with Scripture. This thought stands to the mind in the same relation in which the faculty of digestion does to the body, it is the means by which nourishment is assimilated and made to recruit the frame. And so our Reformers have called it with an admirable appropriateness "inward digestion "—“Grant that we may in such wise inwardly digest them."

And now in the close of the Collect is brought out its significance in connection with the Ecclesiastical Season; "that by patience, and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life." The words "blessed hope" are taken from the second chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to Titus, where they are closely associated with the Saviour's Second Advent; "Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ." The "blessed hope" cannot be fully realized before "the glorious appearing." The "patience" is "the patient waiting for Christ," into which St. Paul prays that the hearts of the Thessalonians may be directed, the patience "unto the coming of the Lord" to which St. James exhorts. The "comfort" is that assurance of his coming, and of its nearness to us, which the Scriptures so often give, and by which they confirm and quicken our hope. Old Simeon, who waited "for the consolation of Israel," Joseph of Arimathea, "who also himself waited for the kingdom of God," had the hope of the First Advent nourished in

them by the Scriptures of the Old Testament. And we, by the use of the whole Sacred Volume, must have the hope of the Second Advent nour ished and confirmed in us. Thus the subject of this Collect, if given in full, is the right use of Holy Scripture, as a means of preparing for the Second Advent.

Unlike most Collects, it is not explicitly offered through the Mediator, although, of course, that is implied. A different turn is given to the conclusion, which runs not as usual, "through Jesus Christ our Lord," but "in our Saviour Jesus Christ." This, like the invocation, is peculiar to this Collect, and is a very significant variation on the ordinary formula. "The hope which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ; apart from Him the hope is the baseless fabric of a dream. And therefore, when God is called our Saviour by St. Paul, the Lord Jesus

"our

Christ is called in the same sentence hope;" His return (after preparing a place for His people), to take them to Himself, being the Christian's great point of hope in the future; for "Christ in you," as the same apostle says to the Colossians, is "the hope of glory."

Thus, in one of the Advent Collects, the usual expression of faith in Christ with which our prayers are closed, is most appropriately exchanged for an expression of hope in Him. For the grace of hope is pre-eminently the Advent

grace.

The Third Sunday in Advent.

O Lord Jesu Christ, who at thy first coming didst send thy messenger to prepare thy way before thee; Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries may likewise so prepare and make ready thy way, by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, that at thy second coming to judge the world we may be found an acceptable people in thy sight, who livest and reignest with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

TH

HIS is the first of four Collects, which were drawn up in connection with the Savoy Conference in 1661, the other three being the Collects for St. Stephen's Day, for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, and for Easter Even. A glance at these four prayers shows that they are all struck from the same die, and that the author (probably Cosin, Bishop of Durham,) followed

as his model rather the Collects framed at the Reformation in 1549 than those of the early Office Books.

Our Collect was substituted by Cosin and his colleagues for a much shorter and quite unobjectionable one, in which our Lord was besought to "give ear to our prayers," and "by" His "gracious visitation" to "lighten the darkness of our heart." The great merit of the new Collect is that it introduces a new idea, which is not only most valuable in itself, but also carries on, and beautifully dovetails in with, the train of

thought which runs through the series of Advent Collects. In the first Collect we pray God to give us grace to prepare ourselves for the dawn of the Second Advent. Holy Scripture, which, rightly used, will fortify us with patience until the Advent, and give us comfort in the hope of its appearing, is the subject of the second Collect. And what other means are given us of preparing for the second Advent? The Christian ministry rightly exercised; to which, moreover, our thoughts are drawn by the fact that the third week in Advent is an Ember week, in preparation for the fourth Sunday, on which Holy Orders are administered, and laborers sent forth into the Lord's vineyard. This, then, is the great fundamental thought of the third Collect, that Christian ministers are called to be pioneers of the Second Advent, clearing the way, and preparing the minds of the people for the Lord's appearing in glorious majesty, as St. John the Baptist cleared the way for His appearing in great humility.

"Grant that the ministers and stewards of thy mysteries." Now pray observe the connection in which those words occur in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. "Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ; "the stress should be laid on the word ministers, which, according to the derivation of the Greek word in the origiinal, means a rower in a galley, who takes the time from an officer appointed to give it, and receives his orders from the captain of the ship. 1 1 Cor. iii. 22, and iv. 1. 2 ὑπηρέτης.

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We, Christian ministers," he would say, only rowers in the Church's galley; our Captain who gives us our orders, our Officer who gives us the time by His voice or by signs, our Pilot who steers the bark whithersoever He lists, while we only supply the brute force which propels it, is Christ." Again, "stewards of the mysteries of God." A steward or housekeeper is only a dispenser of another man's stores; the stores do not belong to him. So Christian ministers are mere stewards, dispensing to Christian people not the inferences and conjectures of their own minds, but the Word and Sacraments of God, with which at their ordination they are solemnly entrusted.

But how are Christian ministers to fulfil the office of pioneers for the Second Advent, as John fulfilled it for the First? What must they do, or aim at doing, in order to prepare and make ready the way of the Lord? "By turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just." This is a quotation which comes in the last resort from the Prophet Malachi, and is another form of saying, "he shall turn the heart of the children to their fathers." But what authority have we for departing from the very words of the prophet, and substituting an equivalent phrase? We have the authority-not a very mean one-of the angel Gabriel. It is not the seventy Alexandrian translators of the Old Testament, but an angel (speaking to Zacharias the priest), who has given this turn to the Hebrew text. The "fathers" are the forefathers of the