a natural inclination we all have to idolatry, which makes men think they see some ray of the Divinity in extraordinary creatures, and on this account worship them; or from hypocrisy, which makes men willing to discharge their obligations to God by grimace, and by zeal for external services; or from presumption, which makes men serve God after their own fancies.-Claude.

SUPERSTITION and RELIGION.

The religion of Revelation stands clear of all the distortions into which men have wrought it, and of all the abominations with which they have associated it. It brings glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, and good-will toward men. But the fine gold has been changed; and in tossing away the counterfeit, men have lost sight of the heavenly reality. The counterfeit, however, must bear a proportion of the guilt in the dishonour done to the pure original; and to a corrupted Christianity, as a subordinate cause, must be assigned no small amount of influence in occasioning the rejection of Christianity itself.-T. Pearson. SUPERSTITION and UNBELIEF.

These two distempered conditions of the spiritual life are but opposite symptoms of the same fundamental evil, of which the one passes easily into the other. When once the inner life is become thoroughly worldly, it either suppresses all religious feeling and abandons itself to infidelity, or, blending itself with that feeling, gives to it an interpretation of its own, and thus turns it to superstition. The desperation of unbelief surrenders the troubled conscience a prey to superstition; and the irrationality of superstition makes religion suspected by the thoughtful mind.-Dr. Neander.

SUPPER.-The Lord's

It is an emblem of the marriage-supper of the Lamb, and an earnest of that communion we shall have with Christ in glory; it is a feast of fat things; it gives us bread from heaven, such as does not only preserve life, but prevent death. It has glorious effects in the hearts of the godly; it quickens their affections, strengthens their graces, mortifies their corruptions, revives their hopes, and increaseth their joy.-T. Watson.

SUPPER.-Passions Raised at the Lord's

The Lord's Supper is a holy rite wonderfully adapted to raise excellent passions. Here Christ is, as it were, "set forth crucified among us." We see His body broken, and His blood poured forth: here with a devout joy we receive and embrace Him by faith and love in these symbols of His body and blood, and pledges of His love. The soul must be very ill-prepared; it must have very imperfect notions of sin and damnation, the cross of Christ, grace and salvation, which is not sensible of a crowd of holy passions springing up at this Sacrament.-Dr. Lucas.

SUPPER.-Receiving the Lord's

The service of communion at the Lord's Table is beyond prayer, or praise, or meditation, because it joins these together, and adds to them. It is beyond mere spiritual exercises of worship, because of the singular way in which it employs not only the soul, but also the body. It is liker heaven than secret communion with God, because it is an enjoyment of it in the visible communion of saints. It is beyond private duties, because it is a public ordinance; and beyond other public ordinances, because it has the use of them joined to it, and adds something

to it. It is not only a commemoration of God's chief gift, but a solemn receiving of it; and what it especially communicates is the very consummation of that blessed work-the Redeemer's death. There is an honourable distinction put upon it by the circumstances of its appointment, which was immediately by the Redeemer himself, and at that remarkable time when He was entering upon those last sufferings which it chiefly commemorates. It is, therefore, the most solemn performance of the chief exercises of which we are capable. But that should not make it seem a burden, but a delight. It is more the Lord's work than it is ours. His generous work at His own table is to give; ours is to take and receive. Maclaurin.

SUPPER.-A Sacrifice in the Lord's

That in the Sacred Supper there is a sacrifice in that sense wherein the Fathers spake, none of us ever doubted; but that is eucharistical; that is, as Chrysostom speaks, a remembrance of a sacrifice; that is, as Augustine interprets it, a memorial of Christ's passion celebrated in the Church. And from this sweet commemoration of our redemption there arises another sacrifice-the sacrifice of praise; and from thence a true peace-offering of the Christian soul.-Bishop Hall.

SUPPER.-The Sight of Partakers of the Lord's

Could we make ourselves, in a manner, spectators, and yet not mere spectators, of our own work, it would be easy to see we cannot form an idea of any work upon earth so great, or so honourable. The chief sight, indeed, that the world ever saw, was the King of Kings dying on a cross for guilty subjects. That was a spectacle beyond all comparison. But next to that, can there be a greater, than to see a crowd of such subjects, once condemned criminals, now invited and assembled at their reconciled Sovereign's table, at a feast of reconciliation, to receive a sealed remission of all their guilt, an infeftment into an everlasting inheritance; yea, to receive the foretaste and first-fruits of it, having, as it were, the pearl of great price among their hands, jointly doing honour to God's greatest mercy and chief gift, and jointly employed about the noblest spiritual exercises we can conceive human nature, or any creature on earth or in heaven, to be capable of?-Maclaurin.

SYMBOL.-The God-like in

A symbol is ever, to him who has eyes for it, some dimmer or clearer revelation of the God-like. Through all there glimmers something of a divine idea; nay, the highest ensign that men ever met, and embraced under the Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.-Carlyle.

SYMBOLS.-Different Kinds of

Earth is the symbol of humanity,

Water of Spirit, fire of Deity,

And air of all things; stars the truths of Heaven.-P. J. Bailey. SYMBOLS.-Incomparable

There are no symbols to compare with those of the Lord's Supper, either for solemnity or appropriateness; for the consecrated bread actually symbolizes the broken body, and the consecrated wine the shed blood of Jesus, "the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world."-Dr. Davies.

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SYMPATHY.-The Divine Character of

Next to love, sympathy is the divinest passion of the human heart.-Burke. SYMPATHY.-The Province of

It is the province of sympathy to render us alive to the evils of those around us; so it is equally the province of reason and good sense to save the mind from too deep an interest in afflictions which we can neither prevent nor remedy. No doubt, therefore, it is the perfection of the human character to be at once equal to its own happiness, and yet sensible to those miseries of our fellow-creatures which its exertions can alleviate.-Professor Smyth.

SYMPATHY-a Substitution.

Sympathy may be considered a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected.-Burke. SYNAGOGUE.—A Description of a Modern

Here we have before us the lineal descendants of patriarchs, prophets, and kings, praying in the language of David and Isaiah, and continuing far on in an era inaugurated by their own rejected Messiah, the worship practised in Jerusalem thousands of years ago. Then everything around is so different from what we see in any other place of worship, or probably ever expected to see-the place, the worshippers, the worship. The men sit or stand with their hats on, and wrapped in curious fringed praying scarfs; they rattle over their prayers with extraordinary rapidity and in a singing tone, the while swaying their bodies backward and forward, or from side to side. The modern Pharisees still occupy "the uppermost seats," the men are down below, while the women are shut up in a grated gallery. An eternal light burns before a veiled chest or ark, which contains gorgeously mantled rolls of the Law, brought out and read amid great ceremonies, the honour of taking part in this being, in out-of-the-way places, to this day disposed of by public auction during the worship itself. These and many other strange customs and appearances, seem to transport you from the heart of Europe and the nineteenth century, ever so many ages back to the far East.-Dr. Edersheim.

SYNAGOGUE.-The Service of the

The method of reading lessons from the Scriptures was the established practice of the Jewish Church in our Saviour's time, and in the time of the Apostles-a practice our Lord often honoured with His presence, and often joined in—a practice to which the usage of our own Church is exactly conformable. And indeed if we compare the whole Synagogue-service with ours in the Church, we shall find the frame and model of both to be perfectly alike ;-the Synagogue-service consist. ing, as ours doth, of forms of prayer and two lessons; and afterwards a discourse or sermon, when any rabbi or teacher was present, and had any word of exhortation for the people.—Wogan.

SYNAGOGUE.—The Temple Superseded by the

Complicated as modern Judaism seems, it may be summed up in one brief sentence:-The Synagogue has taken the place of the Temple. This one fact underlies all the rest. It is, of course, that ever since the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus, the services of the Temple have wholly ceased. Sacrifices, a ministering priesthood, and a mitred high priest are impossible out of the one national Sanctuary on Mount Moriah, which has lain waste these eighteen centuries. The

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Jewish rabbi is not a priest; only a teacher-one who settles the many knotty questions arising from the intricacies of their Law; a sort of casuist and ecclesiastical judge. Nor does the modern Jewish ritual bear the faintest resemblance to the rites of the Temple. So far as possible, the ancient names have been preserved, but the things named are totally different. The cessation of the Temple-services is the most significant fact in history. As at the commencement of the Old Testament the Jewish people and its history were, so to speak, summed up in one individual-Abraham, so at its close the royalty, the priesthood, nay, the nation itself in Jesus Christ. Thus when "the fulness of the time came," and the purpose of all had been served, the same Hand which had opened the Templegates, closed them and for ever. But long before that another order of things from the Temple-services had gradually been preparing in the institution of the Synagogue.-Dr. Edersheim.

TABERNACLE.-The

T.

The Tabernacle was little else than a portable temple, as no other kind of structure would have suited the earlier circumstances of the chosen race. A nomade people would, of course, have a moveable temple; and among a tentdwelling people, that temple would naturally be a tent, or a portable fabric of wood. An immoveable temple could only be expected to be found among a settled race; and when a moving people become settled, and exchange their tents for houses, in like manner their moveable tabernacles become fixed temples. "See now," said David, "I dwell in a house of cedar, but the ark of God dwelleth between curtains." He therefore proposed that the house of God should be no longer a tent, but a fabric of stone, in accordance with the altered circumstances of the people. But until the Israelites were settled in the Land of Promise, their sacred edifice must necessarily be such as they could easily take to pieces and transfer from place to place. The object of such a building was not as a place of shelter for the assembled worshippers, for the worshippers assembled not in the temples, but in the courts before or around them; nor yet as places for offering sacrifices, for the sacrifices were also offered in the courts. It was intended as a habitation of the visible symbol of Jehovah, who is emphatically designated "the God of Israel."-Professor Bush.

TABERNACLE.-The Character of the

The Tabernacle possessed the two-fold character of a sanctuary, or holy place -a place of worship, and of a royal palace, where Jehovah would keep the state of a court, as supreme civil magistrate and King of Israel; from whence He would issue His laws and commandments as from an oracle, and where He was to receive the homage and tribute of His subjects. This idea of the Tabernacle, as in part that of a palace for a king, will seem perfectly clear to every one who notes carefully the terms in which this building, and also the Temple, are spoken of and referred to throughout the Scriptures; and we doubt not it is a view essential to the right understanding of these structures and the things which belong to them. It is a view also which is held by the Jews themselves, who carry out the analogy, and regard the utensils of the Tabernacle as palace furniture, and the priests as its ministers of state and officers. -Professor Bush.

TABERNACLE.-The Design of the

In the erection of the Tabernacle, God, for the first time, localized a place for His own peculiar and spiritual worship on the earth. Before this there were no temples and sanctuaries built by the express arrangement of God for His own worship. The only intimation, if such it be, is the place of the cherubim at the gates of Paradise. It is supposed that those flaming cherubim were placed there to fence off every application to enter, till the great atonement was made, and the true Paradise was opened; and that when Abel went to present his sacrifice to the Lord, he went into the symbolic presence of the Lord, that is-into the glory that shone between these cherubim, and at that spot, and in that light, he offered up a sacrifice which was acceptable unto God; and as if to explain the justice of this supposition, the Bible says-"Cain went forth from the presence of the Lord"—as if God was visibly present, by the token of the divine majesty, in the splendour of which the ancient sacrifices were offered up.-Dr. Cumming.

TABERNACLE.-The Minor Things of the

When you look at a complicated machine, as, for instance, at a locomotive engine, there are parts of it that seem to be utterly worthless in themselves; the pin in the axle seems a very worthless thing, but if that pin were to drop out, the machinery would all go wrong, and human lives be sacrificed. And so it is here; there are bowls, and branches, and almonds, and flowers, and knops, that seem very trifling, but when seen, as we shall yet see them, in connection with a bright and perfect glory that is to be, and as part and parcel of a sublime plan, progressively developed, then the minutest thing will appear instinct with meaning, and the most insignificant indicate its beauty and its place.-Dr. Cumming.

TALENT.-Diversity of

We cannot all shine as stars of the first magnitude in the wide firmament of the Church: those that cannot must give such light as they are able to dispense. I envy not our eagles in divinity that they see far more than I, but thank God I see so much. While the greater sages offer gold, and myrrh, and frankincense, I am happy enough if I may be allowed to bring goats' hair and badgers' skins toward the accomplishment of the Tabernacle.-Horneck.

TALENT.-God and

The great primary end to which every man of talent should consider his powers, in whatever line of intellect or attainment they may predominantly lie, as solemnly or sacredly pledged, is the promotion of the glory of the great Author of his being. This was the very object for which such an order of mind was bestowed upon him; this is the central point to which every ray throughout the whole circle of human endowments should steadily and uniformly converge. There must be in the mind a fixed, a never-varying regard to the glory, the majesty, the will, and the purposes of its beneficent Creator, whose sway it must unreservedly own; and until it has been brought under this legitimate and salu. tary control, it is as incapable of guiding itself aright as the fabled Phaeton of directing the chariot of the sun.-Sir J. Davies.

TALENT.-Three Orders of

The highest order of talent is certainly the power of revelation—the power of imparting new propositions of important truth: inspiration, therefore, while it continued in a given mind, might be called the paramount talent. The second