Other communion would be a
happiness,--to break together the bread of mutual thought, to
drink the wine of loving life,--but it is not necessary.
'Yet I cannot but feel that the crowd of men whose pursuits
are not intellectual, who are not brought by their daily walk
into converse with sages and poets, who win their bread from
an earth whose mysteries are not open to them, whose worldly
intercourse is more likely to stifle than to encourage the
sparks of love and faith in their breasts, need on that
day quickening more than repose. The church is now rather a
lecture-room than a place of worship; it should be a school
for mutual instruction. I must rejoice when any one, who lays
spiritual things to heart, feels the call rather to mingle
with men, than to retire and seek by himself.
'You speak of men going up to worship by "households," &c.
Were the actual family the intellectual family, this might be;
but as social life now is, how can it? Do we not constantly
see the child, born in the flesh to one father, choose in the
spirit another? No doubt this is wrong, since the sign does
not stand for the thing signified, but it is one feature of
the time.
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