e Christian creed.

And the character of this summary exhortation shows us that any idea of
a faith which stops short of moral identification with its object is
utterly alien to St. Paul's mind. Faith is no true Christian faith, if
it is content to receive from the Father, or from Christ, a gift which
leaves it still outside the life of God. The faith which Christ
inspires asks for and receives nothing less than real fellowship in His
divine and human life, and that life is, in its joys as well as its
sorrows, a life of self-surrender, of sacrifice. Thus the Christian
only welcomes the gift of pardon through Christ's sacrifice in order to
be admitted into the freedom of the dedicated life in Christ, which is
the life of sacrifice. It is the sort of sacrifice (as St. Paul's
language indicates) which is as different as possible from any such
asceticism as is prompted by contempt of the flesh or the body, or
refusal of joy, or love of death. It is sacrifice which seeks to
cultivate {100} into full vitality every faculty of body as well as of
mind (and that in an active society or brotherhood), in order to
consecrate all we are or can be to the service of God, and so realize
in conscious correspondence with the divine will the rational worship
for humanity.

St. Paul's words here about a 'living' as opposed to a bloody, and a
'rational' as opposed to an animal sacrifice, may be the basis on which
the eucharist, the Christian worship 'in spirit and in truth,' was
often called in early times the 'reasonable' and 'bloodless
sacrifice[3].' And whether this be the case or no, at any rate we must
relearn the lesson that St. Augustine is for ever insisting upon, that
the eucharistic sacrifice essentially involves and implies the offering
of the Church as the body of Christ, {101} that is, the offering of
ourselves as members of the body; and we may feel profoundly thankful
that, in our service of Holy Communion, this truth has been restored to
its proper prominence, after having been, in the pre-Reformation
service, almost ignored. 'And here we offer and present unto thee, O
Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and
lively sacrifice unto thee.' In this prayer is really the climax of
our sacrificial worship[4].

The true service of God is intelligent correspondence with the divine
will--this is perfection; and to correspond with the divine will we
must be able to know it: and this is what we ca