and to inquire after the character and faults of everybody:  he therefore took the matter very much in the lump, and thought to curb us by means of the church forms.  For this reason he commonly, when he admitted us to his presence, used to lower his little head, and, in his weeping, winning voice, to ask us whether we went regularly to church, who was our confessor, and whether we took the holy communion?  If we came off badly at this examination, we were dismissed with lamentations:  we were more vexed than edified, yet could not help loving the man heartily.

On this occasion I cannot forbear recalling somewhat of my earlier youth, in order to make it obvious that the great affairs of the ecclesiastical religion must be carried on with order and coherence, if they are to prove as fruitful as is expected.  The Protestant service has too little fulness and consistency to be able to hold the congregation together; hence it easily happens that members secede from it, and either form little congregations of their own, or, without ecclesiastical connection, quietly carry on their citizen-life side by side.  Thus for a considerable time complaints were made that church-goers were diminishing from year to year, and, just in the same ratio, the persons who partook of the Lord’s Supper.  With respect to both, but especially the latter, the cause lies close at hand; but who dares to speak it out?  We will make the attempt.

In moral and religious, as well as in physical and civil, matters, man does not like to do any thing on the spur of the moment; he needs a sequence from which results habit; what he is to love and to perform, he cannot represent to himself as single or isolated; and, if he is to repeat any thing willingly, it must not have become strange to him.  If the Protestant worship lacks fulness in general, so let it be investigated in detail, and it will be found that the Protestant has too few sacraments,—­nay, indeed, he has only one in which he is himself an actor,—­the Lord’s Supper; for baptism he sees only when it is performed on others, and is not greatly edified by it.  The sacraments are the highest part of religion, the symbols to our senses of an extraordinary divine favor and grace.  In the Lord’s Supper earthly lips are to receive a divine Being embodied, and partake of a heavenly under the form of an earthly nourishment.  This import is the same in all kinds of Christian churches:  whether the sacrament is taken with more or less submission to the mystery, with more or less accommodation as to that which is intelligible, it always remains a great, holy thing, which in reality takes the place of the possible or the impossible, the place of that which man can neither attain nor do without.  But such a sacrament should not stand alone:  no Christian can partake of it with the true joy for which it is given, if the symbolical or sacramental sense is not fostered within him.  He must be accustomed to regard the inner religion of the heart and that of the external church as perfectly one, as the great universal sacrament, which again divides itself into so many others, and communicates to these parts its holiness, indestructibleness, and eternity.