CHRIST IN THE COLLECTS AND Services of the Church. A SERIES OF THIRTEEN TRACTS FOR THE Principal Festivals, etc., OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR. 31. BY THE REV. W. H. LYON, M. A., RECTOR OF OBORNE, DORSET. Price One Shilling the Series, or Single Tracts, 1d. Sherborne : JAMES ELLIS, BOOKSELLER, PARADE. London: WILLIAM MACINTOSH, PATERNOSTER ROW. f. CHRIST IN THE COLLECTS AND Services of the Church. A SERIES OF TRACTS FOR Advent, Christmas, etc. NO. I.-ADVENT SUNDAY. BY THE REV. W. H. LYON, M. A., RECTOR OF OBORNE, DORSET. NEW EDITION, REVISED. Sherborne: JAMES ELLIS, BOOKSELLER, PARADE. London: WERTHEIM, MACINTOSH, AND HUNT, PATERNOSTER ROW. [Price 1d., or 7s. per hundred.] ADVENT SUNDAY. "Behold! He cometh."-Rev. i. 7. THE season of Advent is a season of preparation. We are called upon by the services of our church to look for the coming of Christ. The words at the head of this tract seem to be addressed to us by all we hear and read this day: "Behold! He cometh." This season is the beginning of the Christian year. The church "does not number her days or measure her seasons so much by the motion of the Sun as by the course of our Saviour: beginning and counting on her year with Him, Who being the true Sun of righteousness, began now to rise upon the world, and, as the Day-star on high, to enlighten them that sat in spiritual darkness." (Wheatley.) The Collect for to-day speaks of two Advents or comings of Christ. He came once in deep humility. That coming we hope to celebrate on Christmas Day. On the work then accomplished all our hopes depend. Unless we obtain acceptance through the first Advent of the Lord Jesus, and His death and resurrection, His second Advent can have nothing but terrors for us. To that first Advent "in great humility" our minds are directed in the Gospel for the day, (Matt. xxi. 1-13.), which tells us how our Lord fulfilled the prophecy of Zechariah that her king should come to the daughter of Sion "meek and sitting upon an ass and a colt the fole of an ass," when He rode into Jerusalem accompanied by a joyous crowd who hailed Him as the Son of David and cried, saying, "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest." With a view also to this first coming, the need of it in the utter sinfulness of man, and the effects of it in cleansing away his guilt, it would seem that the first Lesson for the morning service (Isaiah i.) was selected. In it we find a terrible description of the corruption and impurity of the human heart, and a blessed promise that "sins, even though as scarlet should be made as white as snow, and that though red like crimson, they should be as wool." To the second Advent our thoughts seem specially directed by the Collect for the day, the Epistle & the first Lesson for the evening service. In the Collect we pray that we may so prepare in this life, "that in the last day when our Lord shall come again in His glorious majesty to judge both the quick and dead, we may rise to |