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For my own part, I accept tradition outright, because I think it wiser to receive a mystery than to weaken faith; but no one exacts such strictness from you. There are scores of clergymen to-day in our pulpits who are in my eyes little better than open skeptics, yet I am not allowed to refuse communion with them. Why should you refuse it with me?
We have by effort and longing, by self-abnegation and aspiration, by prayer and work, by communion and service, to increase our possession of that likeness to God which lives in Jesus Christ, and from Him is stamped ever more and more deeply on the heart.
Communion with God gives beauty and ornament to the whole character. It brings the true refining and perfecting of the soul. No doubt many Christian men, as we see them, are but poor specimens of this effect of godliness; still, it is an effect produced in proportion to the depth and continuity of their communion.
You have made something, some good work, bodily; your communion has commenced with those of times to come; your mind has produced a witness to its individuality; there is a tablet sacred to its memory standing among men for ever. And are not these unbounded pleasures, spreading over life, and comforting the struggles of a death-bed?
The present work, too, over the communion table was intended only to serve till something more worthy could be prepared; and, to supply its place, Wren had modelled a magnificent altar, consisting of four pillars wreathed of the finest Greek marbles, supporting a hemispherical canopy, richly decorated with sculpture.
Discipline is special to each congregation, but that sense of justice which always stands as the basis of discipline, is common to all the churches of one communion. This public opinion is created by a mutual interchange of sentiment the books we read and the preachers we hear. For years past slaveholders have ceased to hear those suspected of abolitionism or to read their writings.
The message of the missionary will be that by Christianity self-sacrifice is shown to be the condition of morality, the essence of communion with God and the way to life eternal . . . 34-69 A view sometime held was that magic is religion, and religion magic. Primitive man acts on the assumption that he can produce like by means of like; and about that assumption there is no "magic" of any kind.
In April, 1828, Harriet again writes to her brother Edward: "I have had more reason to be grateful to that friend than ever before. He has not left me in all my weakness. It seems to me that my love to Him is the love of despair. All my communion with Him, though sorrowful, is soothing.
And if our state altogether is parallel to that of the Israelites, as an antitype to its type, it is natural to think that so great a gift as Holy Communion would not be without its appropriate figures and symbols in the Old Testament.
Six years later Edwards wrote a preface to his "An Humble Inquiry into the Qualifications for Full Communion in the Visible Church of God," a treatise severely condemning the Half-Way Covenant, and urging the revival of the early personal account of conversion.
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