connected with the reception of Holy Communion.[1]
It remains now to ask how far we English Church people have any guidance to which we can appeal in our liturgical forms. We have to admit that the well-being of the body does not receive the amount of consideration in our Prayer-book that it did receive in more primitive days. And yet the allusions are more frequent than many imagine. At the outset of Morning and Evening Prayer we are reminded that we have met 'to ask those things which are requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul.' Over and over we repeat the clause in the Lord's Prayer—'Give us this day our daily bread.' In the Creed we joyfully attest our belief in the 'resurrection of the body.' In the Litany we pray to be delivered from 'plague and pestilence.' A special intercession is appointed for use 'in the time of common plague or sickness,' as well as the more general one for all who are 'any ways afflicted, or distressed, in
- ↑ pp. 370, 381. Compare also the witness of St. Thomas à Kempis in regard to the power of this Sacrament. 'The grace is sometimes so great that out of the fulness of devotion here given not the mind only but the weak body also feels great increase of strength bestowed on it' (vires sibi praestitas sentiat ampliores). De Imit. iv. 1.
