lowship implies a reciprocal intercourse with God. By it we not only abide in Christ, but Christ abides in us; we not only ask, but we receive; we not only give ourselves to God, but God imparts himself to us. And the Holy Spirit is the medium of this communion. As the atmosphere stands between us and the sun, the transparent element through which we behold its brightness, and through which its warmth is transmitted to us, so the Holy Ghost mediates between us and Christ. "He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you,' says Jesus. Here is one side the communication of the life and love and joy of the Lord to us. "The Spirit maketh intercession for us."† Here is the other side the communication of our needs and sorrows, our praises and confessions to the Lord. And both these ideas are involved in full communion with Christ.

To establish this fellowship we make use, first of all, of the Scriptures which are the inspired organ of the Holy Ghost. And it is very important for us to see that the most direct and intelligible means of communion is the word of God. Meditation, contemplation, aspiration - these are

very vague and unsatisfactory exercises when attempted alone. Thought, like the vine, needs a trellis on which to climb, in order to mount up into the sunlight. We require God's word as a support and uplift in order that we may think Gou's thoughts after him. And we are sure that the most substantial and most satisfactory intercourse which we can have with the Lord is attained in this way.

Rev. William Haslam, the well-known evangelist, in referring to that remarkable crisis in his ministry when he gained the power of the Holy Ghost as he had never known it before, says:

"A book came into my hands which interested me greatly. This I read and re-read, and made an abstract of it. It was the 'Life of Adelaide Newton.' What struck me in it so much was to find that this lady was able to hold spiritual communion with God by means of a Bible only. Is it possible, I thought, to hold such close communion with the Lord apart from the church and her ministrations? I do not hesitate to say that this was the means under God of stripping off some remains of my grave clothes, and enabling me to walk in spiritual liberty." *

* From Death Unto Life, p. 59.

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The lady to whom he refers was one of the excellent of the earth, in whom we may believe the Lord delighted. Her expositions of Hebrews and of the Song of Solomon are among the best specimens of devotional study with which we are acquainted. Here we find affection and meditation climbing up to the Lord along his promises and precepts. And as we read, we learn the true secret of communion. Unsustained contemplation soon tires; but that which mounts up to God along the scala sancta of Scripture renews its strength at every step. It has such secure foothold that it never falters or grows dizzy; and thus it escapes the peril of fanaticism and pious dreaming. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts," saith the Lord. "saith the Lord. We cannot reach God's thoughts therefore by meditation or reflection alone. We may tarry all night in the fields like Jacob, but unless we know the Scriptures we have not the ladder whose top reaches unto heaven, along which our thoughts like angels may ascend and descend.

And next to God's recorded thoughts, the high

* Isaiah 4: 8.

est aid to communion will be found in the spiritual contemplations of his saints. Each believer needs the help of every other in order to any measure of apprehension of God. "That ye may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge," "* is the fervent prayer of the apostle. Each son of God has some vision and apprehension of the Father's will and glory which another may miss. And we require the sum of all Christian knowledge to help us toward the beginning of that which "passeth knowledge."

It has sometimes struck us as being one of the saddest fruits of schism in the church, that it has begotten a kind of covetousness of truth and love. Christians hold their favorite doctrines as a sort of spiritual monopoly; loving truth for the distinction it may give to them, as the miser loves his gold, instead of loving it for the blessing and joy it may bring to others when imparted. To find the highest help in communion we must be willing to give all we have without stint; and to take from all who have acquired any riches of truth, however

* Eph. 3: 18.

remote and out of ecclesiastical fellowship with us they may be. We make good our suggestion by borrowing from one whom we must own as a true saint, though found within the pale of an apostate body. Fenelon, shut up within the bounds of a narrow and exclusive church, deprecated what he calls "the avarice of prayer," and not less the avarice of communion. With a most comprehensive charity he exclaims :

"Oh! how blessed it were to see all goods in common,' both of mind and of body, and that every one no longer regarded his thought, his opinions, his science, his light, his virtues, his noble sentiments, as his own. It is thus that the saints in heaven have all in God, and nothing for themselves alone. Theirs is a beatitude infinite and common to all, of which the ebb and flow cause the abundance and satiety of all the blessed; each receiving his measure, each giving out all he has received. If men here below entered into this poverty of spirit and this community of spiritual gifts, we should see all disputes and all schisms come to an end. We cannot reform the church except by thus reforming ourselves; then all would be only one spirit; the spirit of love and truth would be the soul of the members of the body of the church, and would re-unite them in closest