Deum, the simple Gloria, the solemn Sanctus 
 or the words of some well-known hymn. But better 
 still it is to collect for ourselves from the Bible some 
 of the attributes of God, which tell of His Holiness, 
 His Omnipotence, His Condescension, His Love, and 
 address Him in the very terms of His own revelation. 
 The list of adjectives which we use in our praise of
 
 OUR PRIVATE PRAYERS 71 
 
 God is very small — Almighty, Eternal, Merciful ; the 
 titles we use are very few — God, Lord, Saviour, 
 Father. These words by their very frequent repe- 
 tition tend to lose their full meaning. We want to 
 use up in our prayers all the growing knowledge we 
 have of God's Being. Let us ransack Scripture for 
 God's own revelation of Himself and learn to praise 
 Him more worthily for what He is. The desire to do 
 this will add a new zest to our Bible-reading, and ay 
 we gather together and treasure up the manifold 
 attributes of God, we shall make a perceptible growth 
 in the knowledge of His Love and Power. To begin 
 the day with a fresh remembrance of God's Love, 
 and Care, and Might, is to arm oneself anew against 
 temptation and to find strength and victory for the 
 day's work. Thus we shall underline in our Bibles, 
 and gather into our manuscript book of prayer, the 
 different attributes of God and use them in our acts 
 of Praise. We would glorify God as "the blessed 
 and only Potentate, the King of Kings and Lord of 
 Lords, Who only hath immortality, dw^elling in the 
 light which no man can approach unto " — as " the 
 faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy 
 with them that love Him" — as God, "Who turnest 
 the shadow of death into morning and dost renew 
 the face of the earth " — " the God Who helpeth us 
 and poureth His benefits upon us, our God, even the 
 God of Whom cometh salvation, the Lord by Whom 
 we escape death." And so also with the titles and
 
 72 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 attributes of our Blessed Lord and of the Holy Ghost, 
 which the revelation of the New Testament provides. 
 Thus to enhance and enrich our praise of God is to 
 strengthen the very foundations of our life of prayer. 
 
 (c) Act of Humility and Penitence. Then we need 
 to acknowledge our own weakness and ask pardon 
 for our sin. The thought of God's greatness suggests 
 the natural contrast. With the fresh remembrance 
 of God's mercy and might before us, we can express 
 in our own simple words the sense of our own sinful- 
 ness and our need of His grace for safety through 
 this very day. If we lack words of our own, there is 
 the General Confession in our Morning Service, and 
 there are simple forms which every book of private 
 prayer suggests. Only beware of unreal expressions 
 and of needless repetition. Special seasons like Lent 
 and Advent will always enrich for us this part of our 
 daily prayer, and enable us to draw afresh upon the 
 penitential language of the Bible for the more worthy 
 expression of our growing humility. 
 
 id) Prayer to the Holy Ghost. It is wise to look 
 forward to the duties of the day, to forecast the 
 probable difficulties, to think of the special tempta- 
 tions or special joys which may be ours, and then, in 
 the face of that simple prospect, to ask for the definite 
 counsel and guidance of the Spirit just for to-day. 
 And we can make a resolve to call to remembrance 
 His solemn Indwelling at certain times in the day. 
 
 {e) Intercession. This part of our prayer is so
 
 OUR PRIVATE PRAYERS 73 
 
 natural and so generally understood that we need 
 say little of it now. Only there is one point that 
 calls for counsel. We have so many to intercede 
 for, that, with the short time that we can devote to 
 prayer, it is difficult to make the remembrance of them 
 real. The prayer either becomes a bare list of names 
 or else it dissatisfies us with its omissions. The only 
 plan is to make a careful scheme, by which we divide 
 out the subjects for intercession among the different 
 days of the week. Certain names must be daily in 
 our prayers : there are others whom we will very 
 carefully remember once a week. This saves that 
 general sense of indefinite dissatisfaction which so 
 often besets us, and it also ensures a more deliberate 
 remembrance. Be careful especially in intercession 
 to recall yourself to the sense of God's Presence, in 
 order to prevent wasting the moments of prayer 
 in idle distraction, day dreams and castle building. 
 
 (/) Act of Conformity to God's Will. This may 
 perhaps end our morning prayer. We need to dwell 
 on the Will of God, renewing our sense of vocation 
 each day, holding before us the certainty of God's 
 individual Care and Providence. We ask God to 
 make us love every token of His Will, and we move 
 out to the day's work with the consciousness that God's 
 Love has prepared the way for us, and everywhere 
 we shall come upon the traces of the Divine Wisdom. 
 
 Set out thus at length, this may seem rather an 
 ambitious scheme of morning prayer, but all the
 
 74 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 essential elements of it can be preserved, and yet 
 the time of prayer be suited readily to our opportuni- 
 ties and our needs. The important thing is that we 
 have some real plan of our own — whether it be like 
 this, or different, matters little. 
 
 Then for our evening prayer we shall have some 
 similar plan. Tkanksgivmg will have special promi- 
 nence. And our self-examination will need care. 
 This proves of all things the most difficult. The 
 manuals give us such dull and inappropriate sugges- 
 tions. The questions make no real appeal to our 
 conscience. The same sins trample over the harden- 
 ing " wayside " of our hearts day after day. Evi- 
 dently something else is needed to break up the 
 ground. If we have made a forecast of the day's 
 work in the morning, it will generally be sufficient to 
 ask ourselves earnestly whether we have been able 
 to keep our morning resolution of conformity to 
 God's Will, and have recalled the Indwelling of the 
 Holy Ghost and the Presence of Christ at the critical 
 moments of the day. If we find that, by God's grace, 
 we have been able to be true to our purpose, let us 
 give careful thanks to God for His help. If we find 
 that our will has failed, and that we have fallen short 
 of what we should have been, let us wait for a mo- 
 ment and take seriously to heart what really has 
 happened, and make a humble act of penitence and a 
 new resolve that to-morrow shall not see a repetition 
 of to-day's defeat. Probably some intercessions ^ some
 
 OUR PRIVATE PRAYERS 75 
 
 petitions for such special graces as our review of the 
 day shows most necessary, and a simple commenda- 
 tion of ourselves to God for the night will close our 
 evening prayers. 
 
 C. 
 
 There is a special difficulty which attends our 
 night prayers. We are so very tired, and our minds 
 are so sleepy and unfit for the real strain of prayer. 
 It is a wise thing to train oneself into the habit of 
 saying the evening prayers earlier in the evening, 
 before the evening meal perhaps, instead of leaving 
 them till the very last and sleepiest moments of all the 
 day. But it needs training, because at first we are not 
 accustomed to it and it seems strange. Very often 
 those who come back from work and cannot find a 
 quiet time or place for their evening prayers, may have 
 a chance of slipping into a church on their way home 
 or afterwards, and so gain a few moments of quiet be- 
 fore the very end of the day. Then we should have 
 just the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and our Commenda- 
 tion for the very last moment before we go to sleep. A 
 hard counsel, but a very effective help is this, after we 
 have gone to bed to let the echo of our prayers ring 
 on and on in our hearts until we have fallen asleep. 
 
 Where we have fallen into the habit of distracted 
 and inattentive prayer, it will often be found useful 
 to say our prayers aloud, speaking just loud enough 
 to be able to hear ourselves. It keeps the mind alert 
 and prevents wandering thoughts.
 
 76 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 The question is sure to arise, how far shall I use a 
 manual of devotion? We know what a hindrance 
 they can be as well as a help. No manual ought 
 absolutely to take the place of our own self-expressed 
 prayers. Every time of prayer ought to find us 
 using at least one prayer which comes from no book, 
 but is the simple unfettered expression of our own 
 immediate needs and aspirations. This too needs 
 careful training. It is not hard, with a little pre- 
 severance, to obtain a very happy and sufficient habit 
 of extempore prayer. We begin best with taking 
 the Lord's Prayer and slowly paraphrasing each peti- 
 tion, unfolding in our own words the fuller meaning 
 of each separate clause. Soon, aided by our study 
 of the Bible phrases and our growing knowledge of 
 God's revelation, we are able to express our own devo- 
 tion readily and fluently in words sufficiently dignified 
 and clear, which have become very, very real to us. 
 We know, of course, that God does not wait for 
 beautiful language and elegance of style in our simple 
 prayers, but it is also true that clearness and majesty 
 of diction go hand in hand with clearness of thought 
 
 and reverence. 
 
 D. 
 
 When we come to arrange our subjects of prayer 
 
 for different days according to some ordered scheme, 
 
 it will be found a very great help if we choose for 
 
 each day of the week some one central thought, and 
 
 group all our prayers round that. For instance, if we 
 
 choose the Incarnation as our special subject of com-
 
 OUR PRIVATE PRAYERS 77 
 
 memoration on Monday, then Humility would be the 
 special grace for ourselves to pray for, Children and 
 all that concerns family life and all the relations of 
 human love would form the subject of our Interces- 
 sions, our Praise would be specially praise of the In- 
 carnate. On Tuesday we might specially celebrate 
 the work of the Holy Spirit. To that day we would 
 naturally assign our intercessions for those about to 
 be confirmed, those who need the special help of the 
 Holy Ghost, those who are bound in any special 
 religious fellowship. So Wednesday might suggest 
 the commemoration of the Church, Thursday of the 
 Holy Eucharist, Friday of the Cross, and Saturday of 
 Paradise, and round each day would naturally gather 
 the subjects of prayer most appropriate to each day's 
 commemoration. So many subjects offer themselves 
 for natural division into sevens. There are the seven 
 Words from the Cross, the seven Penitential Psalms, 
 the seven Gifts of the Spirit, and the seven clauses of 
 the Lord's Pra}^er, while the Beatitudes can easily 
 bear compression into a sevenfold division, and all 
 these suggest a weekly scheme of prayer. These are 
 all so many ways of finding a new interest in our 
 prayers and lifting them out of the rut of the com- 
 monplace. 
 
 We must not be afraid to use well-known forms of 
 prayer. Indeed, we need to make more frequent use 
 of those most beautiful Collects in our own Prayer 
 Book, which have an almost inexhaustible applica-
 
 78 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 tion. And we can use hymns more often in our 
 prayers. The Lord's Prayer can also be used for any 
 need with special intention, when it is hard to find 
 words of our own to express our Godward desires. 
 All our private prayers have their relation to the 
 Eucharist. They either carry on our preparation or 
 enrich our Thanksgiving. It prevents a wrong in- 
 dividualism if we remember this connection with our 
 greatest act of Corporate Worship, and it is partly 
 for this reason that it is so helpful, as we kneel down 
 in our rooms, to picture to ourselves the Altar where 
 God stoops to meet us. And the sense of God's Pre- 
 sence all through our prayer is more easily maintained 
 as we hold before our eyes this remembrance of the 
 Sanctuary, where Christ's Eucharistic Presence shines. 
 These are little ways in which our daily offering of 
 Prayer may be enriched. We must not be surprised 
 that over our daily prayers we have to fight our 
 hardest battles, for those familiar words are true : — 
 
 " Prayer is the Christian's vital breath, 
 The Christian's native air ; 
 His watchword at the gates of death ; 
 He enters Heaven with prayer." 
 
 And it is not likely that Heaven can be won with- 
 out many a struggle. Let us kneel on. Our Blessed 
 Lord knelt and His Agony came upon Him. He knelt 
 on, and " thereappearedan angel unto Him from heaven 
 strengthening Him." So for us too may God send His 
 good angels to strengthen us in our agony of Prayer.
 
 VII 
 
 PENITENCE 
 
 THE Church of Christ as the School of Holiness 
 and Fellowship of the Saints has her own dis- 
 cipline of Penitence, and as the Treasury of Grace 
 brings to the repentant soul the succours of Divine 
 Love. The Son of God was manifested that He 
 might destroy the works of the devil and put away 
 sin. By the ministries of His Church He carries on 
 the work of conquest in each individual soul. Clear 
 and distinct is the commission with which our Lord 
 charged His Apostles to continue His work. Ex- 
 plicit and absolute is the power with which He 
 endued them for that ministry. Of Himself He had 
 said, " The Son of Man hath power on earth to for- 
 give sin." To His Apostles He said, "As the 
 Father hath sent Me, even so I send you." And 
 this commission Jesus defined more fully in the 
 words that immediately follow, " Receive ye the 
 Holy Ghost ; whose soever sins ye remit, they are 
 remitted unto them, and whose soever sins ye retain, 
 they are retained." The penitential discipline of the 
 Church is based upon the security of this commis- 
 sion. 
 
 79
 
 8o THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 A. 
 
 In two ways the teaching and work of Christ had 
 deepened the opportunities of Penitence. Christ 
 had revealed by His life the gravity of sin. And 
 He had provided atonement for all those wilful sins 
 which under the old covenant were utterly beyond 
 remedy. Already the law had emphasised the need 
 of special and personal cleansing for the guilt of 
 individual sin. However faithfully each one might 
 join in the worship of the Congregation, even on the 
 great Day of Atonement, yet for his own individual 
 sins he must offer special sacrifices of atonement. 
 It was natural, therefore, that with the deepening 
 of the sense of sin, the early Church should realise 
 the special need of an individual application of the 
 Merits of Christ's cleansing Blood for individual 
 forgiveness. Hand in hand went the sense of cor- 
 porate sin and the deepening of individual penitence. 
 In those early da}^s the feeling of fellowship in the 
 Church was very strong, and the guilt of individual 
 sin was in a real sense shared by the whole com- 
 munity. The sin of one brought its shame upon all. 
 
 The whole Body suffered with the sin of one of 
 its members. This corporate sense of sin is strongly 
 emphasised in the earliest penitential discipline 
 which the history of the Church reveals. The 
 Apostles, in pursuance of their commission, had 
 prepared the way for the establishment of a habit of
 
 PENITENCE Bi 
 
 public penance in the face of the Church. The sinner 
 would first confess his sin, whether publicly before 
 the Church or more probably in secret before the 
 priest. His penance openly performed was the proof 
 to all of the sincerity of his repentance. Absolution 
 would then restore him to the peace and fellowship 
 of the Church. Thus for some five centuries the 
 discipline of the Church bore witness to the close 
 fellowship of its members and to the gravity of sin 
 in the lives of the Baptised. 
 
 This is the ordinary practice to which the writings 
 of the Fathers bear witness. The doctrinal founda- 
 tion on which the habit was built was this. They 
 enunciate two principles, two complementary truths 
 which they state and keep side by side. First, they 
 speak with definiteness of the absolute value for 
 forgiveness of a living and true contrition, apart 
 from all outward means of grace. Through the 
 merits of the all-atoning Passion of Christ, true con- 
 trition avails for full forgiveness. And upon that 
 assurance the soul can rest. But side by side with 
 that is the second truth, that the outward means of 
 Sacramental Absolution have an abiding place in 
 the Ministries of the Church. Not only are there 
 cases of sin where the use of that means is the only 
 sure proof of penitence, but even in the case of true 
 and assured contrition there is a place for the grace 
 of priestly Absolution. For over and above the 
 Divine Forgiveness, thus imparted and assured, there 
 
 G
 
 82 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 comes a larger grace of the Holy Ghost, with its 
 own proper gift of spiritual joy and its own quicken- 
 ing of life and fruitfulness. 
 
 Thus while the habit of public penance was estab- 
 lished in the early Church, it was a witness to the deep 
 sense of the corporate nature of all sin among the 
 faithful. But it can readily be understood that as 
 the Church grew in numbers and in general favour, 
 much difficulty might be found in retaining so public 
 a form of discipline. Discipline was somewhat re- 
 laxed when the severities of persecution were with- 
 drawn. The sudden extension of the Church by the 
 addition of so many new converts, the growth of 
 heresy, the new friendly relation of the ecclesiastical 
 and civil courts, the dread of disclosing scandals 
 which might bring shame upon the Church — all 
 these causes gradually worked together from the 
 fourth century to produce a change in discipline. 
 And from that century onwards penance began in 
 ordinary cases to be performed in private. Only 
 notorious guilt and special cases of voluntary humilia- 
 tion were subject to the old discipline of public 
 
 p-'inance. 
 
 B. 
 
 No change came until the Middle Ages, when at 
 the Lateran Council in the thirteenth century Con- 
 fession was made a matter of obligation as a pre- 
 paration for Communion, and thus enjoined as a 
 condition of full fellowship with the Church. This
 
 PENITENCE 83 
 
 was no doubt a conscientious attempt to enforce 
 a return to the discipline of the Church which had 
 suffered neglect during an age of increasing tur- 
 bulence and moral laxity. But it was a distinct 
 innovation upon ancient and primitive custom, and 
 was an unjustified restriction upon the conditions of 
 Church membership. The English Church, in the 
 next century, duly and authoritatively for the time 
 accepted the innovation of the Lateran Council. In 
 the years that followed, the whole heart of Penitential 
 Discipline was eaten out by the abuse of the system of 
 Indulgences. This disturbance of the even balance 
 of the teaching of antiquity by the demand for the 
 compulsory use of Sacramental Absolution brought 
 its inevitable Nemesis, and helped to fan the flame 
 of revolt against all Church authority in the six- 
 teenth century. 
 
 In the Church of England we have special cause 
 of thanksgiving for the full knowledge of the antiqui- 
 ties of the Church which such men as Cranmer and 
 Cosin possessed. There were voices raised loudly 
 enough for the total overthrow of all Church disci- 
 pline and a complete breach with the past. There 
 were pleas earnest and frequent for the innovations 
 of the Lateran Council. But under the guidance of 
 such men of learning as Cranmer, and with the 
 ready concurrence of even such reforming spirits as 
 Ridley and Latimer, the English Church was led 
 back to the old path of primitive Church principle
 
 84 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 in the matter of Confession, Our Church proclaims 
 with unhesitating precision that Sacramental Absolu- 
 tion is part of her treasury of grace. Her Priests 
 are commissioned to exercise this Ministry of Re- 
 conciliation. The words in which our Lord first gave 
 this Commission to His Apostles are part of the 
 very words of Commission with which our Priests 
 are ordained to-day. " Receive the Holy Ghost for 
 the office and work of a Priest in the Church of 
 God now committed unto thee by the imposition of 
 our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are 
 forgiven, and whose sins thou dost retain, they are 
 retained. And be thou a faithful dispenser of the 
 Word of God and of His Holy Sacraments, in the 
 Name of the Father and of the Son and of the 
 Holy Ghost. Amen." Thus the power is given and 
 the Priest is bidden to be a faithful dispenser of the 
 Sacramental Grace of which he is the sure and 
 certain instrument. So much from the side of the 
 Priest. And on the side of the Penitent, the Prayer 
 Book speaks with words of loving exhortation, when 
 it asks one who requires further comfort or counsel 
 in the preparing of his heart for Communion, to 
 come " to some discreet and learned minister of 
 God's Word and open his grief, that by the ministry 
 of God's Holy Word he may receive the benefit of 
 absolution together with ghostly counsel and advice 
 to the quieting of his conscience and avoiding of all 
 scruple and doubtfulness." While, in the Visitation
 
 PENITENCE 85 
 
 of the Sick, at the critical moment of a man's illness, 
 when the sincerity and fulness of his penitence must 
 be assured, the Rubric runs as follows : " Here shall 
 the sick person be moved to make a special con- 
 fession of his sins, if he feels his conscience troubled 
 with any weighty matter. After which confession, 
 the Priest shall absolve him, if he humbly and 
 heartily desire it, after this sort," and then is given 
 the form of words to be used for Sacramental Abso- 
 lution. 
 
 The position of our Church is therefore very clear 
 with regard to this Sacrament. The Church does 
 not compel its use, but does heartily and earnestly 
 commend it. In so doing, the English Church pre- 
 serves the simplicity of the primitive faith, which, 
 while it acknowledged the sufficiency of true and living 
 contrition for forgiveness apart from the use of out- 
 ward means, yet jealously preserved the Sacrament 
 of Reconciliation, and accorded to it the highest 
 place in the ministries of the Church to the penitent 
 soul. 
 
 C. 
 
 What, then, shall be the fruit of our deepened 
 Penitence? The elements of Penitence will be the 
 same for us all, whether we use the special ministry 
 of Sacramental Absolution or not. 
 
 (i) The first step is Confession. Confession is 
 always confession to God, however it be made. And 
 the meaning of it is this. We want to offer our-
 
 S6 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 selves wholly to God. We do not know what we 
 have to offer until we have made a careful examina- 
 tion of ourselves, for we are what our past has made 
 us. And having traced out every root of evil, we 
 make a solemn repudiation of what is wrong, and 
 offer ourselves for God's merciful acceptance. It is 
 wonderful how, out of the dark spaces of the past, 
 there rises up, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit, 
 the memory of that for which we seek forgiveness. 
 Sometimes, through the length of years, or the weak- 
 ness of our faculties, we have the sense that much is 
 forgotten. But if we have really shirked nothing, 
 and have made our offering as complete and as 
 humble as possible, then we can trust the covenanted 
 mercies of God, and be sure that we have recalled 
 all that the Holy Spirit allows us to remember, and 
 as I ask pardon for " these and all my other sins which 
 I cannot now remember," I know that God grants 
 me forgiv^eness for all the past, known and unknown. 
 If our confession be made to God in the hearing of 
 His Priest, there is no difference of course in the 
 actual forgiveness, for there can be no measure nor 
 degree in forgiveness. It is either absolutely given 
 or absolutely withheld. But it will be found that the 
 very discipline of telling out our sins before another 
 not only leads to a much fuller examination and 
 a deeper humiliation, but helps towards a more 
 adequate realisation of the gravity of sin and be- 
 comes a real deterrent against repetition. Never in
 
 PENITENCE 87 
 
 any case will the confession lead to despair or morbid 
 sadness, for it will be remembered that every stage 
 of our great penitential effort brings joy to the 
 Heart of the Great Absolver, and He will vouchsafe 
 a special sense of His glad nearness to us if we ask 
 Him. Our self-examination is made in the conscious- 
 ness of His Presence, and in His Presence is the 
 fulness of joy. 
 
 (2) The second element is Contrition. Contrition 
 is perhaps the hardest part of our preparation. But 
 we must be careful not to make too great a demand 
 upon our emotions. Contrition is godly sorrow, 
 sorrow for our sin because it grieves our Blessed 
 Lord. We can be assured of that sorrow, not by the 
 depth of our emotions, but by the actual effect upon 
 our lives. Are we forsaking sin .'* Love is the ful- 
 filling of His Commandments. Is this the love which 
 we are offering? The broken and contrite heart 
 which we desire is the gift of the Holy Ghost, and if 
 we submit ourselves to His inspiration, we must be 
 satisfied with what sensible emotion of grief He 
 allows to us. We are distressed, because we do not 
 really feel so sorry at grieving Jesus as we know we 
 feel at causing pain to our friends on earth. And 
 then we doubt the sincerity of our Contrition. Let 
 us be content to take the rule of Thomas a Kempis 
 here : " Do what thou canst and do it diligently." 
 Offer what we have of present sorrow. It is not now 
 what it will be after forgiveness. Then it is that
 
 88 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Contrition will grow. But it is all the Holy Spirit 
 has given to us now, and we can trust His guiding. 
 As lone as there is no conscious resistance of His 
 inspiration, there never need be any doubt about 
 the reality of our Contrition. He will lead us to 
 deeper love, perhaps even to the penitence of tears, 
 but not yet. Perhaps a simple test is this. If I 
 picture to myself the face of our Blessed Lord, and 
 see the shadow of sorrow passing over His Face 
 as He contemplates my sin, am I sorry just because 
 He has been made sorry ? Am I so sorry, not that 
 I cry and feel very miserable, but that I am com- 
 pelled to turn from my sin and desire to bring glad- 
 ness to that Sacred Heart by newness of life ? It is 
 here that to many souls the discipline of Sacramental 
 Absolution brings untold comfort, for it offers to the 
 penitent the reassuring judgment of one who has 
 been trained in the workings of contrition, and is 
 able to give consolation and confidence to the shrink- 
 ing and scrupulous conscience, trembling with the 
 fears of unreality and imperfect penitence. 
 
 (3) The last step in assured penitence is the 
 resolution of the will. Here many a penitence 
 fails. In the face of so many known sins in the 
 past, in the presence of so many repeated fail- 
 ures, in the clear consciousness of the struggle that 
 will be needed in the future, there must yet be the 
 act of the whole personality, which deliberately and 
 emphatically puts away sin and turns faithfully to
 
 PENITENCE 89 
 
 holiness and to God. That act of the will can only 
 be made in reliance upon the indwelling strength of 
 the Holy Spirit That act of will must not only be 
 made now, it must be daily repeated. Temptation 
 will not cease after forgiveness. The will must be 
 daily reset against all that is evil, daily directed 
 afresh towards that which is good. It is not sufficient 
 to desire to be better, to hope to be purer, to wish 
 to be holier, to rekindle high ideals. We must will, 
 will to give up that sin. And nothing less than 
 a generous, confident, and noble exercise of will can 
 satisfy the demands of penitence. We must will 
 with all the force of our personality, in simple 
 reliance upon the strength of the Holy Spirit. Lives 
 remain for years unreformed, crushed under the 
 burden of the same repeated sins, becoming sullen, 
 morose, despairing, because they will not have the 
 manliness to will generously. Let us pray that this 
 last element of a perfect penitence may be granted 
 to us. 
 
 D. 
 For all of us alike, whether we ask for the help 
 of the priestly ministry or not, this is the Penitence 
 which must be sought, the Penitence to which God, 
 in His abounding mercy and of His overflowing 
 grace, grants the happiness of Pardon. Some may 
 be helped to the fulness of that penitence by the 
 secret ministries of the Holy Ghost. But many may 
 find in the Sacramental ministries of the Spirit the
 
 go THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 help which they need in the deepening of penitence. 
 They will recognise that such a discipline satisfies 
 that desire for humiliation which marks the contrite 
 heart. They will see how it offers a help to the ful- 
 ness of self-examination, prevents self-deceit, 
 corrects morbidity, aids true self-knowledge, and 
 gives to the anxious soul that certain pledge of 
 needed assurance which is the mark of all Sacra- 
 ments. Moreover, the depth of our special peniten- 
 tial effort is rewarded by a power of greater 
 receptiveness of grace, and there is the special grace 
 of the Spirit which brings both joy and effective 
 strength for newness of life. While Satan has ever 
 done much to make the way of Sacramental Absolu- 
 tion doubtful and hard for many of us, we can take 
 his earnest efforts as the measure of its helpfulness. 
 And if God should show that this is the way of 
 Penitence for us to tread, may we have strength 
 to follow where God calls. There are no words to 
 express the unbounded joy that accompanies God's 
 forgiveness. It needs great faith for the forgiven 
 soul to look at itself steadily in the new dignity which 
 the Divine Pardon has bestowed upon it. For it 
 means no less than this, that God, looking down 
 upon the soul after Absolution, sees it no longer 
 stained with the guilt of its old sins, but sees it 
 clothed with the robe of Christ's Righteousness, re- 
 stored to that baptismal purity with which the Holy 
 Ghost had first endowed it. God sees it thus. But
 
 PENITENCE 91 
 
 for ourselves it needs high faith that we, with all our 
 memory of the past, may dare to look at our own souls 
 as God Himself sees them. Yet He asks no less. Such 
 faith helps us to use aright the grace of Absolution. 
 And often enough the Grace of Absolution has proved 
 inoperative and almost fruitless in our lives, because 
 we have not consciously lived on that high level of 
 the pardoned life, to which God by His mercy has 
 raised us. We must not measure our penitence by 
 the fervency of our emotions. Nothing is more 
 disastrous. Penitence, like love, has its first ardours, 
 its first thrill of passionate emotion, which never can 
 be recalled. The consciousness of sin, which grows 
 in poignancy, does not show itself in deeper emotional 
 feeling, but in an abiding spirit of humility, a per- 
 sistent purpose of service and steadfast obedience, 
 and an ever-growing sense of responsibility. These 
 are the tests of true penitence which never fail. Our 
 consciousness of sin ever grows as we press along 
 the way of penitence, but it is to be remembered that, 
 however deep the consciousness of sin to which after 
 long years of growth we may attain, deeper far, 
 infinitely deeper, has been the sense of our own sin 
 which God already realised at the actual moment 
 when He bestowed upon us His full pardon. We 
 must live in the certainty of that forgiveness which 
 has restored us to the full fellowship of love both 
 with God and man.
 
 VIII 
 MEDITATION 
 
 MEDITATION is one of the greatest aids in 
 the life of Fellowship. Satan knows that 
 well, and makes it very difficult for most of us, so 
 difficult that we all have shirked the conflict and at 
 some time have confessed ourselves beaten. There 
 are some who, after long struggles, have lost hope in 
 their own powers of Meditation ; there are others 
 who have not yet attempted to make Meditation 
 a part of their regular devotional life. 
 
 A. 
 
 To both of these classes a strong appeal may be 
 made to look at Meditation as a necessary step in 
 the full realisation of that Sacramental Fellowship 
 which is extended to us at the Altar. Of course, it is 
 not itself a Sacrament. The Sacraments, of all things, 
 come first in our religious life as the channels, not 
 only of new birth, but of continual purification and 
 increasing enlightenment and holiness and strength. 
 To the power of Sacramental grace there is no 
 barrier except that of human infirmity, which we by 
 our own will interpose. How often experience shows 
 
 92
 
 MEDITATION 93 
 
 that these great, divine, illimitable powers lie in- 
 operative within us for want of true, deep apprehen- 
 sion, and conscious co-operation of the will to 
 assimilate and absorb their influence and translate 
 them into action. Prayer and Meditation are the 
 means which fit us to apply these divine powers 
 immediately and aright, which give us the faculty 
 of realisation, and show us how to correspond at 
 once to the new gifts of grace, and to adapt the new 
 spiritual forces to the practical needs and oppor- 
 tunities of daily life. Meditation is the handmaid of 
 the Sacramental life. 
 
 Many definitions have been given of Meditation. 
 Looked at rightly, it is just a realisation of the 
 Presence of God — a realisation which is mediated 
 for us by the Word of God. It is just the approach 
 to the Heart of God through the channel of His 
 written Word. It differs from prayer really in this, 
 that in prayer we speak to God, but in Meditation it 
 is rather God Who speaks to us. The Holy Spirit 
 moving within the soul speaks to us through the 
 very words which He has inspired, and shows 
 us the things of Jesus. Just because it is a Divine 
 movement in the soul, it calls into play all the 
 deepest energies of the will, the heart, and the 
 intellect. None of our faculties can lie beyond 
 its reach. It is the gathering of all the powers 
 of the soul in the apprehension of God. The 
 amount of earnest and deliberate concentration of
 
 94 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 the mind which it requires is suggested by the words 
 of a spiritual writer, who defines Meditation as " the 
 quiet, serious, devout fixing of the mind on some 
 great truth or fact of religion, holding it before the 
 mind steadily, silently, brooding over it till it 
 becomes warm and vital and melts into us." Now 
 very few people are accustomed to such attentive 
 concentration in any of the duties of life, and least 
 of all in their religious exercises. It is no wonder, 
 then, that we encounter difficulties at the very 
 beginning. It makes the most unmitigated claim 
 upon our will. And if our will is out of hand, and 
 our attention hard to fix, in the ordinary affairs of 
 the day, it is not strange that we find distraction and 
 listless dreaming start into woeful prominence when 
 we first take up Meditation. 
 
 Meditation is a realisation of God's Presence. Let 
 us be honest. Do we really want to realise His 
 Presence? Most failures in Meditation are to be 
 sought there. No rules, no method, no elaboration 
 of schemes, no ingenuity of study will ever make 
 Meditation possible, if this first desire is not there. 
 And we may well begin by asking God to quicken 
 that desire and purify our motives that we may truly 
 want to realise His Presence through each day. For 
 Meditation is meant to spread the consciousness 
 of God increasingly through all the moments of the 
 day. The Meditation that fails, however clever its 
 intellectual analysis, however rapt its momentary
 
 MEDITATION 95 
 
 vision, however deep its theological acumen, is the 
 Meditation that is not remembered and recalled 
 throughout the crises of the day. For Meditation 
 must stir the will actively with new and immediate 
 motives derived from the fresh apprehension of God, 
 which the study of His Word has given. It is not 
 an intellectual exercise, not merely an access of 
 theological knowledge, but it is being brought face to 
 face with God, receiving from Him, as it were, the 
 password of the day, which through all our waking 
 hours shall be ever in our heart to test friend and 
 foe, a perpetual reminder of the allegiance which we 
 owe to the Captain of our Salvation. 
 
 B. 
 
 There are many ways in which we can fulfil the 
 exercise of Meditation, ways which make it accessible 
 to all, if only there be the will to realise the Presence 
 of God. 
 
 (i) The very simplest way of all is to learn a short 
 text at the beginning of the day. Perhaps some 
 almanack hangs on the bedroom wall, perhaps a 
 magazine may suggest a text, or some book of daily 
 reading, which contains more than we can read iti 
 full, may yield just so much of its treasures to us. We 
 learn that text — with its few words easily remem- 
 bered — with the belief that God would have us live 
 this day in the light of that special word of warning or 
 encouragement, and with the intention of recalling it
 
 96 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 definitely and deliberately to our minds many times 
 in the day. It is wonderful how the events of the 
 day will bring out into new and startling significance 
 the truth of a text thus taken into our lives as a 
 special message from God. It is a real meditation, 
 bringing us consciously into the Presence of God, and 
 throwing God's light and God's protection over the 
 problems and perils of the day. To those who have 
 given up any longer or more ambitious form of 
 Meditation, this simple habit of mental prayer may 
 be most earnestly commended. Let no one despise 
 it for its simplicity. It may be the first step in a new 
 effort after a more continual apprehension of God's 
 Presence. 
 
 (2) There is another simple form of Meditation, 
 which is possible for those who can give a little more 
 consecutive attention than the first method requires. 
 When you have chosen your passage of Scripture 
 on which to meditate, turn it all into the simplest 
 form of prayer, adapting all the thoughts, as you 
 pray, to your immediate needs. Perhaps an illustra- 
 tion, however simple, may be the best explanation of 
 this way of meditation. Suppose that you have 
 chosen the first incident in the eighth chapter of St. 
 Matthew's Gospel, the Healing of the Leper. You 
 read quietly the familiar words : " When He was covie 
 doivn from the viotmtain, great multitudes followed 
 Him, and behold, there came a leper and worshipped 
 Him, saying, Lord, if Thou wilt. Thou canst
 
 MEDITATION 97 
 
 make me clean. And Jesus put forth His hand and 
 touched hini^ saying, '/ tvill, be thott clean,' and im- 
 mediately his leprosy was cleansed. And Jesus saith 
 unto him, See thou tell no man, but go thy way, 
 shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses 
 commanded for a testimony unto them." Then, in your 
 own simple way, you would translate that incident in 
 our Lord's life directly into a prayer for yourself in 
 some such words as these : " O Lord Jesus Christ, 
 Who wast followed down from the mount of Thy 
 teaching by great multitudes, I would learn of 
 Thee this day, and do come in worship as this leper 
 whom Thou didst heal. Lord, Thou canst make me 
 clean who am covered with the taint of sin. Do Thou 
 put forth Thy hand in mercy and touch me this day, 
 that I may be clean from this sin which I bewail, that 
 my leprosy may be healed. And grant that I may go 
 my way this day in obedience to Thee, and not by 
 words only, but by my deeds, give grateful thanks for 
 my healing, and bear witness of my cleanness for a 
 testimony unto those that know not Thee." In this 
 way we may continually bring before our Lord the 
 remembrance of the incidents of His earthly life and 
 plead them before the Father, and in so doing, we are 
 bringing our own lives into active and fruitful relation 
 to His meritorious Life. All the day long we shall 
 find comfort in anxiety, counsel in difficulty, strength 
 against temptation, encouragement for service, and 
 fortitude to endure suffering, from the ever-present 
 
 H
 
 98 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 thought of Christ as the Great Healer. Thus we 
 remind ourselves that He is the same yesterday, to-day, 
 and forever. And the actualities of to-day, the dan- 
 gers, the conflicts, the joys, the cares of our life are 
 immediately brought into the Presence of God. For 
 a long while, it may be, we ought to practise this 
 form of Meditation. 
 
 (3) There is a more ambitious method than this — 
 the one with which many are familiar and with which 
 perhaps we often begin, the failures in which have led 
 to much disappointment. Those who can spend 
 twelve or fifteen minutes on their Meditation may 
 well learn this method, which makes a greater demand 
 upon our will and our use of all the gifts of devotion 
 and love which the Holy Ghost has given us. We 
 take the passage which we have chosen, and read it 
 over slowly. Then we deliberately picture the scene 
 to ourselves with all the fulness that our imagination 
 will allow. If we are alone, let us meditate loud 
 enough to be able to hear our own voice. It will be 
 found to prevent idle dreaming. Let the words find 
 themselves, in the simplest way possible — they will 
 come surely enough if our thoughts are clear, and the 
 very speaking of the words will be found to re-act 
 upon the clearness of our thought. Then when the 
 scene has been simply pictured, and the reality of it 
 brought home, we look to see what the definite points 
 of teaching are for ourselves to-day. For instance, 
 in the incident just chosen, the first point conceivably
 
 MEDITATION 99 
 
 might be the thought of the unresting activity of Christ 
 in the work of Salvation. We think of Him passing 
 from the great teaching on the Mount to be thronged 
 with the multitudes whose varied needs He immed- 
 iately supplies. And we take to ourselves the lesson 
 of His untiring industry, and are moved perhaps to 
 contrition for our want of zeal, our frequent impatience 
 at interruptions, and our selfish way of devoting so 
 much time to our own comfort and culture. There 
 would follow naturally at once a simple prayer that 
 God would keep us from such selfishness to-day, and 
 make us ready to accept the first opportunity of 
 generous service that to-day may offer. The second 
 point might be the thought of our sinfulness, bringing 
 with it perhaps a simple thanksgiving to God for the 
 way in which through the sacramental ministries of 
 His Church He has put forth His hand and touched 
 us, saying, " I will, be thou clean." And the third 
 point, if we had time for another, might be the neces- 
 sity of obedience as the test of gratitude. At any rate, 
 we would sum up our meditation with some short 
 resolution, to act throughout the day as a remembrance 
 of Christ's Presence and an immediate test of our 
 obedience. 
 
 (4) There is another method, too, which is a little 
 harder, but which is often very helpful. That is to 
 meditate, not upon a continuous passage, but upon 
 some one great truth or some one great Word. For 
 instance, one might take the subject of Grace, or
 
 loo THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Faith, or Election, or the Will of God. A simple 
 concordance or the use of the references in the 
 margin of the Bible is sufficient to suggest a connec- 
 tion of passages, which will throw a wonderfully new 
 and satisfying light on some of the dark and deep 
 problems of God's teaching. But this, of course, re- 
 quires more effort and preparation than any of the 
 other methods. 
 
 C. 
 
 A word as to one or two practical details. One of 
 the greatest causes of failure in Bible-reading or 
 Meditation is the want of certainty as to what pass- 
 ages to read, what course to follow, what subject to 
 pursue. There must be no hesitation here. Mark 
 out your subject clearly for some time ahead, so that 
 you are not left to the weak inspiration of the 
 moment. Take quite simply either the Gospel of 
 S. Mark, or the Parables of S. Matthew, or the last 
 chapters of S. John, or one of the shorter Epistles 
 of S. Paul to begin with. Or follow the guidance 
 of the Church and use the chief incident in one of 
 the Lessons for the Day. Now and then, for the 
 more advanced, a course of Psalms is very full of 
 suggestion. But after the habit has once begun, 
 subjects will not be found to fail. 
 
 How long shall our Meditation be? The great 
 test of the proper length of a Meditation is this— it 
 must last long enough for us to get firm grip of one
 
 MEDITATION loi 
 
 clear truth. Meditations are often too long, so long 
 that the unity of thought is lost. It must be the 
 unity of thought, not the manifold fulness and 
 variety of thought, that measures the worth of 
 our Meditation. Sometimes the mind and heart 
 are very fresh, inspiration seems to abound and 
 the thoughts flow very quickly. Then the will 
 must be called in to choose and to settle upon 
 one thought out of the many for careful con- 
 templation. And when that one thought has been 
 seized and turned over and looked at, and has be- 
 come a stimulus to prayer and penitence and thanks- 
 giving and praise, and has been applied to the 
 moment's needs and the prospects of the day's work, 
 then the resolution for the day, clear and definite 
 and strong, suggests itself, and Meditation will have 
 done its work in leading us to closer Fellowship with 
 God through all the day. Five minutes is quite a 
 long while for us when we are just beginning to 
 meditate and our wills are still unused to the strain 
 of attention, and our souls new to the effort of 
 original thought about the things of God. Only let 
 us never tolerate distraction. Let the Meditation be 
 ever so short rather than allow yourself at all in the 
 habit of wilful inattention. Gradually, the time that 
 you need for meditation, the time that you find you 
 can easily use, will increase, till perhaps fifteen 
 minutes, or twenty, become habitual. But always 
 you will set yourself not to meditate for so many
 
 I02 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 minutes, but to meditate upon some particular sub- 
 ject, and your standard of fruitfulness and success 
 will be, not the length of time, but the clearness and 
 permanence of apprehension with which you have 
 realised one definite truth about God as His message 
 to your soul for this day's guidance. 
 
 How often shall we meditate? Perhaps we have 
 expected too much of ourselves, and that has led to 
 disappointment. It is better to make one good medi- 
 tation every week than to scamp one every day. A 
 good plan is to go on to definite meditation on 
 Wednesdays and Fridays, as soon as the weekly 
 meditation is established. Then gradually, as oppor- 
 tunity offers, meditation can become more frequent. 
 It will increase especially as our reception of the 
 Blessed Eucharist becomes more frequent. The 
 Blessed Sacrament gives us the power to meditate, 
 and is itself the supreme reason why we need to 
 meditate. It is only by such an individual offering 
 of all our faculties to the personal apprehension of 
 God that we are able to correspond to the grace 
 which God gives us. The Eucharist without Medi- 
 tation has not its full power over our lives. 
 
 Meditation, we can never forget, is the work of 
 the Holy Ghost in us. We shall always begin with 
 a prayer to the Holy Ghost. We shall always be 
 content with what the Holy Ghost each time allows 
 us of comfort and of counsel. Sometimes we cannot 
 feel that we are deriving any happiness or any
 
 MEDITATION 103 
 
 strength from our meditation. But let us always be 
 quite sure of this, that if we give up our wills to 
 God, our meditation can never fail. God can use, 
 and bless, even the dullness and the coldness, if we 
 make the oblation of our wills and trust to the " un- 
 utterable groanings" of our indwelling Advocate, 
 the Holy Ghost, to express the devotion of our 
 hearts. " I have set God always before me ; He is 
 at my right hand, therefore I shall not be moved." 
 
 D. 
 
 I should like to append some beautiful words which 
 we owe to the pen of Father Waggett. They express 
 in a wonderful way the fellowship with God which may 
 be realised by our meditation. After speaking of the 
 threefold use of the Bible as a Summary of Christian 
 Truth, the Treasury of Christian Prayer, and the 
 Guide to the Christian Life of Devotion, he says that 
 the work of Bible reading is just a fulfilment of 
 Browning's words, " Pouring heaven into this shut 
 house of life." And then he adds : " Suppose a new 
 and better Lucian, a Dialogues of the Dead, which 
 brought us, not in fancy, but in spiritual reality into 
 the presence of the great ones of old. Suppose a 
 Plato of such magic that, as we read in it, our door 
 opened to the knock of Socrates. Such books would 
 even in their own lower sphere be less powerful than 
 the Bible actually is in the highest of all. For as a 
 man reads in this, Christ is made verily apparent as
 
 I04 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 He is ever near ; a door is opened in heaven and our 
 earth is holy with the supreme visitation. ' Behold I 
 stand at the door and knock.' Can any account be 
 given of these things ? How is it that certain parts 
 of Scripture, and for happy souls a growing variety of 
 parts, do in simple reading unlock the doors of this 
 shut house of life, disperse the mists of sense, the 
 clouds of sin and grief, and bring the All, the One, the 
 Alone Blessed, home to the soul ? Is it because the 
 Presence is always near, pressing for an entrance, 
 waiting for recognition ; but our natures, tuned to 
 other and lower apprehensions, are as completely un- 
 aware of the beauty in which we live, as our ears are 
 insensitive to the vibrations of ether, as our hands are 
 incapable of perceiving the currents of the most power- 
 ful magnet — currents or stresses in the fields of ether 
 which can set a mass of iron in such motion as would 
 crush out of recognition the body which is totally un- 
 affected by the currents themselves ? The strongest 
 magnet yields no message to our nerves. The Great 
 Presence folds us in and the perverted or even the 
 natural heart is unaware of it. But the Word which 
 comes from God in the very language and feeling of 
 our nature lays hold on us from Him. The language 
 is ours, the tongue not of angels, but of men ; yet it 
 vibrates in the divine rhythm. This vibration, this 
 rhythmical movement it conveys to us. It addresses, 
 it finds and re-awakens the regenerate in us, the 
 heavenly witness. And the soul — thus tuned by
 
 MEDITATION 105 
 
 means of sense and words and listening mind, tuned 
 in those deep regions which produce no words and 
 yield no message to the plumb-line of discourse — the 
 soul is so far set in unison with the Divine movement 
 that, of a sudden, as a bell brought into sympathy at 
 once sounds out the note which lingered unheard in 
 the air, so suddenly our nature is aware of that which 
 unknown besets it; and we reckon for an advent that 
 which is in truth the emergence of the spiritual organs 
 of apprehension into the flood of real experience." 
 
 It is thus that Meditation awakens new powers of 
 daily fellowship with Christ, and leads on to the full 
 realisation of all those new energies of grace and 
 truth of which His blessed Sacraments are the ap- 
 pointed channels.
 
 IX 
 
 DEATH 
 
 DEATH must be regarded by the Christian as 
 the Gateway to the wider fellowship of Paradise. 
 Death becomes not an end, but a beginning. 
 
 How paralysing the thought of Death must have 
 been, before Christ revealed its meaning and stripped 
 it of its terrors. All that lay beyond the grave seemed 
 too dim, too uncertain and unreal to provoke the en- 
 thusiasm of the pagan world. For the wise, this life 
 held problems enough ; for the rest, there were plea- 
 sures which absorbed all their energies ; the future 
 might take care of itself. The great philosophers of 
 the far East, in whose deeper thought the future ex- 
 istence of the soul was not forgotten, conceived that 
 individual absorption in the Infinity of God must be 
 the great end of human life. To the Jew, death was 
 an unwelcome messenger.ushering him into a shadowy 
 land of bare existence, where intercourse with God 
 and his fellows altogether ceased. Upon a world thus 
 darkened with perplexity, void of hope and lost in 
 fear, there broke the bright light of the Christian 
 revelation of Death. Death was not the end of life, 
 not the loss of individuality, not the denial of all inter- 
 
 io6
 
 DEATH 107 
 
 course. Death was the entrance into ampler fellowship 
 of life. Death led to the perfection of all the powers 
 of human personality. Through Death man passed 
 to the satisfaction of all his deepest social instincts 
 and found fellowship with God and all mankind. 
 
 A. 
 
 And, old as the message is for us, we too need to 
 remember more often that Death is not the end, but 
 the beginning. This world is but the preparation for 
 the fuller life that shall be. Here is not the scene of 
 the perfect fulfilment of the Divine Will. The ac- 
 complishment of that Will lies beyond. There we 
 look for victory, there lies achievement. And when 
 the hindrances come, and God's good work seems 
 almost overborne, when our powers of active service 
 become strangely impaired in hours of sickness and 
 infirmity, then it is stimulating to all our faculties to 
 remember that Death is not the end. Here God 
 tests and trains our character, and leads the will to 
 true obedience, and guides the soul with ever-growing 
 hope, that, when death comes, we may at once with 
 quickened love and firm-set will, embrace the wider 
 opportunities of the ampler life. 
 
 For it will be just our very Self that passes on 
 through the gate of death into the land of life. 
 Death itself will not change our personality. The 
 ego, the self, the " I," passes on, unchanged by Death. 
 The act of dying, the separation of soul and body,
 
 io8 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 makes no moral change, works no purifying miracle. 
 Death indeed hands on the soul into a sphere where 
 the quickened energies of the Holy Spirit have 
 opportunities of more unhindered sway, where the 
 possibilities of enrichment for all the faculties of the 
 soul are increased. But Death itself works no en- 
 richment. Death itself is no process of spiritual 
 development. It separates soul and body for a 
 while, in hope of a future reunion in which each shall 
 find its perfect consummation of bliss. Death gives 
 the opportunity, but Death does not create the bliss. 
 And mostly through avenues of pain Death lets us 
 through into the larger life. That is our experience 
 as sinful men. Often Death comes as the happy 
 climax of an earthly life that has been racked with 
 agonies and pain. Death, as we know it, is hardly 
 separate from infirmity, distress, and pain. That is 
 our universal experience. Yet reverently we can 
 imagine what Death might perhaps have been to 
 those who were created in the very image of God, if 
 there had not been the sad breach of sin. We 
 only know Death under the conditions of sin. The 
 Death which the sinless One endured was the Death 
 which human sin had prepared for Him. But we 
 read how for His Sinless Body there was "no corrup- 
 tion," no decay, but the marvellous transfiguring 
 which from the sepulchre of Death released " His 
 Glorious Body," the Body of the Resurrection. And 
 we can imagine how, maybe, had there been no sin.
 
 DEATH 109 
 
 even the physical agonies of Death had been spared 
 us, and by a gradual process of ever-growing glory, 
 the human body would have been transfigured, as its 
 fellowship with the Incarnate became deepened, till, 
 without infirmity or pain, a fit and expressive instru- 
 ment for the sinless soul, it should attain its heavenly 
 consummation of perfect union with God. 
 
 Yet, sinners as we are, and dying as we must under 
 conditions of weakness and of pain, we find that 
 Christ has indeed taken away the sting of Death and 
 robbed the grave of its Victory. Three great terrors 
 of Death has Christ removed. He has taken away 
 its tmnaturahtess. Death had seemed an unnatural 
 breach in an ordered progress, a sudden halt in a 
 great advance. Death had seemed to shut the door 
 of hope and to blast so many a promise. But Christ 
 has shown how Death is no sudden arrest of growth, 
 no reversal of life's ways, no check to the highest 
 attainment, but just the next step in an ordered 
 advance, the freeing of new capacities, the fulfilment 
 of man's destiny. 
 
 And Christ has taken away the cloud of mystery 
 that darkened the thought of Death. The old world 
 indeed might speak despairingly of that far land 
 from which no traveller returned. There was a time 
 when men might fear the mystery of the Unknown 
 beyond the grave. But now One has returned — re- 
 turned triumphant. And He says that Death is just 
 a " going home " — home to the Father's arms. This
 
 no THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 land is really more strange to us than that, for there 
 is the abiding Home for which we were eternally 
 destined, for which we were lovingly made. 
 
 And that last sting of Death, its loneliness, has 
 been taken away by Christ, that fear which has 
 wrung the heart of the bravest, that great dread 
 which solemnised Pascal as he said, " I die alone." 
 LTrue, indeed, that in the weakness of Death we may 
 lose consciousness for a while of human fellowship ; 
 but when human hands loose us, angelic hands 
 receive us, and Christ Himself guides us through the 
 Valley of the Shadow of Death. And of the cer- 
 tainty of that felt companionship how many of us 
 have been allowed glad witness. We have marked 
 the glow of happiness, the smile of recognition that 
 kindles in the face of the dying, to whom the vision 
 of angelic ministries is granted, to whom Christ 
 makes fresh revelation of Himself 
 
 With true insight has the great poet in " Gareth 
 and Lynette" drawn the picture of Death as the 
 Christian knight must ever find it. Last of all 
 his foes Gareth comes upon Death, tricked out in all 
 the fearful imageries of black funereal pomp — "High 
 on a night-black horse in night-black arms, with 
 white breast bones and barren ribs of Death." But 
 when the knight, meeting his foe " in the dim dawn," 
 has charged home and brought Death to the ground, 
 away fall the trappings of terror and there issues 
 " the bright face of a blooming boy, fresh as a flower
 
 DEATH III 
 
 newborn." Black Death stands revealed as radiant 
 Hope. So may we meet Death in the power of 
 Christ and find all its terrors gone. 
 
 B. 
 
 That must be the general attitude of hope and 
 faith with which we look forward to Death. With 
 all reverence and humility it is possible to suggest 
 one or two more detailed counsels of help and 
 comfort which it may be of service to remember at 
 the imminent approach of Death itself. 
 
 What is the right preparation for Death? Un- 
 doubtedly, the best preparation is always to live in 
 the Presence of God. To live from day to day with 
 the will fresh set towards obedience, and the face 
 turned upward, and the heart ever drawing in fresh 
 grace through the sacramental channels of God's 
 love, this is to be ready for God's call, come when 
 and how it may. "^ This is the spirit of the old lay 
 brother who was found by the Abbot thatching a 
 barn upon the monastery farm. " Brother Hubert," 
 said the Abbot, " God has shown me in a vision this 
 night that to-day He will call thee to thy rest. Come, 
 quit thy work, prepare to meet thy God." "With 
 thy leave. Father," replied the worker, " I would that 
 God might find me at my work." The Abbot bowed 
 and left him reverently working, and the thatching 
 was wellnigh done when God called the brother 
 home. But this is doubtless ideal. We seldom live
 
 112 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 in such readiness for death. Yet it remains true 
 that the best preparation for death is a good life. 
 
 But what shall be the ordering of our days when, 
 perhaps, through gradually growing weakness God 
 leads us slowly down to the Valley of the Shadow of 
 Death? How shall we prepare our soul for those 
 last moments of earthly life ? The Church in her 
 Office of Visitation of the Sick tells us that we must 
 be at peace with men. With true and practical 
 wisdom we are warned to make every preparation 
 which love can dictate for the due settlement of all 
 our earthly possessions. The earthly fellowship 
 which we leave has its responsibilities and claims. 
 Not only are we to be at peace in our hearts with all 
 men, and nourish neither malice nor the spirit of un- 
 forgiving ill-will, but we are, by written word and by 
 verbal direction, to arrange that no cause of dispute 
 or difference can arise, that shall mar the peace of 
 those we leave behind. There will be a very delicate 
 and far-seeing thoughtfulness for others that will 
 mark the mellowed love of our last days. And 
 wisely the Rubric runs : " But men should often be 
 put in remembrance to take order for the settling of 
 their temporal estates whilst they are in health." 
 And the settling of the soul at peace with God must 
 not be left too late. We are too apt at the beginning 
 of our illness to set aside the special care of spiritual 
 things until such weakness has set in, that effective 
 and calm spiritual effort is very difficult and almost
 
 DEATH 113 
 
 impossible. The words of our Prayer Book are very 
 emphatic as to the full cleansing which the soul 
 needs at such a time of peril. " Here shall the sick 
 person be moved to make a special confession of his 
 sins, if he feel his conscience troubled with any 
 weighty matter." The troubled conscience must 
 have the ease of God's Pardon. And then the 
 cleansed soul will need the Viaticum of the Blessed 
 Sacrament to sustain it through the new experience 
 of death. In the death-chamber of one whose soul 
 is thus fortified by the precious Body and Blood of 
 Christ, there reigns a spirit of tranquil calm. Perhaps 
 unconsciousness sets in soon. But that does not 
 break the peace of the soul. Those who are with 
 us at that hour will kneel by our side and soothe us 
 with familiar prayer and wonted psalm and simple 
 litany. And though we cannot join with them, nor 
 show by movement, sign, or speech, that we can 
 hear, yet the words of their prayer will pierce through 
 the veil of unconsciousness and cheer our spirit with 
 their tones of faith and humble penitence, and we 
 shall rejoice to feel with what confidence they com- 
 mend us to the care of Him, Whom we are beginning 
 already to know with deeper intimacy. And as the 
 spirit speeds its way from the frail body, the Prayer 
 of Commendation will be said, which commends our 
 soul into the hands of a faithful Creator and most 
 merciful Saviour. Or maybe, some one will bid us 
 farewell in the simple words which antiquity has 
 I
 
 114 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 hallowed : " Go forth, Christian Soul, in the Name of 
 the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." 
 And so the peace of that last hour on earth will 
 prepare the way for the deepening peace upon which 
 we shall enter in the land of Paradise. 
 
 There is much that is very dark, and suggestive of 
 painful mystery, for those who attend the bedside of 
 the dying. But those whose duty brings them often 
 there enjoy many consolations. There is reassurance, 
 for instance, for those who in life are weighed down 
 with the physical fear of death. For many, this dread 
 is almost a lifelong torture. But never does it continue 
 at the moment when God is actually calling the soul. 
 It is natural with us that there should be this physical 
 shrinking. Christ Himself, in all His sinlessness, 
 experienced that human dread of death, as part of 
 His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. But when 
 God calls the soul, He makes the new home to which 
 He calls us attractive and desired. He looses us 
 from the old attraction of this life. Slowly He turns 
 our face from the things of earth to the things be- 
 yond, and the vision begins to dawn upon us with 
 winning appeal. Have we not seen the smile of 
 happy recognition and joyous expectancy, the 
 smile that slowly spreads over the face of the 
 dying? God is showing them something of the 
 Vision of Himself which hitherto has been withheld, 
 and they are drawn on with irresistible content. 
 And in those last hours, we, who are witnesses of the
 
 DEATH 115 
 
 revelation which God is making, must remember that 
 the soul does now want to go. Hitherto, and rii^htly, 
 it has clung to earth, because God's call has not been 
 made manifest. But now that the call is clear, the 
 soul leaps to the new vision and thrills with the calm 
 enjoyment of its God, and you and I must stand 
 aside and not seek to call the spirit back, nor rouse 
 it from the tranquil apprehension of God's peace. 
 We watch and pray, and bow our heads, and note 
 God's faithfulness and Christ's Victory over the 
 terrors of death, and ask for hearts so deejjjy con- 
 fident of God's love that we can bear the pang of 
 separation for the certainty of our loved one's greater 
 happiness. 
 
 The approach of Death opens the way for a quick- 
 ening of the Holy Spirit's work in the soul. Even 
 though unconsciousness may break the sensible link 
 with earthly things, the life of the soul goes on in its 
 deeper sphere of Godvvard consciousness. In all times 
 of bodily weakness, we can fall back on the certainty 
 that the Holy Spirit "helpeth our infirmities," not 
 only voicing for us those Godward aspirations which 
 are beyond the soul's own power to utter, but quick- 
 ening all the activities of the soul. God seems some- 
 times, in these states of mental unconsciousness, to 
 call the soul aside out of the rush and turmoil of 
 earthly interests and relations, that He may deal with 
 it in undistracted solitude. We tread, I know, on 
 mysterious ground when we try to penetrate the
 
 ii6 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 realm of unconsciousness, but some of us have had 
 such experience of God's dealings with the souls of 
 men, while their minds have been unconscious of all 
 earthly things, that we cannot falter in our witness to 
 the certain quickening of the Holy Spirit's action in 
 the human soul in times of special bodily infirmity. 
 And this may be a great source of comfort. When 
 we cannot reach them, God suffers no hindrance, and 
 the gracious ministry of His Holy Spirit can bring 
 them the succours of Divine Refreshment. 
 
 Perhaps the thought of the certainty of this 
 ministry will help us to remember what medical ex- 
 perience does not fail to impress upon us — that very 
 many of those painful signs of physical distress, which 
 accompany the last hours, do not really betoken felt 
 suffering and agony, but are just the muscular and 
 mechanical movements of the body, of which the real 
 self is unconscious, engaged as it is in a realm of far 
 deeper experience, and engrossed in an intercourse of 
 spirit with Spirit, which no bodily sensations can 
 
 disturb. 
 
 C. 
 
 Certainly Death calls for as much faith in those who 
 are left, as in those who pass from our midst. But surely 
 if we do believe, as we profess, that the life beyond 
 is a fuller life, an ampler opportunity, a nearer realisa- 
 tion of God, then when God calls our friends to take 
 up the higher work, the one and only harm that we 
 can do, is to withhold our own acceptance of God's will.
 
 DEATH 117 
 
 We must acquiesce In God's loving purpose for them. 
 Bereavement is a vocation for us, as much as Death is 
 a call for them. And we must faithfully accept it. 
 Sorrow we must. God knows that. But despair we 
 must not. Sad we shall be, but sullen, never. Yet 
 how many could point to lives, hitherto generous, 
 happy, beneficent, unselfish, which at the touch 
 of bereavement have folded in upon themselves in 
 querulous self-pity, have called earth to witness to the 
 hardness of their lot, have become peevish, restless, 
 self-centred, morose, and have drifted quite from the 
 old moorings of happy certainty and trust in the love of 
 God. Death is the sure touchstone of our faith. Yet 
 we may be sure that our one chance of helping the 
 new life of those who have been called from us, of 
 having real intercourse with them such as God allows, 
 of preparing ourselves for that reunion of love which 
 God has promised, is to accept God's vocation of 
 bereavement for ourselves on earth, with the same 
 confidence and thankfulness with which we have re- 
 joiced to see them meet their Vocation of Death. 
 For each of us, it means a fuller life and wider fellow- 
 ship. For them, an ampler opportunity in the new 
 realms of spiritual service, where the Lord God giveth 
 them light, where there shall be no more death, neither 
 sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more 
 pain, where love grows ever more and more. For us, a 
 fuller life on earth, because our souls will be dedicated 
 to God's greater service with new faith, with new in-
 
 ii8 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 centive, with quickened response to the intercessions 
 which rise perpetually from the loved and holy 
 penitents of Paradise. Faber has put words upon 
 our lips that we might learn to sing ; — 
 
 " How pleasant are thy paths, O Death, 
 Straight to our Father's Home. 
 All loss were gain that gained us this, 
 The sight of God, that single bliss 
 Of the grand world to come." 
 
 Yes, that is Death's great gift — the sight of God. 
 But that gift is for us as well as for the dead. Death 
 calls us who rerrzain to a new sight of God now in this 
 life, that the rest of our days on earth may be 
 illumined with the splendid vision of God's love. 
 Then, pleasant indeed will be the call of Death. We 
 shall be going home. 
 
 " So not alone we land upon that shore, 
 
 'Twill be as though we had been there before. 
 
 We shall meet more we know 
 Than we can meet below, 
 
 And find our rest like some returning dove. 
 And be at home at once with our Eternal Love."
 
 CHAPTER X 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PARADISE 
 
 THE more frequent remembrance of the land of 
 Paradise would often help to solve some of the 
 difficult problems which beset us in thinking of the 
 Divine government of the world, the training of 
 human character, and the growth and maintenance of 
 fellowship after death. 
 
 A. 
 
 In our conception of the Divine Will, we must 
 take into account the realm of Paradise. Again and 
 again we seem bewildered by the hindrances which 
 obstruct the fulfilment of the Will of God in this 
 life. We recognise that what we men can see in 
 action here is always the Permissive Will of God, not 
 His Absolute Will. That is to say, God is always 
 seen redressing the evil which the misuse of man's 
 freewill has brought about. Because we only know 
 the world under the conditions of sin, and we know 
 that no sin can be according to God's Will, therefore 
 we can have no experience of God's Absolute Will, 
 as it is apart from man's self-chosen perversion of his 
 freedom. The infinite resources of the Divine Will 
 
 119
 
 I20 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 suffice abundantly to come to the rescue of man's 
 self-inflicted injury and wrong. We are always 
 watching the lowliness of the Divine action in the 
 work of readjustment and recovery. And in the 
 slow patience of God's working we often lose the 
 sense of His certain victory. Repeatedly our hopes 
 are baffled by the checks, the rebuffs, and the defeats, 
 which the forces of good suffer in the conflict with 
 the powers of evil. Causes, which we know must be 
 dear to the Divine Heart, suffer sudden reverse or 
 make such halting progress, that our faith in the 
 sovereignty, or the goodness, of the Divine Will is 
 overclouded. Then we must remember that we 
 can only understand the purpose and the character of 
 the Will of God, when we extend the horizon of our 
 view beyond the narrow limits of this earthly life, 
 and take in the far distances of Paradise and the 
 eternities of Heaven. God's Will is sovereign and 
 supreme beyond the confines of this universe. One 
 Divine purpose embraces all, and the victory which 
 seems to elude our grasp here, is assured in the 
 ultimate fulfilment of God's purpose in the world to 
 come. When Christ upon the Cross revealed to the 
 dying robber the land of Paradise, He opened to his 
 gaze and to ours the vision of the assured victory of 
 God's loving and sovereign Will. This is a thought 
 of comfort in many an hour of seeming failure.
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PARADISE 121 
 
 B. 
 
 Paradise solves many of those difficulties which 
 harass us as we think of the salvation of those who 
 have no knowledge of the Incarnate Christ in this 
 life. There are two classes of people who are in our 
 thoughts in this connection. There are the heathen, 
 beyond the reach of the news of the Gospel, and there 
 are those in our own midst, moving in and out daily 
 among all the manifold activities of the Faith of the In- 
 carnation, who are yet impervious to the message of the 
 Gospel, whose lives do not accord with the traditional 
 ideals of devotion and religious conviction. Is this 
 world, indeed, for such as these, the limit of proba- 
 tion ? Is this the end of their hope ? The answer is 
 Yes, this is the land of probation, but we ourselves 
 are not judges in any case of what the result of that 
 probation is. This is the land where the character is 
 set, beyond is the land where the character ripens 
 and develops. With regard to the heathen, we know 
 that the Light which lighteneth every man has given 
 to each the illumination of Conscience and of Reason. 
 By that light they are judged, who have had no 
 opportunity of the knowledge of the Gospel. They 
 "perish" out of this life "in blindness and ignorance." 
 But that blindness and ignorance will not be their 
 eternal portion. The revelation which St. Peter 
 makes of the activities of Christ in Paradise is a hint 
 sufficient to us of what is in store for those who have
 
 122 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 not known the Incarnation. Christ proclaimed to the 
 souls of those, who had passed away before His 
 coming, the good news of the Incarnation. So in 
 Paradise, to those who have not known the Gospel, 
 will Christ proclaim the truth of His Incarnation, 
 perhaps immediately and directly by the glory of 
 His nearer Presence, perhaps mediately and in- 
 directly through the fellowship of other souls to 
 whom He is already known in His Incarnate Glory. 
 And those souls, who in this life have begun to 
 respond to the dim light which was vouchsafed them 
 here, who have lived up to the ideals of righteousness, 
 which they have gained, however imperfectly, who 
 have set their wills to do the right and love the good 
 as they have known it — such souls will then open 
 out in glad and joyous response to the manifestation 
 of the Incarnate. He will present Himself to them 
 in all the winning appeal of His full self-revelation. 
 Thus they will enter upon the knowledge of God and 
 be transformed from glory to glory as by the Spirit 
 of the Lord. And of those, who in our very midst, 
 to-day seem to the end of their earthly lives irre- 
 sponsive to the message of Christ, we must say this. 
 Their probation is indeed here. But God alone can 
 tell whether they have made conscious and full 
 rejection of His grace. God alone knows how the 
 message of His love may have been hindered by 
 hereditary forces, never subjected to the influences of 
 right education. God alone knows the difficulties of
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PARADISE 123 
 
 an environment, uncongenial to their true develop- 
 ment, the hindrances of subtle mental affliction. Ail 
 the power of response of which they are capable, all 
 the defeated efforts to rise up to the light, all the 
 hidden conquests over myriad forms of interior 
 selfishness, these may be known to God alone. This 
 only we can say with certainty in the light of the 
 knowledge of Paradise. Be the outward life what it 
 may, no soul has proved itself beyond the reach 
 of salvation, until it has with full and complete 
 knowledge, with deliberate purpose and out of a set 
 love of evil, rejected the appeal of the Incarnate 
 Christ. Christ will make Himself known to each in 
 the attractiveness of that revelation, which is alone for 
 sinful men the full and sufficient proof of the Divine 
 Love and the Divine Holiness. And if it may be 
 that for many souls in this life there comes no full 
 opportunity of such revelation, then by their use of 
 what opportunities they really had, will they be judged. 
 And if to those they have at all responded, if there 
 has been no wanton, wilful, deliberate rejection of the 
 good which has been known as good, then for them 
 there will come joy at the revelation of Paradise 
 which will unveil to them the knowledge of the 
 Incarnate Saviour. God wills all men to be saved. 
 Men may reject God's will for them. But neither the 
 Church as a whole, nor any member of the Church, 
 can say whether this or that man has actually and 
 finally made such a rejection. The scope of the
 
 124 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 Church-prayers is therefore as wide as the embrace of 
 Christ's atoning Redemption. Christ died for all 
 men. The Church prays for all men. The Euchar- 
 istic Sacrifice is the pleading of Christ's death for all 
 men. No limit can be placed to the scope of that 
 Divine Intercession. Whether the objects of that 
 Intercession are specifically mentioned, or fail of 
 definite articulation, in the liturgies of the Church, 
 the Offering of the Eucharist is in itself an Act of 
 Intercession, which perpetuates the pleading of the 
 one all-atoning Death. 
 
 And the effect of that Intercession pours its heal- 
 ing and strengthening virtues through the ranks of 
 all the quick and the dead, and binds together this 
 world and the land of Paradise in a new fellowship 
 of love. 
 
 C. 
 
 There are one or two questions also which sorrow- 
 ing hearts often ask, to which some answers may be 
 reverently suggested, although they are beyond the 
 open and definite revelation which God has given to 
 the Church, and must therefore be regarded as matter 
 of pious meditation, not of necessary faith. 
 
 There is, first, the question of recognition in the life 
 beyond. Shall we know our friend who has gone 
 before us? Perhaps he will have been long in the 
 land of Paradise and will be very near perfection. 
 Will he know us ? Perhaps our shrinking hearts are
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PARADISE 125 
 
 a little too timid to take the full comfort of the assur- 
 ance of Christ's welcome. But our friend's welcome, 
 we should like to be able to count on that. Will he 
 be there to welcome us ? May we look for his greet- 
 ing to make that strange land home for us ? Well, 
 there can be no doubt, from our Lord's own words to 
 the dying thief, that Paradise is a land of Recognition. 
 Our Lord passed to Paradise before the thief. After- 
 wards when he was released from his long agony, he 
 was to find and recognise our Saviour there, finding 
 and recognising Him in His Manhood. We need no 
 other assurance of recognition than that. But perhaps 
 we may see also there the conditions of recognition. 
 We must have spiritual knowledge of one another 
 here. In that land of spirits no mere carnal, fleshly, 
 outward knowledge on earth can avail surely for 
 spiritual recognition there. All ties that are merely 
 sensual, all relations that are not based upon some 
 intimacy of soul with soul, but upon interests of 
 selfish gain or brutish pleasure, these can never be the 
 guarantee of future recognition, where all that is 
 bodily is absent and the soul stands naked in its 
 spirit-nature. But where there has been love, the 
 real outgoing of self into the heart of another, whether 
 that other has been able here to respond to the deep 
 call of that love or not, there will be recognition. 
 For no future growth will ever destroy the insight 
 which true love has given here. Love pierces the 
 outward show of life and sees the soul beneath, sees
 
 126 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 what it can be, what it shall be. Love idealises, and 
 idealising reads the truth. We may smile sometimes 
 at the picture which true love draws of one whom we 
 ourselves cannot look upon with such affection. But, 
 after all, that is the true picture, and nearest Christ's 
 own view of the soul. And love will grow in Paradise. 
 And just as in this world love can trace in the lines 
 of broken life and character the very features of the 
 Christ, so shall it be when we in our unworthiness 
 pass through the gates of Paradise. There will be 
 those holier ones, who will welcome us with the 
 smile of Love's recognition, and there will be those 
 others too, in whom we find the hopes of our own 
 idealising love actually fulfilled in a closer likeness to 
 Christ than ever we had dreamed. So shall the love of 
 this life — "what was our Life of Life when here" — 
 be crowned in Paradise in full recognition and the 
 mutual revelation of our truest selves. 
 
 D. 
 
 But other questions centre round the thought of the 
 long waiting of Paradise. Will not the waiting and 
 the long delay be a source of unhappiness to those 
 souls who need our presence for their fullest joy? 
 
 On the very threshold of meditation upon the world 
 beyond we must always pause to remember that after 
 all we have only mortal words and earthly pictures to 
 describe what is really beyond our comprehending. 
 We can only speak of things as we know them in the
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PARADISE 127 
 sphere of time. Faintly indeed must they reflect the 
 truth of what shall be when there is no more time. 
 The conditions of the timeless state must be beyond 
 our full apprehension. God alone has the timeless, 
 eternal vision of all things. 
 
 "With the Nameless is nor Day nor Hour, 
 The' we, thin minds, who creep from thought to thought, 
 Break into ' Thens ' and ' Whens ' the Eternal Now." 
 
 And though mortal sight, even in the world beyond, 
 never can attain to the eternal vision which God 
 enjoys, yet we must imagine that it will approximate 
 so closely as to transcend all the earthly limitations of 
 the slowly revolving years. So that while for us, who 
 remain on earth, each day of mourning is as a thousand 
 years, maybe for the souls in Paradise there is little 
 sense of waiting, but for them a thousand years are as 
 one day. God grant it may be so. 
 
 Then the question comes to us. How far do the 
 sorrows and sins of this earth affect the joy of those 
 in Paradise ? Is the intercourse so close that my un- 
 yvorthiness and my dejection and disloyalty can cast 
 a shadow upon the happier life of those I love? 
 ^Undoubtedly words fail us to express the intense 
 reality of the Fellowship of the Church, which is so 
 intimate and so living that no one individual can 
 neglect his own spiritual life, nor sin against his own 
 soul, without inflicting suffering and loss upon the 
 whole Body. The Church in Paradise as well as the 
 Church on earth is stronger and holier and happier
 
 128 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 and more steadfast in the realisation of Christ's 
 Presence, if I am keeping near to Christ. There is 
 no doubt whatever about that. But the loving and 
 anxious heart presses the question further home. 
 Granted that there is joy in Paradise over every 
 sinner that repenteth, granted that each act of earthly 
 obedience and holiness increases the sum of happi- 
 ness for the departed, does my dear friend know that 
 it is I who have caused that new thrill of happiness 
 in the unselfish love of the whole Body ? Does he 
 know that he owes that happiness under God to me? 
 And does my sin cause him pain and grief, and blot 
 out some of the happiness of his new life ? Does he 
 know all the doings of my life to-day? Does he 
 watch me as I go in and out ? 
 
 The answer to this must be incomplete, but I 
 think we can say enough both to reassure us of their 
 happiness and to give ourselves a strong motive for 
 effort and holiness. Of course, though they are 
 spirit now, and for a while apart from the limitations 
 of the body, yet they are not ubiquitous. They 
 have not the omnipresence nor the omniscience of 
 God. They have but finite powers. And it seems 
 that all their knowledge of the earth must be 
 mediated through Christ alone. Upon His face 
 their eyes are fixed ; upon Him alone they gaze, 
 and there, as in a mirror. He shows them what He 
 would have them know of earthly things. Surely 
 this will be one of the ministrations of the Holy
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PARADISE 129 
 
 Spirit, Who will carry on into the world beyond His 
 great work as the Light-bearer, showing us the things 
 of Jesus — vv^hat Jesus would have us know of the life 
 of them that are His. And may it not be that, as 
 far as the knowledge of individual actions of those 
 on earth is concerned, Christ would only make known 
 to each soul in Paradise those individual acts ot 
 their loved ones v/hich He Himself chooses to be 
 made known ? Whatever is needed for their growth 
 and happiness, that Christ reveals to them. Thus is 
 it ever in the power of each one of us here to do 
 such acts of love and holiness as Christ shall deem 
 worthy of revealing to them there, and so may our 
 deeds of love bring an individual thrill of undimmed 
 happiness to their souls, and draw them in know- 
 ledge nearer to ourselves and in thankfulness nearer 
 yet to Christ. And when we sin and are beneath 
 ourselves, we belie our love for them, for we keep 
 back a new and added gladness which might be 
 theirs. Every act of love and obedience thus binds 
 us nearer to the love of Paradise, and knits closer 
 the union between quick and dead. 
 
 And sometimes we wonder if the happiness of 
 Paradise is not dashed by the pain of separation. 
 Surely a needless wonder. When we impute the 
 sorrow and sadness of our own earthly experience of 
 separation, we are forgetting that the life of Paradise 
 is a life of fuller knowledge and fuller faith. We 
 sorrow here because we cannot trust God fully. We 
 
 K
 
 I30 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 are not really sure that God is doing the best for 
 us in taking away our friend — the best for him, no 
 doubt, but hardly the best for us. But in Paradise 
 the souls see more of the true purpose of God, they 
 enter more fully into the mind of Christ, and the 
 secrets of the divine government of the world begin 
 to be opened to their faith. And they know that 
 the separation is best, absolutely best, not only for 
 themselves, but for those they love as well. God has 
 a work to do with each, which He can only do with 
 them while they are parted. And with this new 
 knowledge they cannot be sad at the separation, but 
 they must even rejoice, and pray that we on earth 
 may have faith to believe now what has become so 
 plain to them. They must be praying for our greater 
 trust and our ready and cheerful acceptance of God's 
 discipline, that we may be worthier of a speedy 
 reunion, and that the consummation of our mutual 
 love may be hastened. 
 
 We must always speak with great hesitation where 
 God has granted no full revelation. But it is possible 
 reverently to answer the anxious questionings of 
 many souls, carefully distinguishing between the 
 clear, distinct outlines of the definite teaching of the 
 Church on the life of Paradise and the reverent 
 meditations of the devout soul. Only of this one 
 thing we may be sure. The knowledge of things 
 divine is a progressive knowledge, and the revelation 
 about the future world is one of the later stages in
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PARADISE 131 
 
 God's manifestation of Himself to us. In proportion 
 as we keep near to God in this life, in proportion as 
 we realise Christ's Presence here and keep close to 
 Him in the regular sacramental life, so will be our 
 growth in the knowledge of what His nearer Presence 
 must mean to the souls in Paradise. As we keep 
 close to Christ, we keep closest to them. As we do 
 most for Christ here, so do we most help them there. 
 If we are impatient at the reserve of God's revela- 
 tion, if we rebel at the seeming obscurity, perhaps 
 we are trying to understand the last lessons before 
 we have begun to learn the first.
 
 XI 
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PEACE 
 
 " 1\ /T AY they rest in peace." " Jesu, mercy/' 
 IVJ. These are the simple and pregnant words 
 with which many of us have learned to pray for 
 those whom God has already called to the fuller life 
 and more perfect service of the land of Paradise. 
 The reserve which the Bible maintains with regard 
 to the future life is very striking, but it is so distinct 
 a feature in God's revelation that it must be respected. 
 It is too prominent and too startling to be without 
 purpose. Whatever its cause may be — whether the 
 danger of distracting us from our daily duty by the 
 happiness of the future prospect, or the utter in- 
 efficiency of human language to express the glory 
 that shall be, or the need of disciplining man's 
 curiosity and allowing room for the full exercise of 
 real faith — whatever the reason, the reserve is there, 
 and we must accept it as God's purposed training for 
 us. We walk by faith and not by sight. 
 
 A. 
 
 Yet with regard to the peace of the waiting soul in 
 Paradise, we have very sure ground of knowledge in
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PEACE 133 
 
 the experience of the Perfect Man, Christ Jesus. 
 There open out to us two sources of certain know- 
 ledge. 
 
 First, we have the words of our Lord to the 
 penitent robber on the Cross: "To-day shalt thou 
 be with Me in Paradise." Before that night closed, 
 there would be two lifeless bodies hanging on those 
 crosses, and two human spirits, one sin-stained but 
 penitent, the other sinless and radiant, would be 
 together in the land of the Departed. " With Me," 
 not in the sense in which, in the power of His Deity, 
 the Son of God is omnipresent, but " with Me," in 
 human proximity, according to the limitations which 
 He has stooped to accept in His Incarnation. As 
 surely as those two human bodies were hanging 
 together there for all to see, so surely would those 
 two human spirits be together in Paradise — Jesus, in 
 His perfect Humanity, the thief in his very self, their 
 identity unchanged, their personality preserved, the 
 continuity of life unbroken. 
 
 In the second place, we have the words of S. Peter, 
 in which he says Christ was "put to death in the 
 flesh, but quickened in the spirit, in which also He 
 went and preached unto the spirits in prison." 
 
 Significant it is that the revelation comes from 
 S. Peter. Of all the Apostles none was more 
 practical, none more matter-of-fact, none less likely 
 to be moved by sentiment or to mistake the imagin- 
 ings of pious ecstasy for the sober realities of re-
 
 134 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 ligious truth. Characteristic it is also, that the 
 disciple who had been most unwearied in pursuing 
 the strenuous bodily activities of the earthly ministry 
 should be the one to reveal the higher spiritual 
 activities of our Lord's human soul in the land of 
 Paradise. 
 
 The very context of the Apostle's words shows 
 how he realised that this activity of Christ in His 
 quickened human spirit was the charter of hope for 
 our own spiritual activity, when body and soul are 
 separated by death. For he is holding up our Lord 
 as our Example, not only of suffering, but of life 
 through death. Assuredly it is in the power of His 
 quickened Manhood, not merely in the power of His 
 Deity, that Christ performed this ministry in Paradise. 
 As God, in the power of the Divine Omnipresence, 
 Christ, in the Unity of the Father and of the Holy 
 Ghost, had ever been present in the world of spirits. 
 There was wanting no new presence of His Deity. 
 But what was new was the introduction into Paradise 
 of the perfect human Soul, which by the Incarnation 
 the Divine Person of the Son had taken for ever to 
 Himself. It was the entrance of the Representative 
 Man, sinless, in all the activities of the human soul, 
 perfectly and fully responding to the quickening gifts 
 of the Holy Spirit given to His perfect Manhood 
 without measure. It was thus the consecration of 
 Paradise as the land through which all souls must 
 pass as they wait for the glorious reunion of soul
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PEACE 135 
 
 and body at the last great Easter Day. As we hope 
 for the great Easter Day, so we rest also in the 
 certainty of our own Easter Eve in Paradise. We, 
 too, when we are allowed to commend our spirits 
 into the Hands of our Heavenly Father, look to 
 receive the quickening of our human spirits through 
 the energies of the Holy Spirit of God, and with 
 our souls thus invigorated, purified, strengthened, we, 
 too, hope to find rest in the activity of those spiritual 
 ministries in Paradise, which God has prepared for us 
 to fulfil. 
 
 For our future, therefore, Christ's own example is 
 as comforting as it is convincing. But the question, 
 which human love even more than reverent curiosity 
 proposes, has to do with the present rather than the 
 future. How close is the relationship between the 
 life of our loved ones in Paradise and the life of us 
 who remain on earth ? 
 
 For the answer to this we turn unhesitatingly to 
 the unbroken witness of the Church's life and teach- 
 ing. In the very first years, before the promise of 
 Christ's second coming was understood, there were 
 misconceptions as to the Future Life which we find 
 S. Paul very strenuously combating. It was feared 
 that those who died before the great Parousia, or 
 Coming of the Lord, would not be able to share in 
 His Triumph. And in the great chapter on the 
 Resurrection which forms the Lesson in our Burial 
 Service, as well as in his letter to the Thessalonians
 
 136 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 S. Paul sets himself to correct this very error. He 
 feels his own example most convincing. " I die 
 daily." But he would have been the last to expose 
 himself to this daily peril of death, if by dying he 
 was to forfeit his share in the great Resurrection. 
 No, those who are departed already are not lost. 
 They are with Christ. They will rise first. Christ 
 will bring them with Him. It is indeed those on 
 earth who will be the least ready for that Coming. 
 In their case the change, which has been gradual 
 with the others and effected through death, will be 
 immediate ; their Paradise will be but the twinkling 
 of an eye, *'we shall be changed," and together all 
 will be caught up to be for ever with the Lord. 
 
 That stage of misconception soon passed, and 
 Christians were left with the clear conviction that 
 there was such a reality as the waiting Church. At 
 once this belief showed itself in worship and conduct. 
 The one link which all could appreciate between all 
 parts of the Church was Prayer. The one universal 
 act of corporate Prayer was the Holy Eucharist. 
 There, then, the belief in the unbroken intercourse be- 
 tween the seen and the unseen members of the Church 
 expressed itself. In each Church, it seems, at the 
 Great Intercession, the Priest took in his hands the 
 Diptychs, and read from them the individual names 
 of those for whom the prayers of the Church were 
 asked. The Diptychs, as their very name implies, 
 were two-folded tablets ; two-folded, for, as they lay
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PEACE 137 
 
 open to be read, on one fold were the names of the 
 departed, who had a special association with that 
 particular church, Bishops, Priests, Benefactors or 
 others who had now passed from the worship of 
 earth to the worship of Paradise ; on the other fold 
 were the names of the living, for whom the special 
 prayers of the Church were asked. Such a thing as 
 a single-sided prayer tablet with prayers only for the 
 living- at the Eucharist would have been unknown to 
 any Christian Church. Indeed, if either of the folds 
 had been empty, it would have been that the living 
 had not stated any special need, not that the faithful 
 departed had been forgotten. Thus in all her 
 Liturgies, in prayers unsurpassed for their rich 
 simplicity and beauty, the Church bore witness to 
 the intimate communion between earth and Paradise. 
 This witness, through the upheavals of the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries, was sadly marred in part 
 of the Western Church, but never broken. In our 
 own Church not only has our Liturgy been spared to 
 bear its clear witness to this primitive truth, but a 
 long and continuous succession of the best English 
 Divines has borne testimony to this precious heritage 
 of the Catholic faith, and the last few years of our 
 own century have seen a growing appreciation of its 
 truth and beauty. 
 
 So much may be said briefly of the unhesitating 
 witness of the Church. Not only in the Apostles' 
 Creed do we bear witness to the fact and the im- 
 K 2
 
 138 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 portance of Christ's entry into Paradise, when we 
 say " He descended into hell," but at every Eucharist 
 we bind faster the intercourse between living and 
 departed. 
 
 B. 
 
 Since the life beyond is in real unbroken continuity 
 with this life, only possessing new elements of 
 spiritual intensity and progress, we can gather some- 
 thing of its nature from our own experience of what 
 this life, even in its imperfection, can offer. S. Paul 
 has said that for " every man that worketh good " 
 God holds in store three great gifts — " glory, honour, 
 and peace!' From our present experience of the 
 peace, which God gives us in this life, we can form 
 a very true idea of the peace of the intenser life 
 beyond. 
 
 The peace of this world is threefold : — 
 (i) Peace with God. — That is the peace of accepted 
 union with Christ. He is our Peace. It is the peace 
 of those who are " accepted in the Beloved," whose 
 sins are forgiven ; the Peace of those who have 
 thrown down their arms and surrendered to the 
 victorious King of Love ; the peace of faith, of 
 tranquil hope and firm reliance upon the divine 
 promises ; the peace of patient service ; the peace of 
 fruitful communion ; the peace of constant prayer ; 
 the peace of a life lived in the conscious Presence 
 of Christ.
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PEACE 139 
 
 (2) Peace with self. — This means the true adjust- 
 ment of all the faculties of our nature ; the unifying 
 of all our powers ; the harmony of all our energies ; 
 the reconciling of all those contradictory impulses 
 which seem almost to divide the personality into 
 rival selves. It is that conquest of self in which the 
 indwelling Holy Spirit plays so important a part. 
 It enables the whole self to direct all its undivided 
 activities with concentrated purpose upon the work 
 in hand. 
 
 (3) Peace with man. — This is the unselfish Fellow- 
 ship of love, the joy and happiness of social inter- 
 course which leads to the mutual development of 
 man's powers. It is that self-sacrificing service of 
 our fellows which means the higher realisation of each 
 man's best self; that losing of the soul which means 
 its truest finding. 
 
 It is just this very peace, in these same threefold 
 relations, which is deepened and developed in the 
 life beyond. At the moment of death the soul that 
 has sought peace in this life passes on, its identity 
 unshaken, unimpaired, to find Peace zvitJi God. 
 
 Here the experience of Christ will only go part of 
 the way for us, for He was sinless and we are sinful. 
 He ever had in His perfect Manhood unbroken com- 
 munion with the Father. But even that sinless 
 Humanity was capable of a "quickened" energy of 
 spiritual life when it passed beyond the grave. That 
 Humanity which from the moment of conception
 
 I40 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 was filled with the Holy Spirit, endowed with the gift 
 of the Spirit "without measure," had yet been able 
 to receive a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit 
 for the work of His public Ministry, and now it can 
 be newly quickened in the life of Paradise. So even 
 in His sinlessness Christ's example speaks to us of 
 that quickening of the holy life-giving Spirit which 
 awaits our sin-stained souls in Paradise. For us, 
 too, there will be the intensified activity of the Holy 
 Spirit. Sin will oppose no barriers then to the pure 
 energies of holiness. The soul will yield itself in 
 penitence to the cleansing application of the 
 Precious Blood which the ministries of the Holy 
 Spirit afford. 
 
 The purgatorial fire of that holy discipline is the 
 fire of the Holy Spirit, leading the soul out through 
 all the pains of lowliest penitence to the happiness 
 of perfect sanctification. There will be growth in 
 purification as the soul " with unveiled face reflects 
 as a mirror the glory of the Lord, and is transformed 
 into the same image from glory to glory, even as 
 from the Lord the Spirit." And as there is growth 
 in the peace of holiness, there is growth also in the 
 peace of knowledge. The soul will be brought more 
 and more into harmony with the mind of Christ ; it 
 will know God increasingly, and be able to enter 
 humbly into the Divine purposes. There is the 
 peace of the nearer Presence of Christ. And, feed- 
 ing on this inner vision, the souls of the faithful are
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PEACE 141 
 
 ever engaged in that energy of Intercession which 
 derives its efficacy from the merits of Christ's plead- 
 ing alone, but owes its new fervour to the purification 
 and the increased knowledge of the life of Paradise. 
 There, too, indeed, " the supplication of a righteous 
 man availeth much in its working." On that prayer- 
 ful ministry of the souls at peace with God we can 
 confidently rely. It is a ministry of ever-growing 
 happiness to them, and of surpassing comfort to us 
 in our own daily pilgrimage towards the land of 
 Peace. 
 
 In Paradise the soul attains also to true Peace with 
 self. Here, at length, through the perfect work of 
 the Holy Spirit, the soul achieves that true adjust- 
 ment and unifying of all its powers, which the 
 discipline of this life has never been able to effect. 
 The souls whom He has begun to inspire and sanctify 
 here, He wholly fills and leads to perfection there. 
 There, in that world of greater growth, all the latent 
 capacities, all the unfulfilled promises, all the un- 
 developed faculties, for which the earthly life has not 
 provided means of perfect expression, will receive 
 their consummation. The last rebel impulse of the 
 warring self will be subdued, and all the powers of 
 the soul rejoice in one glad harmony. Gone are the 
 old contradictions, the old inconsistencies and long- 
 drawn struggles for the supremacy of the better self. 
 The Holy Spirit has His unhindered way, and Peace 
 reigns in the soul. This is the Refreshment which
 
 142 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 we pray that the souls of the departed may enjoy. 
 And while we pray for their ever-deepening realisa- 
 tion of the Spirit's power, and think of them with 
 open face reflecting the glory of the Lord, w^e also 
 thank God for the vision which Paradise opens of 
 human capacities led on to perfection, of the brightest 
 promises of human life at length fulfilled, of ideals 
 too high for earth's achievement radiantly attained 
 in that ampler world beyond the veil. 
 
 And Paradise also fulfils the ideal of Peace with 
 man, the ideal of human Fellowship. That life, as 
 our Lord's example shows, is a social life. Here the 
 full revelation of Christ most happily supersedes the 
 twilight revelation of the future life which the Old 
 Testament Saints possessed. To them death meant 
 both the cessation of active communion with God 
 and the end of all fellowship and intercourse with 
 men ; the life beyond the grave was a flaccid, listless, 
 shadowy existence, where even God was robbed of 
 human praise, and all spiritual activity ceased. Con- 
 trast with this the revelation of Christ's welcome to 
 the penitent thief in Paradise and His quickened 
 spiritual ministry to the waiting souls. In that life 
 we shall surely find the gradually progressing de- 
 velopment of all our powers of social Fellowship. 
 Not only will there be the joy of recognition and re- 
 union, but there will be the happiness for us, too, of 
 ampler spiritual ministries. Such ministries will be 
 services of Peace. They v/ill bring to the ministering
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PEACE 143 
 
 soul that peace of tireless and unwearied activity 
 which is the very peace of the Divine working. " My 
 Father worketh hitherto and I work." " They cease 
 from their labotirs^' from all the harassing, toilsome, 
 wearing tasks of which alone this life has experience. 
 But "their works do follow them," their spiritual 
 activities continue, being wrought under conditions 
 of perfect tranquillity, harmony, and peace. 
 
 The remembrance of this social aspect and spiritual 
 ministry of Paradise helps us in two great perplexi- 
 ties. First, there is the mystery of those many 
 young lives which seem to us so suddenly and un- 
 accountably cut off in the very height of their 
 usefulness and vigour. May it not be that God 
 needs them already for even higher ministry and 
 services of wider influence in the land beyond 7 May 
 we not trust God to place His workers? Does He 
 not know where each soul can give its most effective 
 aid? And so, if they have been called from our 
 sight, they have gone with the smile of peace already 
 upon their lips ; and, with the beauty of that fuller 
 Peace already shining through the veil, they have 
 passed to ampler opportunities of service. And we 
 can best hold ourselves in close communion with 
 them, we can best aid their work and gladden their 
 hearts, not by rebelling against the separation which 
 God's work entails, not by curious and unblest efforts 
 to pierce the veil which God's love has drawn be- 
 tween the activities of this life and the ministry of
 
 144 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 souls in Paradise ; but by ourselves drawing nearer 
 to God, by a fresh dedication of ourselves here and 
 now to such spiritual service, such earthly ministries 
 of love, as God allows. So shall they that mourn 
 be blessed and find comfort and the peace of God, 
 and prepare themselves most speedily for the happy 
 reunion of Paradise. 
 
 Secondly, the expectation of the spiritual ministry 
 that awaits us in Paradise will often explain the 
 meaning of those times of inactivity, which, whether 
 through sickness or increasing age, come to draw the 
 busy worker away from his accustomed and happy 
 sphere of activity in God's service. The loss of the 
 old energetic ministry distresses us. It is so hard to 
 reconcile ourselves to the abandonment of our out- 
 door work, so hard to be too ill to think consecu- 
 tively. The failure of powers of memory and 
 thought, the fear of increasing infirmity, cast the 
 shadow of hopelessness over our lives. Then it is, 
 perhaps, for us to remember that God is just with- 
 drawing us for a while from the more outward 
 activities of this life, that we may be brought closer 
 to Himself, called into the very sanctuary of suffering 
 and weakness, in order that our deepest spiritual 
 faculties may be tried, tested, purified, strengthened 
 for that fuller ministry of spiritual help which His 
 love has purposed for us in the life beyond.
 
 THE FELLOWSHIP OF PEACE 145 
 
 C 
 
 Thus the peace of this h'fe points us truly, through 
 the very example of the perfect Man Christ Jesus, 
 to that Peace which is the glory of the future, and 
 we take comfort in the unbroken Fellowship of 
 Paradise. There the barriers which on earth impede 
 the fulness of social fellowship are broken down. 
 Love grows ever more and more. Knowledge 
 deepens, sympathy widens, the hearts of all are 
 drawn together in a new unity of purpose as they 
 bow before the nearer vision of Christ. And souls 
 take on new ministries of spiritual service which 
 transcend the possibilities of earthly fellowship. We 
 realise their fellowship with us. For we believe that 
 Christ the Perfect Man is the ground and source, as 
 of sanctity, so also of fellowship of life. The saintly 
 lives known to God the All-loving are more in 
 number than man conceives, those "unknown good 
 who rest in God's still memory folded deep." We 
 believe that no human good pauses for death, that 
 the forces of goodness stored up in the souls that 
 enjoy the wider life beyond are a growing treasury 
 of everliving power and blessing. The influence of 
 the prayers of the saints departed is the greatest 
 spiritual influence that man can exert. Not only is 
 there an ever-increasing energy of spiritual activity, 
 as soul is added to soul, but each soul goes on in an 
 ever-growing approximation to the perfect holiness
 
 146 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 and beauty of Christ's own Life. Into the strong 
 current of that intercession we cast ourselves on 
 earth. 
 
 And what if, through the power of Fellowship, 
 by our steadfastness, by our penitence, by our 
 reverent worship and deepening love of God, we 
 may be allowed to add one thrill of joy to the souls 
 of those whom we so dearly love, whose intercessions 
 we prize? All the influences of Paradise call us to 
 penitence, to prayer, to a reassertion in our lives of 
 those ideals which have been so lovingly entrusted to 
 us. We believe, also, that the Altar is the sacred 
 meeting-place of Heaven and Paradise and Earth 
 and that, in the words of S. Cyril, " it will be of the 
 greatest profit to the souls for whom prayer is offered 
 while the Holy and most awful Sacrifice is pre- 
 sented." So straining our eyes towards the land of 
 Paradise, we pray for the souls of our brethren, 
 pleading the Saviour's infinite Merits ; and by those 
 Holy Mysteries which vouchsafe His Sacramental 
 Presence we link ourselves afresh to the life of 
 the waiting Church. Thus each Eucharistic offering 
 becomes our most solemn presentation in act of that 
 prayer of crowning simplicity and power, "Jesu 
 mercy."
 
 XII 
 
 THE FESTIVAL OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 ALL SAINTS' TIDE 
 
 A LL Saints' Tide is the glory of the falling year. 
 J~\. It is the Festival of human triumph. It is the 
 Festival of man touched with the glory of God, the 
 Festival of human fellowship, the hallowing of 
 friendship, the vindication of human dignity, the 
 Festival of happy Remembrance and of high Ideals. 
 In the gloom of the fading year it brings to us the 
 certainty of human bliss, and touches the sober hues 
 of autumn life with the glories of the Eternal Spring. 
 It is the Festival that cheers the bereaved and lonely 
 heart with the true sense of lasting companionship. 
 It braces the reluctant, shrinking soul for the hard 
 battle, bringing the gracious memory of past victors, 
 who are present witnesses and living intercessors 
 behind the veil. Like an unseen chorus from behind 
 the heavy curtain of the grave there steals upon us 
 the chant of the holy ones — a human chant, so dear, 
 so thrilling to the awakened ear. Thus the sweet, 
 stirring melodies of Heaven and of Paradise break 
 in upon the duties and anxieties of earth, and we 
 recognise the song of Home as we pass on our 
 
 147
 
 148 THE WAY OF FELLOWSHIP 
 
 pilgrim way in a strange land. Dearer and dearer 
 each year this Festival grows to us who remain. 
 May it be to us always not only the stirring of 
 the deepest emotions and the hallowing of the 
 tenderest memories, but the dedication of the will 
 to the more devoted service of God, the deepening 
 of faith, and a fuller experience of the joys of that 
 Sacramental Life, in which we have our closest 
 earthly Fellowship with the Departed, and the 
 pledge of our perfect Fellowship with God. 
 
 WaUAM BKENDON AND SON, LTD, 
 PraXTERS, PLYMOUTH
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 RENEWAL 
 
 l?ENEWAl, 
 
 ?ormL9-50m-9,'60(B361064)444
 
 / 
 
 
 PLEAS^ DO MOT RE.^40VE 
 
 THIS BOOK CAPiD^ 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 c_3 
 
 Pi 
 
 %0JriV3-JO>-' 
 
 University Research Library 
 
 -"J 
 

 
 
 ■!»:'-■