Where is our love, and where our hearts, Services for the Sunday called Quinquagesima, or the Sunday next before Lent. Morning Lesson, Genesis ix. 1-20. The Collect.-O Lord, Who hast taught us that all our doings without charity are nothing worth; send Thy Holy Ghost, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of charity, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever liveth is counted dead before Thee: grant this for Thine only Son Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. Already called and urged to the exercise of repentance, and about to enter upon the penitential mortifications of Lent, the Church most wisely presses upon our minds the divine virtue of charity-love to God for Himself, and to all men for His sake. Love lightens labour, and makes suffering itself sweet, for the sake of the beloved. Love fulfils the whole law, and all duty springs from it, and may be reduced to it. For this holy and happy temper of mind, we earnestly pray in the Collect, from the Divine Spirit, by whom the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts. And from the love of God truly planted, the love of our neighbour, of all the human race, inseparably springs with it; for he that loveth God, by God's commandment must love his brother also. This blessed and heavenly disposition is admirably described and recommended to us in the Epistle, the contents of which we should frequently turn over in our minds, and strictly examine ourselves as to the several marks or characters of charity there laid down. It is only by our having these, that we can truly know our state towards God. Inward feelings may deceive us; but these fruits of benevolence and goodwill to our fellow-creatures, in obedience to His command, are the sure proofs of our true affection towards Him. In the Gospel, we are encouraged by the constraining love of Christ, going up on His last journey to Jerusalem, to rescue us from death by dying in our stead, and announcing His sufferings and death, which He foresaw, with all their circumstances of horror, but for the love of us He willingly went to meet. It was this which gave rise, at the season of the year when it happened, to the fast of Lent, moving us to penitential sorrow for those sins which required His painful and bloody death for their blotting out. "The days will come," He Himself foretold, "when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast" (St. Mark ix. 15). In the case of blind Bartimæus, which makes the second part of the Gospel, we are moved to cry earnestly and repeatedly to Jesus, going to die for us, that He would cure the blindness of our hearts, and strengthen our begging and fainting poverty. We must cast away our filthy rags, to follow Him in the way of His cross, that by an enlightened faith we may really know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death, which is the special purpose of Lent; that by such means we may become properly fitted to be conformed to His glory at the resurrection of the dead, the joy of an everlasting Easter following the humiliation and sorrows of a Lent which only lasts for a time. In the Morning Lesson, we are comforted by the renewal of God's covenant and restoration of mankind after the deluge, encouraging the hopes of His reviving mercy, after the terrors of His awful judgments. In the Evening we are stirred up and admonished to forsake our natural corruption, renouncing self and sin; and by faith, which is the evidence of things not seen, to set out in search of a happy land, which yet we know not (for eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, what God hath prepared for them that love Him); walking by persevering obedience in the steps of our father Abraham, the example and father of all the faithful, Gentiles as well as Jews. O MERCIFUL Creator, hear Our prayers to Thee devoutly bent, Who know'st the weakness of our strength, To us forgiving grace impart, Since we return to Thee at last. Much have we sinned, to our shame; Grant that the flesh may be so pin'd First Sunday in Lent. "And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He was afterward an hungered."-Matt. iv. 2. THE season of humiliation, which goes before Easter, lasts for forty days, in memory of our Lord's long fast in the wilderness. Accordingly on this day, the first Sunday in Lent, we read the Gospel which gives an account of it; and in the Collect we pray Him, who for our sakes fasted forty days and forty nights, to bless our abstinence to the good of our souls and bodies. We fast by way of penitence, and in order to subdue the flesh. Our Saviour had no need of fasting for either purpose. His fasting was unlike ours, as in its intensity, so in its object. And yet when we begin to fast, His pattern is set before us; and we continue the time of fasting till, in number of days, we have equalled His. There is a reason for this; in truth, we must do nothing except with Him in our eye. As He it is through Whom alone we have the power to do any good thing, so unless we do it for Him it is not good. From Him our obedience comes,— towards Him it must look. He says, "Without Me ye can do nothing" (John xv. 5). No work is good without grace and without love. St. Paul gave up all things "to be found in Christ, not having his own righteousness, which is of the law, but the righteousness which is from God upon faith” (Phil. iii. 9). Then only are our righteousnesses acceptable when they are done, not in a legal way, but in Christ through faith. Vain were all the deeds of the law, because they were not attended by the power of the Spirit. The Jews had the burden and heat of the day, and the yoke of the law, but it did not "work out for them a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." But God hath reserved some better thing for |