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           Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture: Matthew IX to XVIII
      Creator(s): Maclaren, Alexander (1826-1910)
   CCEL Subjects: All; Bible
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                         EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.

  ST. MATTHEW
  Chaps. IX to XXVIII
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                         EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.

  ST. MATTHEW
  Chaps. IX to XVII
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CONTENTS

   CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS (Matt. ix. 2)

   SOUL-HEALING FIRST: BODY-HEALING SECOND (Matt. ix. 6)

   THE CALL OF MATTHEW (Matt. ix. 9-17)

   THE TOUCH OF FAITH AND THE TOUCH OF CHRIST (Matt. ix. 18-31)

   A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN (Matt. ix. 36)

   THE OBSCURE APOSTLES (Matt. x. 5)

   CHRIST'S CHARGE TO HIS HERALDS (Matt. x. 5-16)

   THE WIDENED MISSION, ITS PERILS AND DEFENCES (Matt. x. 16-31)

   LIKE TEACHER, LIKE SCHOLAR (Matt x. 24, 25)

   THE KING'S CHARGE TO HIS AMBASSADORS (Matt. x. 32-42)

   A LIFE LOST AND FOUND (Matt. x. 39)

   THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM, AND THEIR REWARD (Matt. x. 41, 42)

   JOHN'S DOUBTS OF JESUS, AND JESUS' PRAISE OF JOHN (Matt. xi. 2-15)

   THE FRIEND OF PUBLICANS AND SINNERS (Matt. xi. 19)

   SODOM, CAPERNAUM, MANCHESTER (Matt. xi. 20)

   CHRIST'S STRANGE THANKSGIVING (Matt. xi. 25)

   THE REST GIVER (Matt. xi. 28, 29)

   THE PHARISEES' SABBATH AND CHRIST'S (Matt. xii. 1-14)

   AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOUNT FOR JESUS (Matt. xii. 24)

   MAKE THE TREE GOOD' (Matt. xii. 33)

   A GREATER THAN JONAS' (Matt. xii. 41)

   A GREATER THAN SOLOMON' (Matt. xii. 42)

   FOUR SOWINGS AND ONE RIPENING (Matt. xiii. 1-9)

   EARS AND NO EARS (Matt. xiii. 9)

   TO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN' (Matt. xiii. 12)

   SEEING AND BLIND (Matt. xiii. 13)

   MINGLED IN GROWTH, SEPARATED IN MATURITY (Matt. xiii. 24-30)

   LEAVEN (Matt. xiii. 33)

   TREASURE AND PEARL (Matt. xiii. 44-46)

   THE MARTYRDOM OF JOHN (Matt. xiv. 1-12)

   THE GRAVE OF THE DEAD JOHN AND THE GRAVE OF THE LIVING JESUS (Matt.
   xiv. 12; xxviii. 8)

   THE FOOD OF THE WORLD (Matt. xiv. 19, 20)

   THE KING'S HIGHWAY (Matt. xiv. 22-36)

   PETER ON THE WAVES (Matt. xiv. 28)

   THB CRUMBS AND THE BREAD (Matt. xv. 21-31)

   THE DIVINE CHRIST CONFESSED, THE SUFFERING CHRIST DENIED (Matt. xvi.
   13-28)

   CHRIST FORESEEING THE CROSS (Matt. xvi. 21)

   THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY (Matt. xvii. 1-13)

   THE SECRET OF POWER. (Matt. xvii. 19, 20)

   THE COIN IN THE FISH'S MOUTH (Matt. xvii. 25, 26)
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CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS

   'Son, be of good cheer.'--MATT. ix. 2.

   This word of encouragement, which exhorts to both cheerfulness and
   courage, is often upon Christ's lips. It is only once employed in the
   Gospels by any other than He. If we throw together the various
   instances in which He thus speaks, we may get a somewhat striking view
   of the hindrances to such a temper of bold, buoyant cheerfulness which
   the world presents, and of the means for securing it which Christ
   provides.

   But before I consider these individually, let me point you to this
   thought, that such a disposition, facing the inevitable sorrows, evils,
   and toilsome tasks of life with glad and courageous buoyancy, is a
   Christian duty, and is a temper not merely to be longed for, but
   consciously and definitely to be striven after.

   We have a great deal more in our power, in the regulation of moods and
   tempers and dispositions, than we often are willing to acknowledge to
   ourselves. Our low' times--when we fret and are dull, and all things
   seem wrapped in gloom, and we are ready to sit down and bewail
   ourselves, like Job on his dunghill--are often quite as much the
   results of our own imperfect Christianity as the response of our
   feelings to external circumstances. It is by no means an unnecessary
   reminder for us, who have heavy tasks set us, which often seem too
   heavy, and are surrounded, as we all are, with crowding temptations to
   be bitter and melancholy and sad, that Christ commands us to be, and
   therefore we ought to be, of good cheer.'

   Another observation may be made as preliminary, and that is that Jesus
   Christ never tells people to cheer up without giving them reason to do
   so. We shall see presently that in all cases where the words occur they
   are immediately followed by words or deeds of His which hold forth
   something on which, if the hearer's faith lay hold, darkness and gloom
   will fly like morning mists before the rising sun. The world comes to
   us and says, in the midst of our sorrows and our difficulties, Be of
   good cheer,' and says it in vain, and generally only rubs salt into the
   sore by saying it. Jesus Christ never thus vainly preaches the duty of
   encouraging ourselves without giving us ample reasons for the
   cheerfulness which He enjoins.

   With these two remarks to begin with--that we ought to make it a part
   of our Christian discipline of ourselves to seek to cultivate a
   continuous and equable temperament of calm, courageous good cheer; and
   that Jesus Christ never commands such a temper without showing cause
   for our obedience--let us turn for a few moments to the various
   instances in which this expression falls from His lips.

   I. Now the first of them is this of my text, and from it we learn this
   truth, that Christ's first contribution to our temper of equable,
   courageous cheerfulness is the assurance that all our sins are
   forgiven.

   Son, be of good cheer,' said He to that poor palsied sufferer lying
   there upon the little light bed in front of Him. He had been brought to
   Christ to be cured of his palsy. Our Lord seems to offer him a very
   irrelevant blessing when, instead of the healing of his limbs, He
   offers him the forgiveness of his sins. That was possibly not what he
   wanted most, certainly it was not what the friends who had brought him
   wanted for him, but Jesus knew better than they what the man suffered
   most from and most needed to have cured. They would have said Palsy.'
   He said, Yes! but palsy that comes from sin.' For, no doubt, the sick
   man's disease was a sin of flesh avenged in kind,' and so Christ went
   to the fountain-head when He said, Thy sins be forgiven thee.' He
   therein implied, not only that the man was longing for something more
   than his four kindly but ignorant bearers there knew, but also that the
   root of his disease was extirpated when his sins were forgiven.

   And so, in like manner, thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.'
   There is nothing that so drapes a soul with darkness as either the
   consciousness of unforgiven sin or the want of consciousness of
   forgiven sin. There may be plenty of superficial cheerfulness. I know
   that; and I know what the bitter wise man called it, the crackling of
   thorns under the pot,' which, the more they crackle, the faster they
   turn into powdery ash and lose all their warmth. For stable, deep,
   lifelong, reliable courage and cheerfulness, there must be thorough
   work made with the black spot in the heart, and the black lines in the
   history. And unless our comforters can come to us and say, Thy sins be
   forgiven thee,' they are only chattering nonsense, and singing songs to
   a heavy heart which will make an effervescence like vinegar on nitre,'
   when they say to us, Be of good cheer.' How can I be glad if there lie
   coiled in my heart that consciousness of alienation and disorder in my
   relations to God, which all men carry with them, though they overlay it
   and try to forget it? There is no basis for a peaceful gladness worthy
   of a man except that which digs deep down into the very secrets of the
   heart, and lays the first course of the building in the consciousness
   of pardoned sin. Son, be of good cheer!' Lift up thy head. Face smaller
   evils without discomposure, and with quietly throbbing pulses, for the
   fountain of possible terrors and calamities is stanched and stayed
   with, Thy sins are forgiven thee.'

   Side by side with this first instance, illustrating the same general
   thought, though from a somewhat different point of view, I may put
   another of the instances in which the same phrase was soothingly on our
   Lord's lips. Daughter,' said He to the poor woman with the issue of
   blood, be of good cheer. Thy faith hath saved thee.' The consciousness
   of a living union with God through Christ by faith, which results in
   the present possession of a real, though it may be a partial,
   salvation, is indispensable to the temper of equable cheerfulness of
   which I have been speaking. Apart from that consciousness, you may have
   plenty of excitement, but no lasting calm. The contrast between the
   drugged and effervescent potion which the world gives as a cup of
   gladness, and the pure tonic which Jesus Christ administers for the
   same purpose, is infinite. He says to us, I forgive thy sins; by thy
   faith I save thee; go in peace.' Then the burdened heart is freed from
   its oppression, and the downcast face is lifted up, and all things
   around change, as when the sunshine comes out on the wintry landscape,
   and the very snow sparkles into diamonds. So much, then, for the first
   of the instances of the use of this phrase.

   II. We now take a second. Jesus Christ ministers to us cheerful courage
   because He manifests Himself to us as a Companion in the storm (Matt.
   xiv. 27).

   The narrative is very familiar to us, so that I need not enlarge upon
   it. You remember the scene--our Lord alone on the mountain in prayer,
   the darkness coming down upon the little boat, the storm rising as the
   darkness fell, the wind howling down the gorges of the mountains round
   the landlocked lake, the crew toiling in rowing, for the wind was
   contrary.' And then, all at once, out of the mysterious obscurity
   beneath the shadow of the hills, Something is seen moving, and it comes
   nearer; and the waves become solid beneath that light and noiseless
   foot, as steadily nearer He comes. Jesus Christ uses the billows as the
   pavement over which He approaches His servants, and the storms which
   beat on us are His occasion for drawing very near. Then they think Him
   a spirit, and cry out with voices that were heard amidst the howling of
   the tempest, and struck upon the ear of whomsoever told the Evangelist
   the story. They cry out with a shriek of terror--because Jesus Christ
   is coming to them in so strange a fashion! Have we never shrieked and
   groaned, and passionately wept aloud for the same reason; and mistaken
   the Lord of love and consolation for some grisly spectre? When He comes
   it is with the old word on His lips, Be of good cheer.'

   Tell us not to be frightened when we see something stalking across the
   waves in the darkness!' It is I'; surely that is enough. The Companion
   in the storm is the Calmer of the terror. He who recognises Jesus
   Christ as drawing near to his heart over wild billows may well be of
   good cheer,' since the storm but brings his truest treasure to him.


     Well roars the storm to those who hear

     A deeper Voice across the storm.'

   And He who, with unwetted foot, can tread on the wave, and with quiet
   voice heard above the shriek of the blast can say, It is I,' has the
   right to say, Be of good cheer,' and never says it in vain to such as
   take Him into their lives however tempest-tossed, and into their hearts
   however tremulous.

   III. A third instance of the occurrence of this word of cheer presents
   Jesus as ministering cheerful courage to us by reason of His being
   victor in the strife with the world (John xvi. 33).

   In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have
   overcome the world.'

   Of course the world' which He overcame is the whole aggregate of things
   and persons considered as separated from God, and as being the great
   Antagonist and counter power to a holy life of obedience and filial
   devotion. At that last moment when, according to all outward seeming
   and the estimate of things which sense would make, He was utterly and
   hopelessly and all but ignominiously beaten, He says, I have overcome
   the world.' What! Thou! within four-and-twenty hours of Thy Cross? Is
   that victory? Yes! For he conquers the world who uses all its
   opposition as well as its real good to help him, absolutely and
   utterly, to do the will of God. And he is conquered by the world who
   lets it, by its glozing sweetnesses and flatteries, or by its knitted
   brows and frowning eyes and threatening hand, hinder him from the path
   of perfect consecration and entire conformity to the Father's will.

   Christ has conquered. What does that matter to us? Why, it matters
   this, that we may have the Spirit of Jesus Christ in our hearts to make
   us also victorious in the same fight. And whosoever will lay his
   weakness on that strong arm, and open his emptiness to receive the
   fulness of that victorious Spirit for the very spirit of his life, will
   be more than conqueror through Him that loved us,' and can front all
   the evils, dangers, threatenings, temptations of the world, its heaped
   sweets and its frowning antagonisms, with the calm confidence that none
   of them are able to daunt him; and that the Victor Lord will cover his
   head in the day of battle and deliver him from every evil work. Be of
   good cheer, for I have overcome the world, and play your parts like men
   in the good fight of faith; for I am at your back, and will help you
   with Mine own strength.'

   IV. The last instance that I point to of the use of this phrase is one
   in which it was spoken by Christ's voice from heaven (Acts xxiii. 11).
   It was the voice which was heard by the Apostle Paul after he had been
   almost torn in pieces by the crowd in the Temple, and had been bestowed
   for security, by the half-contemptuous protection of the Roman
   governor, in the castle, and was looking onward into a very doubtful
   future, not knowing how many hours' purchase his life might be worth.
   That same night the Lord appeared to him and said, Be of good cheer,
   Paul, for as thou hast testified of Me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear
   witness also at Rome.' That is to say, No man can touch you until I let
   him, and nobody shall touch you until you have done your work and
   spoken out your testimony. Jerusalem is a little sphere; Rome is a
   great one. The tools to the hand that can use them. The reward for work
   is more work, and work in a larger sphere. So cheer up! for I have much
   for you to do yet.'

   And the spirit of that encouragement may go with us all, breeding in us
   the quiet confidence that no matter who may thwart or hinder, no matter
   what dangers or evils may seem to ring us round, the Master who bids us
   Be of good cheer' will give us a charmed life, and nothing shall by any
   means hurt us until He says to us, Be of good courage; for you have
   done your work; and now come and rest.' Wait on the Lord. Be of good
   courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart; wait, I say, on the
   Lord.'
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SOUL-HEALING FIRST: BODY-HEALING SECOND

   That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive
   sins (then saith He to the sick of the palsy), Arise, take up thy bed,
   and go unto thine house.'--MATT. ix. 6.

   The great example of our Lord's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is
   followed, in this and the preceding chapter, by a similar collection of
   His works of healing. These are divided into three groups, each
   consisting of three members. This miracle is the last of the second
   triad, of which the other two members are the miraculous stilling of
   the tempest and the casting out of the demons from the men in the
   country of the Gergesenes.

   One may discern a certain analogy in these three members of this
   central group. In all of them our Lord appears as the peace-bringer.
   But the spheres are different. The calm which was breathed over the
   stormy lake is peace of a lower kind than that which filled the soul of
   the demoniacs when the power that made discord within had been cast
   out. Even that peace was lower in kind than that which brought sweet
   repose in the assurance of pardon to this poor paralytic. Forgiveness
   speaks of a loftier blessing than even the casting out of demons. The
   manifestation of power and love steadily rises to a climax.

   The most important part of this story, then, is not the mere healing of
   the disease, but the forgiveness of sins which accompanies it. And the
   large teaching which our Lord gives as to the relation between His
   miracles and His standing work, His ordinary work which He has been
   doing all through the ages, which He is doing to-day, which He is ready
   to do for you and me if we will let Him, towers high above the mere
   miracle, which is honoured by being the signal attestation of that
   work.

   Therefore I would turn to this story now, not for the sake of dealing
   with the mere miraculous event, but in order to draw the important
   lessons from it which lie upon its very surface.

   I. The first thought that is suggested here is that our deepest need is
   forgiveness.

   How strangely irrelevant and beside the mark, at first sight, seems the
   answer which Christ gives to the eager zeal and earnestness of the man
   and his bearers. Christ's word is Son,' or as the original might more
   literally and even more tenderly be rendered, Child--be of good cheer;
   thy sins be forgiven thee.' That seemed far away from their want. It
   was far from their wish, but yet it was the shortest road to its
   accomplishment. Christ here goes straight to the heart of the
   necessity, when, passing by the disease for the moment, He speaks the
   great word of pardon. The palsy was probably the result of the
   sufferer's vice, and probably, too, he felt, whatever may have been his
   friends' wishes for him, that he needed forgiveness most. Such a
   conclusion as to his state of mind seems a fair inference from our
   Lord's words to him, for Christ would never have offered forgiveness to
   an impenitent or indifferent heart.

   So we may learn that our chief and prime need is forgiveness. Amid all
   our clamours and hungry needs, that is our deepest. Is not a man's
   chief relation in this world his relation to God? Is not that the most
   important thing about all of us? If that be wrong, will not everything
   be wrong? If that be right, will not everything come right? And is it
   not true that for you and me, and for all our fellows, whatever be the
   surface diversities of character, civilisation, culture, taste and the
   like, there is one deep experience common to every human spirit, and
   that is the fact, and in some sense more or less acutely the
   consciousness of the fact, that we have sinned, and come short of the
   glory of God'?

   There is the fontal source of all sorrow, for even to the most
   superficial observation ninety per cent., at any rate, of man's misery
   comes either from his own or from others' wrongdoing, and for the rest,
   it is regarded in the eye of faith as being sorrow that is needful
   because of sin, in order to discipline and to purify. But here stands
   the fact, that king and clown, philosopher and fool, men of culture and
   men of ignorance, all of us, through all the ages, manifest the unity
   of our nature in this--I was going to say most chiefly--that lapses
   from the path of rectitude, and indulgence in habits, thoughts,
   feelings, and actions, which even our consciences tell us are wrong,
   characterise us all.

   Hence the profound wisdom of Christ and of His Gospel in that, when it
   begins the task of healing, it does not peddle and potter on the
   surface, but goes straight to the heart, with true instinct flies at
   the head, like a wise physician pays little heed to secondary and
   unimportant symptoms, but grapples with the disease, makes the tree
   good, and leaves the good tree to make, as it will, the fruit good.

   The first thing to do to heal men's misery, is to make them pure; and
   the first step in the great method by which a man can be made pure, is
   to assure him of a divine forgiveness for the past. So the sneers that
   we often hear about Christian philanthropists taking tracts to people
   when they want soup,' and the like, are excessively shallow sneers, and
   indicate nothing more than this, that the critic has superficially
   diagnosed the disease, and is wofully wrong about the remedy. God
   forbid that I should say one word that would seem to depreciate the
   value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubt upon the purity
   of motives, or even to be lacking in admiration for the enthusiasm that
   fills and guides many an earnest man and woman, working amongst the
   squalid vice of our great cities and of our complex and barbarous
   civilisation to-day. I would recognise all their work as good and
   blessed; but, oh! dear brethren, it deals with the surface, and you
   will have to go a great deal deeper down than æ³´hetic, or
   intellectual, or economical, or political reformation and changes
   reach, before you touch the real reason why men and women are miserable
   in this world. And you will only effectually cure the misery, but you
   certainly then will do it, when you begin where the misery begins, and
   deal first with sin. The true saviour of society' is the man that can
   go to his brother, and as a minister declaratory of the divine heart
   can say--Brother, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.' And
   then, after that, the palsy will go out of his limbs, and a new nervous
   energy will come into them, and he will rise, take up his bed, and
   walk.

   II. Now, in the next place, notice, as coming out of this incident
   before us, the thought that forgiveness is an exclusively divine act.

   There was, sitting by, with their jealous and therefore blind eyes, a
   whole crowd of wise men and religious formalists of the first water,
   collected together as a kind of ecclesiastical inquisition and board of
   triers, as one of the other evangelists tells us, out of every corner
   of the land. They had no care for the dewy pity that was in Christ's
   looks, or for the nascent hope that began to swim up into the poor, dim
   eye of the paralytic. But they had keen scent for heresy, and so they
   fastened with true feline instinct upon the one thing, This man
   speaketh blasphemies. Who can forgive sins but God alone?' Ah! if you
   want to get people blind as bats to the radiant beauty of some lofty
   character, and insensible as rocks to the wants of a sad humanity,
   commend me to your religious formalists, whose religion is mainly a
   bundle of red tape tied round men's limbs to keep them from getting at
   things that they would like. These are the people who will be as hard
   as the nether millstones, and utterly blind to all enthusiasm and to
   all goodness.

   But yet these Pharisees are right; perfectly right. Forgiveness is an
   exclusively divine act. Of course. For sin has to do with God only;
   vice has to do with the laws of morality; crime has to do with the laws
   of the land. The same act may be vice, crime, and sin. In the one
   aspect it has to do with myself, in the other with my fellows, in the
   last with God. And so evil considered as sin comes under God's control
   only, and only He against whom it has been committed can forgive.

   What is forgiveness? The sweeping aside of penalties? the shutting up
   of some more or less material hell? By no means: penalties are often
   left; when sins are crimes they are generally left; when sins are vices
   they are always left, thank God! But in so far as sin is sin,
   considered as being the perversion and setting wrong of my relation to
   Him, its consequences, which are its penalties, are swept away by
   forgiveness; for forgiveness, in its essence and deepest meaning, is
   neither more nor less than that the love of the person against whom the
   wrong has been done shall flow out, notwithstanding the wrong. Pardon
   is love rising above the ice-dam which we have piled in its course, and
   pouring into our hearts.

   When you fathers and mothers forgive your children, what does it mean?
   Does it not mean that your love is neither deflected nor embittered any
   more, by reason of their wrongdoing, but pours upon them as of old? So
   God's forgiveness is at bottom--Child! there is nothing in my heart to
   thee, but pure and perfect love.' We fill the sky with mists, through
   which the sun itself has to look like a red ball of lurid fire. But it
   shines on the upper side of the mists all the same, and all the time,
   and thins them away and scatters them utterly, and shines forth in its
   own brightness on the rejoicing heart. Pardon is God's love, unchecked
   and unembittered, granted to the wrongdoer. And that is a divine act,
   and a divine act alone. Pharisees and Scribes were perfectly right. No
   man can forgive sins but God only.

   And I might add, though it is somewhat aside from my direct purpose,
   God can forgive sin; which some people nowadays say is impossible. The
   apparent impossibility arises only from shallow and erroneous notions
   of what forgiveness is. God does not--it might be too bold to say God
   cannot, if we believe in miracles--but as a matter of fact, God does
   not, usually interfere to hinder men from reaping, as regards this
   life, what they have sown. But as I say, that is not forgiveness; and
   is there any reason conceivable why it should be impossible for the
   divine love to pour down upon a sinful man who has forsaken his sin,
   and is trusting in God's mercy in Christ, just as if his sin was
   non-existent, in so far as it could condition or interfere with the
   flow of the divine mercy?

   And I may say, further, we need a definite divine assurance of pardon.
   Ah! if you have ever been down into the cellars of your own hearts, and
   seen the ugly things that coil there, you will know that a vague trust
   in a vague God and a vague mercy is not enough to still the conscience
   that has once been stung into action. My brothers, you want neither
   priests nor ceremonies on the one hand, nor a mere peradventure of Oh!
   God is merciful!' on the other, in order to deal with that deepest need
   of your heart. Nothing but the King's own sign-manual on the pardon
   makes it valid; and unless you and I can, somehow or other, come to
   close grips with God, and get into actual contact with Him, and hear,
   somehow, with infallible certitude, as from His own lips, the assurance
   of forgiveness, there is not enough for our needs.

   III. So I come to say, in the next place, that the incident before us
   teaches us that Jesus Christ claims and exercises this divine
   prerogative of forgiveness.

   Mark His answer to these cavillers. He admits their promises
   absolutely. They said, No man can forgive sins but God only.' If Christ
   was only a man, like us, standing in the same relation to the divine
   pardon that other teachers, saints, and prophets have stood, and had
   nothing more to do with it than simply, as I might do, to say to a
   troubled heart, My brother, be quite sure that God has forgiven you';
   if Christ's relation to the divine forgiveness was nothing more than
   ministerial and declaratory, why, in the name, not of common sense
   only, but of veracity, did He not turn round to these men and say so?
   He was bound, by all the obligations of a religious teacher, to
   disclaim, as you or I would have done under similar circumstances, the
   misapprehension of His words: I use blasphemies? No! I am not speaking
   blasphemies. I know that God only can forgive sins, and I am doing no
   more than telling my poor brother here that his sins are forgiven by
   God.' But that is not His answer at all. What He says in effect
   is--Yes; you are quite right. No man can forgive sins, but God only. I
   forgive sins. Whom think ye, then, that I, the Son of Man am? It is
   easy to say "Thy sins be forgiven thee"--far easier to say that than to
   say "Take up thy bed and walk," because one can verify and check the
   accomplishment of the saying in the one case, and one cannot in the
   other. The sentences are equally easy to pronounce, the things are
   equally difficult for a man to do, but the difference is that one of
   them can be verified and the other of them cannot. I will do the
   visible impossibility, and then I leave you to judge whether I can do
   the invisible one or not.'

   Now, dear brethren, I have only one word to say about that, and it is
   this. We are here brought sharp up to a fork in the road. I know that
   it is not always a satisfactory way of arguing to compel a man to take
   one horn or other of an alternative, but it is quite fair to do go in
   the present case; and I would press it upon some of you who, I think,
   urgently need to consider the dilemma. Either the Pharisees were quite
   right, and Jesus Christ, the meek, the humble, the Pattern of all lowly
   gentleness, the Teacher whom nineteen centuries confess that they have
   not exhausted, was an audacious blasphemer, or He was God manifest in
   the flesh. The whole context forbids us to take these words, Thy sins
   be forgiven thee,' as anything less than the voice of divine love
   wiping out the man's transgressions; and if Jesus Christ pretended or
   presumed to do that, there is no hypothesis that I know of which can
   save His character for the reverence of man, but that which sees in Him
   God revealed in manhood; the world's Judge, from whom the world may
   receive divine forgiveness.

   IV. Jesus Christ here brings visible facts into the witness-box as the
   attesters of His invisible powers.

   Of course the miracle was such a witness in a special way, inasmuch as
   it and forgiveness were equally divine prerogatives and acts. I need
   not dwell now upon what I have already observed in my introductory
   remarks, that our Lord here teaches us the relative importance of the
   attesting miracle and the thing attested, and regards the miracle as
   subordinate to the higher and spiritual work of bringing pardon.

   But we may widen out this into the thought that the subsidiary effects
   of Christian faith in individuals, and of the less complete Christian
   faith which is diffused over society, do stand as very strong evidences
   of the reality of Christ's professions and claims to exercise this
   invisible power of pardon. Or, to put it into a concrete form, and to
   take an illustration which may need large deductions.--Go into a
   Salvation Army meeting. Admit the extravagance, the coarseness, and all
   the rest which we educated and superfine Christians cannot stand. But
   when you have blown away the froth, is there not something left in the
   cup which looks uncommonly like the wine of the Kingdom? Are there not
   visible results of that, as of every earnest effort to carry the
   message of forgiveness to men, which create an immense presumption in
   favour of its reality and divine origin? Men reclaimed, passions tamed,
   homes that were pandemoniums made Bethels, houses of God. Wherever
   Christ's forgiving power really comes into a heart, life is beautified,
   is purified, is ennobled; and secondary and material benefits follow in
   the train.

   I claim all the difference between Christendom and Heathendom as
   attestation of the reality of Christ's divine and atoning work. I say,
   and I believe it to be a valid and a good argument as against much of
   the doubt of this day, If you seek His monument, look around.' His own
   answer to the question, Art thou He that should come?' is valid still:
   Go and tell John the things that ye see and hear'; the dead are raised,
   the deaf ears are opened; faculties that lie dormant are quickened, and
   in a thousand ways the swift spirit of life flows from Him and
   vitalises the dead masses of humanity.

   Let any system of belief or of no belief do the like if it can. This
   rod has budded at any rate, let the magicians do the same with their
   enchantments.

   Now, Christian men and women, ye are My witnesses,' saith the Lord. The
   world takes its notions of Christianity, and its belief in the power of
   Christianity, a great deal more from you than it does from preachers
   and apologists. You are the Bibles that most men read. See to it that
   your lives represent worthily the redeeming and the ennobling power of
   your Master.

   And as for the rest of you, do not waste your time trying to purify the
   stream twenty miles down from the fountainhead, but go to the source.
   Do not believe, brother, that your palsy, or your fever, your paralysis
   of will towards good, or the unwholesome ardour with which you are
   impelled to wrong, and the consequent misery and restlessness, can ever
   be healed until you go to Christ--the forgiving Christ--and let Him lay
   His hand upon you; and from His own sweet and infallible lips hear the
   word that shall come as a charm through all your nature: Son, thy sins
   be forgiven thee.' Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened; then
   shall the lame man leap as an hart';--then limitations, sorrows,
   miseries, will pass away, and forgiveness will bear fruit in joy and
   power, in holiness, health and peace.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE CALL OF MATTHEW

   And as Jesus passed forth from thence, He saw a man, named Matthew,
   sitting at the receipt of custom: and He saith unto him, Follow Me. And
   he arose, and followed Him. 10. And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at
   meat in the house, behold, many publicans and sinners came and sat down
   with Him and His disciples. 11. And when the Pharisees saw it, they
   said unto His disciples, Why eateth your Master with publicans and
   sinners? 12. But when Jesus heard that, He said unto them, They that be
   whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. 13. But go ye and
   learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am
   not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. 14. Then
   came to Him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees
   fast oft, but Thy disciples fast not? 15. And Jesus said unto them, Can
   the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is
   with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken
   from them, and then shall they fast. 16. No man putteth a piece of new
   cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up
   taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. 17. Neither do men
   put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine
   runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new
   bottles, and both are preserved.'--MATT. ix. 9-17.

   All three evangelists connect the call of Matthew immediately with the
   cure of the paralytic, and follow it with an account of Christ's
   answers to sundry cavils from Pharisees and John's disciples. No doubt,
   the spectacle of this new Teacher taking a publican into His circle of
   disciples, and, not content with such an outrage on all proper
   patriotic feeling, following it up with scandalous companionship with
   the sort of people that a publican could get to accept his hospitality,
   sharpened hatred and made suspicion prick its ears. Mark and Luke call
   the publican Levi, he calls himself Matthew, the former being probably
   his name before his discipleship, the latter, that by which he was
   known thereafter. Possibly Jesus gave it him, as in the cases of Simon,
   and perhaps Bartholomew. But, however acquired, it superseded the old
   one, as the fact that it appears in the lists of the apostles in both
   the other evangelists and in Acts, shows. Its use here may be a trace
   of a touching desire to make sure that readers, who only knew him as
   Matthew, should understand who this publican was. It is like the little
   likenesses of themselves, in some corner of a background, that early
   painters used to slip into a picture of Madonna and angels. There was
   no vanity in the wish, for he says nothing about his sacrifices,
   leaving it to Luke to tell that he left all,' but he does crave that
   his brethren, who read, should know that it was he whom Jesus honoured
   by His call.

   The condensed narrative emphasises three things, (1) his occupation
   with his ordinary business when that wonderful summons thrilled his
   soul; (2) the curt authoritative command, and (3) the swift obedience.
   As to the first, Capernaum was on a great trade route, and the
   custom-house officers there would have their hands full. This one was
   busy at his work, hateful and shameful as it was in Jewish eyes, and
   into that sordid atmosphere, like a flash of light into a mephitic
   cavern full of unclean creatures, came the transcendent mercy of Jesus'
   summons. There is no region of life so foul, so mean, so despicable in
   men's eyes, but that the quickening Voice will enter there. We do not
   need to be in temples or about sacred tasks in order to hear it. It
   summons us in, and sometimes from, our daily work. Well for those who
   know whose Voice it is, and do not mistake it for some Eli's!

   No doubt this was not the first of Matthew's knowledge of Jesus. Living
   in Capernaum, he would have had many opportunities of hearing Him or of
   Him, and his heart and conscience may have been stirred. As he sat in
   his tolbooth,' feeling contempt and hatred poured on him, he, no doubt,
   had had longings to get nearer to the One whose voice was gentle, and
   His looks, love. So the call would come to him as the fulfilment of a
   dim hope, and it would be a joyful surprise to know that Jesus wished
   to have him for a disciple as much as he wished to have Jesus for a
   Teacher. The ring of fire and hate within which he had been imprisoned
   was broken, and there was One who cared to have him, and who would not
   shrink from his touch. In the light of that assurance, the call became,
   not a summons to give anything up, but an invitation to receive a
   better possession than all with which he was called to part. And if we
   saw things as they are, would it not always be so to us? Follow Me'
   does mean, Forsake earth and self, but it means still more: Take what
   is more than all. It parts from these because it unites to Jesus.
   Therefore it means gain, not deprivation. And it condenses all rules
   for life into one, for to follow Him is the sum of all duty, and yields
   the perfect pattern of conduct and character, while it is also the
   secret of all blessedness, and the talisman that assures a man of
   continual progress. They who follow are near, and will reach, Him. Of
   course, if His servants follow Him, it stands to reason that one day,
   where I am there shall also My servants be.' So in that command lie a
   sufficient guide for earth, and a sure guarantee for heaven.

   And he arose and followed Him.' That is the only thing that we are told
   of Matthew. We hear no more of him, except that he made a feast in his
   house on the occasion. No doubt he did his work as an apostle, but
   oblivion has swallowed up all that. A happy fate to be known to all the
   world for all time, only by this one thing, that he unconditionally,
   immediately and joyfully obeyed Christ's call! He might have said: How
   can I leave my work? I must make up my accounts, hand over my papers,
   do a hundred things in order to wind up matters, and I must postpone
   following till then.' But he sprang up at once. He would have abundant
   opportunities to settle all details afterwards, but if he let this
   opportunity of taking his place as a disciple pass, he might never have
   another. There are some things that are best done gradually and slowly,
   but obedience to Christ's call is not one of them. Prompt obedience is
   the only safety. The psalmist knew the danger of delay when he said: I
   made haste and delayed not, but made haste to keep Thy commandments.'

   Matthew does not tell us that he made the feast, but Luke does. It was
   the natural expression of his thankfulness and joy for the new bond.
   His knowledge was small, but his love was great. How could he honour
   Jesus enough? But he was a pariah in Capernaum, and the only guests he
   could assemble were, like himself, outcasts from respectable society.'
   In popular estimation all publicans were regarded without any more ado
   as sinners,' but probably that designation is here applied to
   disreputable folks of various kinds and degrees of shadiness, who
   gravitated to Matthew and his class, because, like him, they were
   repulsed by every one else. Even outcasts hunger for society, and
   manage to get a community of their own, in which they find some glow of
   comradeship, and some defence from hatred and contempt. Even lepers
   herd together and have their own rules of intercourse.

   But what a scandal in the eyes not only of Pharisees, but of all the
   proper people in Capernaum, Jesus' going to such a gathering of
   disreputables would be, we may estimate if we remember that they did
   not know His reason, but thought that He went because He liked the
   atmosphere and the company. Like draws to like' was the conclusion
   suggested, in the absence of His own explanation. The Pharisee
   conceived that his duty in regard to publicans and sinners was to keep
   as far from them as he could, and his strait-laced self-righteousness
   had never dreamed of going to them with an open heart, and trying to
   win them to a better life. Many so-called followers of Jesus still take
   that attitude. They gather up their skirts round them daintily, and
   never think that it would be liker their Lord to sweep away the mud
   than to pick their steps through it, caring mainly to keep their own
   shoes clean.

   The feast was probably spread in some courtyard or open space, to
   which, as is the Eastern custom, uninvited spectators could have
   access. It is quite in accordance with the usage of the times and land
   that the Pharisees should have been onlookers, and should have been
   able to talk to the disciples. No doubt their colloquy became animated,
   and perhaps loud, so that it could easily attract Christ's attention.
   He answered for Himself, and the tone of His reply is friendly and
   explanatory, as if He recognised that the questioners genuinely wished
   to know why' He was sitting in such company.

   It discloses His motive, and thereby sweeps away all insinuations that
   He consorted with sinners because their company was congenial. It was
   precisely for the opposite reason, because He was so unlike them. He
   came among these sinners as a physician; and who wonders at his being
   beside the sick? He does not spend his days by their bedsides because
   he likes the atmosphere, but because it is his business to make them
   well. Now, in that comparison, Jesus pronounces no opinion on the
   correctness of the Pharisees' estimate of themselves as righteous,' or
   of publicans as sinners, but simply takes them on their own ground. But
   He does make a great claim for Himself, and speaks out of His
   consciousness of power to heal men's worst disease, sin. It is a
   tremendous assertion to make of oneself, and its greatness is enhanced
   by the quiet way in which it is stated as a thought familiar to
   Himself. What right had He to pose as the physician for humanity, and
   how can such a claim be reconciled with His being meek and lowly in
   heart'? If He Himself was one of the sick and needed healing, how can
   He be the healer of the rest? If being a sinful man, as we all are, He
   made such a claim, what becomes of the reverence which is paid to Him
   as a great religious Teacher, and where has His 'sweet reasonableness'
   vanished?

   Jesus passes from explanation of His personal relation to the publicans
   to adduce the broad principle which should shape the Pharisees'
   relation to them, as it had shaped His. Hosea had said long ago that
   God delighted more in mercy' than in sacrifice.' Kindly helpfulness to
   men is better worship than exact performance of any ritual. Sacrifice
   propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him, and imitation is the
   perfection of divine service. Jesus here speaks as all the prophets had
   spoken, and smites with a deadly stroke the mechanical formalism which
   in every age stiffens religion into ceremonies and neglects love
   towards God, expressed in mercy to men. He lays bare the secret of His
   own life, and He thereby lays on His followers the obligation of making
   it the moving impulse of theirs.

   The great general truth is followed, as it has been preceded, by a
   plain statement of Jesus' own conception of His mission in the world. I
   came,' says He, hinting at the fact that He was before He was born, and
   that His Incarnation was His voluntary act. True, He was sent, and we
   speak of His mission, but also He came,' and we speak of His advent. To
   repentance' is omitted by the best editors as being brought over from
   Luke, where it is genuine. But it is a correct gloss on the simple word
   call,' though repentance' is but a small part of that to which He
   summons. He calls us to repent; He calls us to Himself; He calls us to
   self-surrender; He calls us to Eternal Life; He calls us to a better
   feast than Matthew had spread. But we must recognise that we are
   sinners, or we shall never realise that His invitation is for us, nor
   ever feel that we need a physician, and have in Him, and in Him alone,
   the Physician whom we need.

   The Pharisees objected to Jesus' feasting, and could scarcely in the
   same breath find fault with Him for not fasting, but they put forward
   some of John's disciples to bring that fresh objection. Common hatred
   is a strong cement, and often holds opposites together for a while. It
   was bad for John's followers that they should be willing to say, We and
   the Pharisees.' They had travelled far from the days when their master
   had called the same class a generation of vipers'! Their keen desire to
   uphold the honour of their teacher, whose light they saw paling before
   the younger Jesus, made them hostile to Him, and, as is usually the
   case, the followers were more partisan than the leader. Religious
   antagonism sometimes stoops to very strange alliances. The two
   questions brought together in this context are noticeably alike, and
   noticeably different. Both ask for the reason of conduct which they do
   not go the length of impugning. They seem to be desirous of
   enlightenment, they are really eager to condemn. Both avoid seeming to
   call in question the acts of the persons addressed, for the Pharisees
   interrogate the disciples as to the reason for Jesus' conduct, while
   John's disciples ask from Jesus the reason of His disciples' conduct.
   In both, mock respectfulness covers lively hatred.

   Our Lord's first answer is as profound as it is beautiful, and veils,
   while it reveals, a lofty claim for Himself and a solemn foresight of
   His death, and lays down a great and fruitful principle as to the
   relations between spiritual moods and outward acts of religion. His
   speaking of Himself as the Bridegroom' would recall to some of His
   questioners, and that with a touch of shame, John's nobly humble
   acceptance of the subordinate place of the bridegroom's friend and
   elevation of Jesus to that of the bridegroom. But it was not merely a
   rebuking quotation from John's witness, but the expression of His own
   unclouded and continual consciousness of what He was to humanity, and
   of what humanity could find in Him, as well as a sovereign
   appropriating to Himself of many prophetic strains. What depth of love,
   what mysterious blending of spirit, what adoring, lowly obedience, what
   perfection of protecting care, what rapture of possession, what rest of
   heart in trust, what dower of riches are dimly shadowed in that
   wonderful emblem, will never be known till the hour of the
   marriage-supper of the Lamb, when His bride hath made herself ready.'
   But across the light there flits a shadow. It is but for a moment, and
   it meant little to the hearers, but it meant much to Him. For He could
   not look forward to winning His bride without seeing the grim Cross,
   and even athwart the brightness of the days of companionship with His
   humble friends, came the darkness on His soul, though not on theirs, of
   the violent end when He shall be taken from them.' The hint fell
   apparently on deaf ears, but it witnesses to the continual presence in
   the mind of Jesus of His sufferings and death. The certainty that He
   must die was not forced on Him by the failure of His efforts as His
   career unfolded itself. It was no disappointment of bright earlier
   hopes, as is the case with many a disillusionised reformer, who thought
   at the outset that he had only to speak and all men would listen. It
   was the clearly discerned goal from the first. The Son of Man came
   . . . to give His life a ransom.'

   But our Lord here lays down a broad principle, which, if applied as it
   was meant to be, would lift a heavy burden of outward observance off
   the Christian consciousness. Fast when you are sad; feast when you are
   glad. Let the disposition, the mood, the moment's circumstance, mould
   your action. There is no virtue or sanctity in observances which do not
   correspond to the inner self. What a charter of liberty is proclaimed
   in these quiet words! What mountains of ceremonial unreality,
   oppressive to the spirit, are cast into the sea by them! How different
   Christendom would have been and would be to-day, if Christians had
   learned the lesson of these words!

   The two condensed parables or extended metaphors, which follow the
   vindication of the disciples, carry the matter further, and lay down a
   principle which is intended to cover not only the question in hand,
   their non-observance of Jewish regulations as to fasting, but the whole
   subject of the relations of the new word, which Jesus felt that He
   brought, to the old system. The same consciousness of His unique
   mission which prompted His use of the term bridegroom,' shines through
   the two metaphors of the new cloth and the new wine. He knows that He
   is about to bring a new garb to men, and to give them new wine to
   drink, and He knows that what He brings is no mere patch on a worn-out
   system, but a new fermenting force, which demands fresh vehicles and
   modes of expression. The two metaphors take up different aspects of one
   thought. To try to mend an old coat with a bit of unshrunk cloth would
   only make a worse dissolution of continuity, for as soon as a shower
   fell on it the patch would shrink, and, in shrinking, pull the thin
   pieces of the old garment adjoining it to itself. Judaism was already
   rent' and worn too thin to be capable of repair. The only thing to be
   done was as a vesture' to fold it up' and shape a new garment out of
   new cloth. What was true as to the supremely new thing which He brought
   into the world remains true, in less eminent degree, of the less acute
   differences between the Old and the New, within Christianity itself.
   There do come times when its externals become antiquated, worn thin and
   torn, and when patching is useless. Christian men, like others,
   constitutionally incline to conservatism or to progress, and the one
   temperament needs to be warned against obstinately preserving old
   clothes, and the other against eagerly insisting that they are past
   mending.

   But a patch and a worn garment do not wholly describe the relations of
   the old and the new. Freshly made wine, still fermenting, and old,
   stiff wine-skins which have lost their elasticity suggest further
   thoughts. Now we have to do with containing vessel versus contents,
   with a fermenting force versus stiffened forms. To put that into these
   will destroy both. For example, if the struggle of the Judaisers in the
   early Church had succeeded, and Christianity had become a Jewish sect,
   it would have dwindled to nothing, as the Jewish-minded Christians did.
   The wine must have bottles. Every great spiritual renovating force must
   embody itself in institutions. Spiritual emotions must express
   themselves in acts of worship, spiritual convictions must speak in a
   creed. But the containing vessel must be congruous with, and still
   more, it must be created by, the contained force, as there are
   creatures who frame their shells to fit the convolutions of their
   bodies, and build them up from their own substance. Forms are good, as
   long as they can stretch if need be; when they are too stiff to expand,
   they restrict rather than contain the wine, and if short-sighted
   obstinacy insists on keeping it in them, there will be a great spill
   and loss of much that is precious.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE TOUCH OF FAITH AND THE TOUCH OF CHRIST

   While He spake these things unto them, behold, there came a certain
   ruler, and worshipped Him, saying, My daughter is even now dead: but
   come and lay Thy hand upon her, and she shall live. 19. And Jesus
   arose, and followed him, and so did His disciples. 20. And, behold, a
   woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came
   behind Him, and touched the hem of His garment: 21. For she said within
   herself, If I may but touch His garment, I shall be whole. 22. But
   Jesus turned Him about, and when He saw her, He said, Daughter, be of
   good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made
   whole from that hour. 23. And when Jesus came into the ruler's house,
   and saw the minstrels and the people making a noise. 24. He said unto
   them, Give place: for the maid is not dead, but sleepeth. And they
   laughed Him to scorn. 25. But when the people were put forth, He went
   in, and took her by the hand, and the maid arose. 26. And the fame
   hereof went abroad into all that land. 27. And when Jesus departed
   thence, two blind men followed Him, crying, and saying, Thou Son of
   David, have mercy on us. 28. And when He was come into the house, the
   blind men came to Him: and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am
   able to do this? They said unto Him, Yea, Lord. 29. Then touched He
   their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you. 30. And
   their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See
   that no man know it. 31. But they, when they were departed, spread
   abroad His fame in all that country.'--MATT. ix. 18-31.

   The three miracles included in the present section belong to the last
   group of this series. Those of the second group were all effected by
   Christ's word. Those now to be considered are all effected by touch.
   The first two are intertwined. The narrative of the healing of the
   woman is embedded in the account of the raising of Jairus's daughter.

   Mark the impression of calm consciousness of power and leisurely
   dignity produced by Christ's having time to pause, even on such an
   errand, in order to heal, by the way, the other sufferer. The father
   and the disciples would wonder at Him as He stayed His steps, and be
   apt to feel that priceless moments were being lost; but He knows His
   own resources, and can afford to let the child die while He heals the
   woman. The one shall receive no harm by the delay, and the other will
   be blessed. Our Lord is sitting at the feast which Matthew gave on the
   occasion of his call, engaged in vindicating His sharing in innocent
   festivity against the cavils of the Pharisees, when the summons to the
   death-bed comes to Him from the lips of the father, who breaks in on
   the banquet with his imploring cry. Matthew gives the story much more
   summarily than the other evangelists, and does not distinguish, as they
   do, between Jairus's first words, at the point of death, and the
   message of her actual decease, which met them on the way. The call of
   sorrow always reaches Christ's ear, and the cry for help is never
   deemed by Him an interruption. So this man, gluttonous and a
   wine-bibber,' as these Pharisees thought Him, willingly and at once
   leaves the house of feasting for that of mourning. How near together,
   in this awful life of ours, the two lie, and how thin the partition
   walls! Well for those whose feasts do not bar them out from hearing the
   weeping next door.

   As the crowd accompanies Jesus, His hasting love is, for a moment,
   diverted by another sufferer. We never go on an errand of mercy but we
   pass a hundred other sorrowing hearts, so close packed lie the griefs
   of men. This woman is a poor shrinking creature, broken down by long
   illness (which had lasted for the same length of time as the joyous
   life of Jairus's child), made more timid by disappointed hopes of cure,
   and depressed by poverty to which her many doctors had brought her. She
   does not venture to stop this new Rabbi-physician, as He goes with the
   church dignitary of the town to heal his daughter, but lets Him pass
   before she can make up her mind to go near Him; and then she comes
   creeping up behind the crowd, puts out her wasted, trembling hand to
   the hem of His garment,--and she is whole.

   The other evangelists give us a more extended account, but Matthew
   throws into prominence, in his condensed narrative, the essential
   points.

   Notice her real but imperfect faith. There was unquestionable
   confidence in Christ's power, and very genuine desire for healing. But
   it was a very ignorant faith. She believes that her touch of the
   garment will heal without Christ's will or knowledge, much more His
   pitying love, having any part in it. She thinks that she may win her
   desire furtively, and may carry it away, and He be none the wiser nor
   the poorer for the stolen blessing. What utter, blank ignorance of His
   character and way of working! What gross superstition! Yes, and withal
   what a hunger of desire, what absolute assurance of confidence that one
   finger-tip on His robe was enough! Therefore she had her desire, and
   her Healer recognised her faith as true, though blended with much
   ignorance of Him. Her error was very like that which many Christians
   entertain with less excuse. To attach importance to external means of
   grace, rites, ordinances, sacraments, outward connection with Christian
   organisations, is the very same misconception in a slightly different
   form. Such error is always near us; it is especially rife in countries
   where there has long been a visible Church. It has received strange new
   vigour to-day, partly by reaction from extreme rationalism, partly by
   the growing cultivation of the aesthetic faculties. It is threatening
   to corrupt the simplicity and spirituality of Christian worship, and
   needs to be strenuously resisted. But the more we have to fight against
   it, the more do we need to remember that, along with this clinging to
   the hem of the garment instead of to the heart of its Wearer, there may
   be a very real trust, which might shame some of those who profess to
   hold a less sensuous form of faith. Many a poor soul clasping a
   crucifix clings to the Cross. Many a devout heart kneeling at mass sees
   through the incense-smoke the face of Christ.

   This woman's faith was selfish. She wanted health; she did not care
   much about the Healer. She would have been quite contented to have had
   no more to do with Him, if she could only have stolen out of the crowd
   cured. She would have had little gratitude to the unconscious Giver of
   a stolen good. So, many a Christian life in its earlier stages is more
   absorbed with its own deep misery and its desire for deliverance, than
   with Him. Love comes after, born of the experience of His love. But
   faith precedes love, and the predominant motive impelling to faith at
   first is distinctly self-regard. That is all as it should be. The most
   purely self-absorbed wish to escape from the most rudely pictured hell
   is often the beginning of a true trust in Christ, which, in due time,
   will be elevated into perfect consecration. Some of our modern
   teachers, who are shocked at Christianity because it lays the
   foundation of the most self-denying morality in such selfishness,'
   would be none the worse for going to school to this story, and learning
   from it how a desire for nothing more than to get rid of a painful
   disease, started a process which turned a life into a peaceful,
   thankful surrender of the cured self to the love and service of the
   mighty Healer.

   Observe, next, how Christ answers the imperfect faith, and, by
   answering, corrects and confirms it. Matthew omits Christ's question as
   to who touched Him, the disciples' reply, and His renewed asseveration
   that He was conscious of power having gone forth from Him. All these
   belong to the loving method by which our Lord sought to draw forth an
   open acknowledgment. Womanly diffidence, enfeebled health, her special
   disease, all made the woman wish to hide herself. She wanted to steal
   away unnoticed, as she hoped that she had come. But Christ forces her
   to stand out before all the crowd, and there, with all eyes upon
   her,--cold, cruel eyes, some of them--to conquer her shame, and tell
   all the truth. Strange kindness that; strangely contrasted with His
   ordinary desire to avoid notoriety, and with His ordinary tender
   consideration for shrinking weakness! He did it for her sake, not for
   His own. She is changed from timidity to courage. At one moment she
   stretches out her wasted finger, a tremulous invalid; at the next, she
   flings herself at His feet, a confessor. He would have us testify for
   Him, because faith unavowed, like a plant in the dark, is apt to become
   pale and sickly; but ere He bids us own His name, He pours into our
   hearts, in answer to our secret appeal, the health of His own life, and
   the blissful consciousness of that great gift which makes the tongue of
   the dumb sing.

   His words to her are full of tenderness. She receives the name of
   daughter.' Gently He encourages her timidity by that Be of good cheer,'
   and then He sets right her error: Thy faith'--not thy finger--hath made
   thee whole.' There was no real connection between the touch of the robe
   and healing; but the woman thought that there was, and so Christ
   stooped to her childish thought, and allowed her to prescribe the road
   which His mercy should take. But He would not leave her with her error.
   The true means of contact between us and Him is not our outward contact
   with external means of grace, but the touch of our spirits by faith.
   Faith is nothing in itself, and heals only because it brings us into
   union with His power, which is the sole cause of our healing. Faith is
   the hand which receives the blessing. It may be a wasted and tremulous
   hand, like that which this woman laid lightly on His robe. But He feels
   its touch, though a universe presses on Him, and He answers. Not the
   garment's hem, but Christ's love, is the cause of our salvation. Not an
   outward contact with it or with Him, but faith, is the condition on
   which His life, which knows no disease, pours into our souls. The hand
   of my faith lifted to Him will receive into its empty palm and clasping
   fingers the special blessing for my special wants.

   The other evangelists tell us that, at the moment of His words to the
   woman, the messengers came bearing tidings of the child's death. How
   Jairus must have grudged the pause! A word from Christ, like the
   pressure of His hand, heartened him. Like a river turned from its
   course for a space, to fill some empty reservoir, His love comes back
   to its original direction. How abundant the power and mercy, to which
   such a work as that just done was but a parenthesis! The doleful music
   and the shrill shrieks of Eastern mourning, which met them as they
   entered Jairus's house, disturbed the sanctity of the hour, and were in
   strong contrast with the majestic calmness of Jesus. Not amid venal
   lamentations and excited cries will He do His work. He bids the noisy
   crowd forth with curt, almost stern, command, and therein rebukes all
   such hollow and tumultuous scenes, in the presence of the stillness of
   death, still more where faith in Him has robbed it of its terror, in
   robbing it of its perpetuity. It is strange that believing readers
   should have thought that our Lord meant to say that the little girl was
   not really dead, but only in a swoon. The scornful laughter of the
   flute-players and hired mourners understood Him better. They knew that
   it was real death, as men count death, and, as has often been the case,
   the laughter of His foes has served to establish the truth. That was
   not worthy to be called death from which the child was so soon and
   easily to be awaked. But, besides this special application to the case
   in hand, that great saying of our Lord's carries the blessed truth
   that, since He has come, death is softened into sleep for all who love
   Him. The euphemism is not peculiar to Christianity, but has a deeper
   meaning on Christian lips than when Greeks or Romans spoke of the
   eternal sleep. Others speak of death by any name rather than its own,
   because they fear it so much. The Christian does so, because he fears
   it so little,--and, as a matter of fact, the use of the word death as
   meaning merely the separation of soul and body by the physical act is
   exceptional in the New Testament. This name of sleep, sanctioned thus
   by Christ, is the sweetest of all. It speaks of the cessation of
   connection with the world of sense, and long disquiet merged in rest.'
   It does not imply unconsciousness, for we are not unconscious when we
   sleep, but only unaware of externals. It holds the promise of waking
   when the sun comes. So it has driven out the ugly old name. Our tears
   flow less bitterly when we think of our dear ones as sleeping in
   Jesus.' Their bodies, like this little child's, are dead, but they are
   not. They rest, conscious of their own blessedness and of Him in whom
   they live, and have their being,' whether they move' or no.

   Then comes the great deed. The crowd is shut out. For such a work
   silence is befitting. The father and mother, with His foremost three
   disciples, go with Him into the chamber. There is no effort, repeated
   and gradually successful, as when Elisha raised the dead boy; no
   praying, as when Peter raised Dorcas; only the touch of the hand in
   which life throbbed in fulness, and, as the other narratives record,
   two words, spoken strangely to, and yet more strangely heard by, the
   dull, cold ear of death. Their echo lingered long with Peter, and Mark
   gives us them in the original Aramaic. But Matthew passes them by, as
   he seems here to have desired to emphasise the power of Christ's touch.
   But touch or word, the real cause of the miracle was simply His will;
   and whether He used media to help men's faith, or said only I will,'
   mattered little. He varied His methods as the circumstances of the
   recipients required, and in order that they and we might learn that He
   was tied to none. These miracles of raising the dead are three in
   number. Jairus's daughter is raised from her bed, just having passed
   away; the widow's son at Nain from his bier, having been for a little
   longer separated from his body; Lazarus from the grave, having been
   dead four days. A few minutes, or days, or four thousand years, are one
   to His power. These three are in some sense the first-fruits of the
   great harvest; the stars that shone out singly before all the heaven is
   in a blaze. For, though they died again, and so left to Him the
   precedence in resurrection, as in all besides, they are still prophetic
   of His power in the hour when they that sleep in the dust' shall awake
   at His voice. Blessed they who, like this little maiden, are awakened,
   not only by His voice, but by His touch, and to find, as she did, their
   hand in His!

   The third of these miracles, which Matthew seems to reckon as the
   second in the group, because he treats the two former as so closely
   connected as to be but one in numeration, need not detain us long. It
   is found only in this Gospel. The first point to be observed in it is
   the cry of these two blind men. There is something pathetic and
   exquisitely natural in the two being together, as is also the case in
   the similar miracle, at a later period, on the outskirts of Jericho.
   Equal sorrows drive men together for such poor help and solace as they
   can give each other. They have common experiences which isolate them
   from others, and they creep close for warmth and companionship. All the
   blind men in the Gospels have certain resemblances. One is that they
   are all sturdily persevering, as perhaps was easier for them because
   they could not see the impatience of the listeners, and possibly
   because, in most cases, persistent begging was their trade, and they
   were used to refusals. But a more important trait is their recognition
   of Jesus as Son of David.' Blind as they are, they see more than do the
   seeing. Thrown in upon themselves, they may have been led to ponder the
   old words, and by their affliction been made more ready to welcome One
   who, if He were Messiah, was coming with a special blessing for
   them--to open the blind eyes.' Men who deeply desire a good are quick
   to listen to the promise of its accomplishment. So these two followed
   Him along the road, loudly and perseveringly calling out their
   profession of faith, and their entreaty for sight.

   The next point is our Lord's treatment. He let them cry on, apparently
   unheeding. Had, then, the two miracles just done exhausted His stock of
   power or of pity? Certainly His reason was, as it always was, their
   good. We do not know why it was better for them to have to wait, and
   continue their entreaty; but we may be quite sure that the reason for
   all His delays is the same,--the larger blessing which comes with the
   answer when it comes, and the large blessings which may be gathered
   while we wait its coming. Christ's question to them, when at last they
   have found their way even indoors, holds out more hope than they had
   yet received. By it, Christ established a close relation with them, and
   implied to them that He was willing to answer their cry. One can fancy
   how the poor blind faces would light up with a flush of eager
   expectation, and how swift would be the answer. The question is not
   cold or inquisitorial. It is more than half a promise, and a powerful
   aid to the faith which it requires.

   There is something very beautiful and pathetic in the simple brevity of
   the unhesitating answer, Yea, Lord.' Sincerity needs few words. Faith
   can put an infinite deal of meaning into a monosyllable. Their
   eagerness to reach the goal made their answer brief. But it was enough.
   Again the hand which had clasped the maiden's palm is put out and laid
   gently on the useless eyes, and the great word spoken, According to
   your faith be it unto you.' Their blindness made the touch peculiarly
   fitting in their case, as bringing evidence of sense to those who could
   not see the gracious pity of His looks. The word spoken was, like that
   to the centurion, a declaration of the power of faith, which determines
   the measure, and often the manner, of His gifts to us. The containing
   vessel not only settles the quantity of, but the shape assumed by, the
   water which is taken up in it from the sea. Faith, which keeps inside
   of Christ's promises (and what goes outside of them is not faith),
   decides how much of Christ we shall have for our very own. He
   condescends to run the molten gold of His mercies into the moulds which
   our faith prepares.

   These two men, who had used their tongues so well in their persistent
   cry for healing, went away to make a worse use of them in telling
   everywhere of their cure. Jesus desired silence. Possibly He did not
   wish His reputation as a mere worker of miracles to be spread abroad.
   In all His earlier ministry He avoided publicity, singularly
   contrasting therein with the evident desire to make Himself the centre
   of observation which marks its close. He dreaded the smoky flame of
   popular excitement. His message was to individuals, not to crowds. It
   was a natural impulse to tell the benefits these two had received; but
   truer gratitude and deeper faith would have made them obey His lightest
   word, and have shut their mouths. We honour Christ most, not by taking
   our way of honouring Him, but by absolute obedience.

   The final miracle of the nine (or ten) marshalled in long procession in
   chapters viii. and ix. is told with singular brevity. There is nothing
   individual in our Lord's treatment of the sufferer, as there was in the
   previous healing of the two blind men, and no details are given of
   either the appeal to His pity or the method of His cure. The dumb
   demoniac could lift no cry, nor exercise any faith, and all the
   petitions and hopes of his bearers were expressed in the act of
   bringing the sufferer thither, and silently setting him there before
   these eyes of universal pity. It was enough. With Jesus, to see was to
   compassionate, and to compassionate was to help. In the other instances
   of casting out demons, the method is an authoritative command,
   addressed not to the possessed, but to the alien personality that has
   seized on him, and we conclude that such was the method here. Jesus
   undoubtedly believed in demoniacal possession, if we can at all rely on
   the Gospel narratives; and it may be humbly suggested that there are
   dark depths in humanity, which had need to be fathomed more completely,
   before any one is warranted in dogmatically pronouncing that He was
   wrong in His diagnosis. There are ugly facts which should give pause to
   those who are inclined to say--There are no demons, and if there were,
   they could not dominate a human consciousness.'

   But the effects of the miracle are emphasised more than itself. They
   are two, neither of them what might or should have been. The dumb man
   is not said to have used his recovered speech to thank his deliverer,
   nor is there any sign that he clung to Him, either for fear of being
   captured again or in passionate gratitude. It looks as if he selfishly
   bore away his blessing and cared nothing for its giver. That is very
   human, and we all are too often guilty of the same sin. Nor was the
   effect on the multitudes much better, for they were only struck with
   vulgar wonder, which had no moral quality in it and led to nothing.
   They saw the miracle,' that is, the wonderfulness of the act made some
   dint even on their minds, but these were either too fluid to retain the
   impression, or too hard to let it be deep, and so it soon filled up
   again. We have to think of Christ's deeds as signs,' not only as
   wonders,' or they will do little to draw us to Him. Wonder is a
   necessarily evanescent emotion, which may indeed set something better
   stirring in us, but is quite as likely to die barren.

   The Pharisees did not wonder, and did look into the phenomenon with
   sharp eyes; and in so far, they were in advance of the gaping
   multitudes. They were much too superior persons to be astonished at
   anything, and they had already settled on a formula which was
   delightfully easy of application, and had the further advantage of
   turning the miracles into evidences that the doer of them was a child
   of the Devil. It appears to have been a well-worked formula too, for it
   is found again in chap. xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, in the account of
   another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible that the incident now
   before us may be the same as this, but there is nothing improbable in
   the occurrence of such a case twice, nor in the repetition of what had
   become the commonplace of the Pharisaic polemic. But what a piercing
   example that explanation is of the blinding power of prejudice,
   determined to hold on to a foregone conclusion, and not to see the sun
   at noon! Jesus in league with the prince of the devils'! And that was
   gravely said by religious authorities! They saw the loveliness of His
   perfect life, His gentle goodness, His self-forgetting love, His
   swift-springing pity, and they set it all down to His commerce with the
   Evil One. He was so good that He must be more than humanly bad.
     __________________________________________________________________

A CHRISTLIKE JUDGMENT OF MEN

   But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion on them,
   because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no
   shepherd.' --MATT. ix. 36.

   In the course of our Lord's wandering life of teaching and healing,
   there had naturally gathered around Him a large number of persons who
   followed Him from place to place, and we have here cast into a symbol
   the impression produced upon Him by their outward condition. That is to
   say, He sees them lying there weary, and footsore, and travel-stained.
   They have flung themselves down by the wayside. There is no leader or
   guide, no Joshua or director to order their march; they are a worn-out,
   tired, unregulated mob, and the sight smites upon His eye, and it
   smites upon His heart. He says to Himself, if I may venture to put
   words into His lips, There are a worse weariness, and a worse
   wandering, and a worse anarchy, and a worse disorder afflicting men
   than that poor mob of tired pedestrians shows.' Matthew, who was always
   fond of showing the links and connections between the Old Testament and
   the New, casts our Lord's impression of what He then saw into language
   borrowed from the prophecy of Ezekiel (ch. xxxiv.), which tells of a
   flock that is scattered in a dark and cloudy day, that is broken, and
   torn, and driven away. I venture to see in the text three points: (1)
   Christ teaching us how to look at men; (2) Christ teaching us how to
   feel at such a sight; and (3) Christ teaching us what to do with the
   feeling. When He saw the multitude, He was moved with compassion,
   because they fainted and were scattered abroad.' Then He said unto His
   disciples, the harvest is plenteous, the labourers are few, pray ye the
   Lord of the harvest to send forth labourers unto the harvest.' And then
   there follows, And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He
   gave them power against unclean spirits to cast them out.' There are,
   then, these three points;--just a word or two about each of them.

   I. Here we have our Lord teaching us how to look at men.

   The picture of my text is, of course, in its broad outlines, very clear
   and intelligible, but there may be a little difficulty as to the
   precise force of the language. The obscurity of it is in some degree
   reflected in the margin of our Bibles; so, perhaps, you will permit one
   word of an expository nature. The description of the flock, Because
   they fainted and were scattered abroad,' is couched in the original in
   a couple of words, one of which means properly torn' or fainting,'
   according as one or other of two readings of the text is adopted, and
   the other means lying down.' Now, the former of these gives a very
   pathetic picture if we apply it to the individuals that made up the
   flock. We have then the image of the poor sheep that has lost its way,
   struggling through briars and thorns, getting out of them with its
   fleece all torn and hanging in strips dangling at its heels, or of it
   as lacerated by the beasts of the field to whom it is a prey. If we
   take the metaphor, as seems more probably to be intended, as applying
   not so much to the individuals as to the flock, then it comes to mean
   torn asunder,' thrown apart,' and gives us the notion of anarchic
   confusion into which the flock comes if there be no shepherd to lead
   it. Then the other word, which our Bible translates were scattered
   abroad,' seems to mean more properly lying down,' and it gives the idea
   of the poor, wearied creature, after all its struggles and wanderings,
   utterly beaten and dejected, having lost its way, at its wits' end and
   resourceless, flinging itself down there in despair, and panting its
   timid life out anywhere where it finds itself. So it comes to be a
   picture of the utter weariness and hopelessness of all men's efforts
   apart from that Guide and Shepherd, who alone can lead them in the way.
   And then both of these miserable states, the laceration if you take the
   one explanation, the disintegration and casting apart if you take the
   other, the weariness and exhaustion, are traced to their source, they
   are as sheep having no shepherd.' He has gone, and so all this comes.
   With this explanation we may take the points of view that are thus
   suggested simply as they lie before us.

   First of all, notice how here, as always to Jesus Christ, the outward
   was nothing, except as a symbol and manifestation of the inward; how
   the thing that He saw in a man was not the external accidents of
   circumstance or position, for His true, clear gaze and His loving, wise
   heart went straight to the essence of the matter, and dealt with the
   man not according to what he might happen to be in the categories of
   earth, but to what he was in the categories of heaven. All the same to
   Him whether it was some poor harlot, or a rabbi; all the same to Him
   whether it was Pilate on the judgment-seat, or the penitent thief
   hanging at His side. These gauds and shows were nothing; sheer away He
   cut them all, and went down to the hidden heart of the man, and He
   allocated and ranged them according to that. Christian men and women,
   do you try to do the same thing, and to get rid of all these
   superficial veils and curtains with which we drape ourselves and
   attitudinise in the world, and to see men as Christ saw them, both in
   regard to your judgment of them, and in regard to your judgment of
   yourselves? I am a scholar and a wise man; a great thinker; a rich
   merchant; a man of rising importance and influence.' Very well; what
   does that matter? I am ignorant or a pauper'; be it so. Let us get
   below all that. The one question worth asking and worth answering is,
   How am I affected towards Him?' There are many temporary and local
   principles of arrangement and order among men; but they will all vanish
   some day, and there will be one regulating and arranging principle, and
   it is this: Do I love God in Jesus Christ, or do I not?' Oh! for
   myself, for yourself, and for all our outlook towards others, let us
   not forget that the inmost, deepest, hidden man of the heart is the
   man, and that all else is naught, and that its whole character is
   absolutely determined by its relation to Jesus Christ.

   But this is somewhat aside from my main purpose, which is rather
   briefly to expand the various phases which, as I have already
   suggested, are included in such an emblem. The first of them is this:
   Try to think for yourselves of the condition of humanity as apart from
   Christ--shepherdless. That old metaphor of a shepherd which comes out
   of the Old Testament is there sometimes used to indicate a prophet, and
   sometimes to indicate a king. I suppose we may put both of these uses
   together, as far as our present purposes are concerned; and this is
   what I want to insist upon. I dare say some people here will think it
   is very old-fashioned, very narrow in these broad and liberal days; but
   what I would say is this, that unless Jesus Christ is both Guide and
   Teacher, we have neither guide nor teacher but are shepherdless without
   Him. There are plenty of rulers. There was no lack of other authority
   in the days of His flesh. There were crowds of rabbis, guides, and
   directors. The life of the nation was throttled by the authorities that
   had planted themselves upon its back, and yet Christ saw that there
   were none of those who were fit for the work, or afforded the adequate
   guidance. And so it is, now and always. There have been hosts of men
   who have sought to impose their authority upon an era. Where is there
   one that has swayed passion, that has ruled hearts, that has impressed
   his own image on the will, that has made obedience an honour, and
   absolute, abject devotion to his command a very patent of nobility?
   Here, and nowhere beside. Besides that Christ there is no ruler amongst
   men who can come to them and say to his servant, Go,' and he goeth, and
   to this man, Do this,' and he doeth it. Obedience to any besides is
   treason against the dignity of our own nature; disobedience to Him is
   both treason against our nature and blasphemy against God. Thou art the
   King of Glory, O Christ, Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.'
   There is the deepest reason for His rule.

   And as for teacher,' whom are we to put up beside Him? Is it to be
   these dim figures of religious reformers that are gliding, ghostlike,
   to their doom, being wrapped round and round about by ever thicker and
   thicker folds of the inevitable oblivion that swallows all that is
   human? Brethren, by common consent it is Christ or nobody. Aaron dies
   upon Hor; Moses dies upon Pisgah; the teachers, the leaders, the
   guides, the under-shepherds, pass away one by one; and if this Christ
   be but a Man and a Teacher, He too will pass away. Shall I be thought
   very blind to the signs of the times if I say that I see no sign of His
   dominion being exhausted, of His influence being diminished, of His
   guidance being capable of being dispensed with? You may say, Oh, we do
   not want any teacher or guide; we do not want a shepherd.' I am not
   going to enter upon that question now at all, except just to say this,
   that the instincts of humanity rise up in contradiction, as it seems to
   me, of that cold and cheerless creed, and that we have this fact
   staring us in the face, that men are made capable of a devotion and
   submission the most passionate, the most absolute, the most mighty
   force in their lives, to human guides and ensamples, and that it is all
   wasted unless there be somewhere a Man, our Brother, who shall come to
   us and say, All that ever went before Me are thieves and robbers; I am
   the Good Shepherd; follow Me, and ye shall not walk in darkness,' He
   saw the multitudes as sheep having no shepherd.'

   Still further, take that other phase of the metaphor which, as I
   suggested, the text includes, namely, the idea of disintegration, the
   rending apart of social ties and union, unless there be the centre of
   unity in the shepherd of the flock. I will smite the shepherd, and the
   sheep shall be scattered,' says the old prophecy. Of course, for what
   is there to hold them together unless it be their guide and their
   director? So we are brought face to face with this plain prosaic
   rendering of the metaphor--that but for the centre of unity provided
   for mankind in the person and work of Jesus Christ, there is no
   satisfaction of the deep hunger for unity and society with which in
   that case God would have cursed mankind. For whilst there are many
   other bonds most true, most blessed, God-given, and mighty, such as
   that of the sacred unity of the family, and that of the nation and many
   others of which we need not speak, yet all these are constantly being
   disintegrated by the unresting waves of that gnawing sea of
   selfishness, if I may so say, which, like the waters upon our eastern
   coasts, eats and eats for ever at the base of the cliffs, so that
   society in all its forms, whether it be built upon identity of opinion,
   which is perhaps the shabbiest bond of all, or whether it be built upon
   purposes of mutual action, which is a great deal better, or whether it
   be built upon hatred of other people, which is the modern form of
   patriotism, or whether it be built upon the domestic affections, which
   are the purest and highest of all--all the other bonds of society, such
   as creeds, schools, nations, associations, leagues, families,
   denominations, all go sooner or later. The base is eaten out of them,
   because every man that belongs to them has in him that tyrannous,
   dominant self, which is ever seeking to assert its own supremacy. Here
   is Babel, with its half-finished tower, built on slime; and there is
   Pentecost, with its great Spirit; here is the confusion, there is the
   unifying; here the disintegration, there the power that draws them all
   together. They were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd,' and
   one looks out over the world and sees great tracts of country and long
   dismal generations of time, in which the very thought of unity and
   charity and human bonds knitting men together has faded from the
   consciousness of the race, and then one turns to blessed, sweet, simple
   words that say, there shall be one flock and one shepherd,' and I, if I
   be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.' Drawing thus,
   He will draw them into the eternal, mighty bond of union that shall
   never be broken, and is all the more precious and all the more true
   because it is not a unity like the vulgar unities that express
   themselves in external associations. You know, of course or if you do
   not know it will be a good thing that you should know, that that verse
   in John's Gospel which I have quoted has been terribly mangled by a
   little slip of our translators. Christ said, Other sheep I must bring
   which are not of this fold,' the fold being the external unity of the
   Jewish church--an enclosure made of hurdles that you can stick in the
   ground. I shall bring them,' says He, and there shall be one'--(not, as
   our Bible says, fold,'--but something far better)--there shall be one
   flock'; which becomes a unity not by wattling round about it on the
   outside, but by a shepherd standing in the middle. There shall be one
   flock and one shepherd'--a unity which is neither the destruction of
   the variety of the churches, nor the crushing of men, nationalities,
   and types of character all down into one dead level beneath the heel of
   a conqueror, but the unity which subsists in the many operations of the
   one Spirit, and is expressed by all the forms of the one inspired
   grace.

   Then passing by altogether the other idea which I said was only
   doubtfully suggested by the words--namely, that of laceration and
   wounding--let me say a word about the last of the aspects of humanity
   when Christless, which is set forth in this text, and that is, the
   dejected weariness arising from the fruitless wanderings wherewith men
   are cursed. As a verse in the Book of Proverbs puts it, The labour of
   the foolish wearieth every one of them, because they know not how to go
   to the city.' Putting aside the metaphor, the plain truth which it
   embodies is just this, that there is in all men's souls a deep longing
   after peace and rest, after goodness and beauty and truth, and that all
   the strenuous efforts to satisfy these longings, either by social
   reforms or by individual culture and discipline, are pathetically vain
   and profitless, because there is none to guide them. The sheep go
   wandering in any direction, and with no goal; and wherever one has
   jumped, a dozen others will go after him, and so they are wearied out
   long before the day's journey is ended, and they never reach the goal.
   Put that into less vivid, and, therefore, as people generally suppose,
   more accurate, language, and it is a statement of the universal law of
   human history that, after any epoch of great aspirations and strong
   excitement of the noblest parts of human nature, there has always come
   a reaction of corruption and a collapse from weariness. What did
   Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' end in? A guillotine. What do all
   similar epochs end in, when they do not take the Christ to march ahead
   of them? An utter disgust and disillusion, and a despair of all
   progress. That is why wild revolutionists in their youth are always
   obstinate Conservatives in their old age. The wandering sheep are
   footsore, and they fling themselves down by the wayside. That is why
   heathenism presents to us the aspect that it does. There is nothing
   about it that seems to me more tragical than the weary languor that
   besets it. Do you ever think of the depth of pathetic, tragic meaning
   that there is in that verse in one of the Psalms, Such as sit in
   darkness and in the shadow of death'? There they sit, because there is
   no hope in rising and moving. They would have to grope if they arose,
   and so with folded hands they sit like the Buddha, which one great
   section of heathenism has taken as being the true emblem and ideal of
   the noblest life. Absolute passivity lays hold upon them all--torpor,
   stagnation, no dream of advance or progress. The sheep are dejected,
   despairing, anarchic, disintegrated, lacerated, guideless, and
   shepherdless--away from Christ. So He thought them. God give you and me
   grace, dear brethren, to see, as Christ saw, the condition of humanity
   and our own apart from Him.

   II. And now let me say a word in the next place as to the second
   movement of His mind and heart here. He teaches us not only how to
   think of men, but how that sight should touch us.

   He was moved with compassion on them when He saw the multitude'--with
   the eye of a god, I was going to say, and the heart of a man. Pity
   belongs to the idea of divinity; compassion belongs to the idea of
   divinity incarnate; and the motion that passed across His heart is the
   motion that I would seek may pass, with its sweet and healing breath,
   across yours and mine. The right emotion for a Christian looking on the
   Christless crowds is pity, not aversion; pity, not anger; pity, not
   curiosity; pity, not indifference. How many of us walk the streets of
   the towns in which our lot is cast, and never know one touch of that
   emotion, when we look at these people here in England torn, and
   anarchic, and wearied, and shepherdless, within sound of our
   psalm-singing in our chapels? Why, on any Sunday there are thousands of
   men and women standing about the streets who, we may be sure, have not
   seen the inside of a church or a chapel since they were married, and
   that not one in five hundred of all the good people that are going with
   their prayer-books and hymn-books to church and chapel ever think
   anything about them as they pass them by; and some of them, perhaps, if
   they come to any especially disreputable one, will gather up their
   skirts and keep on the safe side of the pavement, and there an end of
   it. But Jesus Christ had no aversions. His white purity was a great
   deal nearer to the blackness of the woman that was a sinner, than was
   the leprous whiteness of the whited sepulchre of the self-righteous
   Pharisee. He had neither aversion, nor anger, nor indifference.

   And, if I might venture to touch upon another matter, compassion and
   not curiosity is an especial lesson for the day to the more thoughtful
   and cultivated amongst our congregations. I have just said that the
   appropriate Christian feeling in contemplating the state of the sheep
   without the Shepherd is compassion, not curiosity. That reminder is
   particularly needful in view of the prominence to-day of investigations
   into the new science of Comparative Religion. I speak with most
   unfeigned respect of it and of its teachers, and gratefully hail the
   wonderful light that it is casting upon ideas underlying the strange
   and often savage and obscene rites of heathenism; but it has a side of
   danger in it against which I would warn you all, especially young,
   reading men and women. The time has not yet come when we can afford to
   let such investigations be our principal occupation in the face of
   heathenism. If idolatry was dead we could afford to do that, but it is
   alive--the more's the pity; and it is not only a curious instance of
   the workings of man's intelligence, and a great apocalypse of earlier
   stages of society, but, besides that, it is a lie that is deceiving and
   damning our brethren, and we have got to kill it first and dissect it
   afterwards. So I say, do not only think of heathenism in its various
   forms as a subject for speculation and analysis; as much as you like of
   that, only do not let it drive out the other thing, and after you have
   tried to understand it, then come back to my text, He was moved with
   compassion.' And so pity, and neither anger, nor aversion, nor
   curiosity, nor indifference is what I urge as the Christian emotion.

   III. Let us take this text as teaching us how Christ would have us act,
   after such emotion built and based upon such a look.

   It is perfectly legitimate, although it is by no means the highest
   motive, to appeal to feeling as a stimulus to action. We have a right
   to base our urging of Christian men and women to missionary work either
   at home or abroad, upon the ground of the condition of the men to whom
   the Gospel has to be carried. I know that if taken alone it is a very
   inadequate motive. I believe that any failure that may be manifest in
   the interest of Christian people in missionary work is largely
   traceable to the blunder we have made in dwelling on superficial
   motives more than we ought to have done, in proportion to the degree in
   which we have dwelt on the deepest. We have been gathering the
   surface-water instead of going right down to the green sand, to which
   the artesian well must be sunk if the stream is to come up without
   pumping or wasting. So I say that a deeper reason than the sorrow and
   darkness of the heathen is--the love of Christ constraineth me'; but
   yet the first is a legitimate one. Only remember this, that Bishop
   Butler taught us long ago, that if you excite emotions which are
   intended to lead to action, and the action does not follow, the
   excitation of the emotion without its appropriate action makes the
   heart a great deal harder than it was before. That is why it is playing
   with edged tools to speak so much to our Christian audiences, as we
   sometimes hear done, about the condition of the heathen as a stimulus
   to missionary work. If a man does not respond and do something, some
   crust of callousness and coldness comes over his own heart. You cannot
   indulge in the luxury of emotion which you do not use to drive your
   spindles, without doing yourselves harm. It is never intended to be
   blown off as waste steam and allowed to vanish into the air. It is
   meant to be conserved and guided, and to have something done with it.
   Therefore beware of sentimental contemplation of the sad condition of
   the shepherdless sheep which does not move you to do anything to help
   them.

   One word more. Take my text as a guide to the form of action into which
   we are to cast the emotions that should spring from this gaze upon the
   world. I will only name three points. Christ opened His mouth and spake
   to them, and taught them many things; Christ said to His disciples,
   Pray ye the Lord of the harvest'; and Christ sent out His apostles to
   preach the Kingdom. These three things in their bearing upon us
   are--personal work, prayer, help to send forth Christ's messengers.
   There is nothing like personal work for making a man understand and
   feel the miseries of his fellows. Christian men and women, it is your
   first business everywhere to proclaim the name of Jesus Christ, and no
   prayers and no subscriptions absolve you from that. In this army a man
   cannot buy himself off and send in a substitute at the cost of an
   annual guinea. If Christ sent the apostles, do you hold up the hands of
   the apostles' successors, and so by God's grace you and I may help on
   the coming of that blessed day when there shall be one flock and one
   Shepherd, and when the Lamb that is in the midst of the throne'--for
   the Shepherd is Himself a lamb--'shall feed them and lead them, and God
   shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE OBSCURE APOSTLES

   These twelve Jesus sent forth.'--MATT. x. 5.

   And half of these twelve' are never heard of as doing any work for
   Christ. Peter and James and John we know; the other James and Judas
   have possibly left us short letters; Matthew gives us a Gospel; and of
   all the rest no trace is left. Some of them are never so much as named
   again, except in the list at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles;
   and none of them except the three who seemed to be pillars' appear to
   have been of much importance in the early diffusion of the Gospel.

   There are many instructive and interesting points in reference to the
   Apostolate. The number of twelve, in obvious allusion to the tribes of
   Israel, proclaims the eternal certainty of the divine promises to His
   people, and the dignity of the New Testament Church as their true heir.
   The ties of relationship which knit so many of the apostles together,
   the order of the names varying, but within certain limits, in the
   different catalogues, the uncultivated provincial rudeness of most of
   them, would all afford material for important reflections. But,
   perhaps, not the least important fact about the Apostolate is that one
   to which we have referred, which like the names of countries on the
   map, escapes notice because it is writ' so large'--namely, the small
   place which the apostles as a body fill in the subsequent narrative,
   and the entire oblivion into which so many of them pass from the moment
   of their appointment.

   It is to that fact that we wish to turn attention now. It may suggest
   some considerations worth pondering, and among other things, may help
   to show the exaggeration of the functions of the office by the opposite
   extremes of priests and rationalists. The one school makes it the
   depository of exclusive supernatural powers; the other regards it as a
   master-stroke of organisation, to which the early rapid growth of
   Christianity was largely due. The facts seem to show that it was
   neither.

   I. The first thought which this peculiar and unexpected silence
   suggests is of the True Worker in the Church's progress.

   The way in which the New Testament drops these apostles is of a piece
   with the whole tone of the Bible. Throughout, men are introduced into
   its narratives and allowed to slip out with well-marked indifference.
   Nowhere do we get more vivid, penetrating portraiture, but nowhere do
   we see such carelessness about following the fortunes or completing the
   biographies even of those who have filled the largest space in its
   pages.

   Recall, for example, the way in which the New Testament deals with the
   very chiefest' apostles, the illustrious triad of Peter, James, and
   John. The first escapes from prison; we see him hammering at Mary's
   door in the grey of the morning, and after brief, eager talk with his
   friends he vanishes to hide in another place,' and is no more heard of,
   except for a moment in the great council, held in Jerusalem, about the
   admission of Gentiles to the Church. The second of the three is killed
   off in a parenthesis. The third is only seen twice in the Book of the
   Acts, as a silent companion of Peter at a miracle and before the
   Sanhedrim. Remember how Paul is left in his own hired house, within
   sight of trial and sentence, and neither the original writer of the
   book nor any later hand thought it worth while to add three lines to
   tell the world what became of him. A strange way to write history, and
   a most imperfect narrative, surely! Yes, unless there be some
   peculiarity in the purpose of the book, which explains this
   cold-blooded, inartistic, and tantalising habit of letting men leap
   upon the stage as if they had dropped from the clouds, and vanish from
   it as abruptly as if they had fallen through a trap-door.

   Such a peculiarity there is. One of the three to whom we have referred
   has explained it in the words with which he closes his gospel, words
   which might stand for the motto of the whole book, These are written
   that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son of God.' The true purpose
   is not to speak of men except in so far as they bore witness to that
   light' and were illuminated for a moment by contact with Him. From the
   beginning the true Hero' of the Bible is God; its theme is His
   self-revelation culminating for evermore in the Man Jesus. All other
   men interest the writers only as they are subsidiary or antagonistic to
   that revelation. As long as that breath blows through them they are
   music; else they are but common reeds. Men are nothing except as
   instruments and organs of God. He is all, and His whole fulness is in
   Jesus Christ. Christ is the sole worker in the progress of His Church.
   That is the teaching of all the New Testament. The thought is expressed
   in the deepest, simplest form in His own unapproachable words,
   unfathomable as they are in their depth of meaning, and inexhaustible
   in their power to strengthen and to cheer: I am the vine, ye are the
   branches, without Me ye can do nothing.' It shapes the whole treatment
   of the history of the so-called Acts of the Apostles,' which by its
   very first sentence proclaims itself to be the Acts of the ascended
   Jesus, the former treatise' being declared to have had for its subject
   all that Jesus began to do and teach while on earth, and this treatise
   being manifestly the continuance of the same theme, and the record of
   the heavenly activity of the Lord. So the thought runs through all the
   book: The help that is done on earth, He does it all Himself.'

   So let us think of Him and of His relation to us as well as to that
   early Church. His continuous energy is pouring down on us if we will
   accept it. In us, for us, by us He works. My Father worketh hitherto,
   said He when here, and I work'; and now, exalted on high, He has passed
   into that divine repose, which is at the same time the most energetic
   divine activity. He is all in all to His people. He is all their
   strength, wisdom, and righteousness. They are but the clouds irradiated
   by the sun and bathed in its brightness; He is the light which flames
   in their grey mist and turns it to a glory. They are but the belts and
   cranks and wheels; He is the power. They are but the channel, muddy and
   dry; He is the flashing life that fills it and makes it a joy. They are
   the body; He is the soul dwelling in every part to save it from
   corruption and give movement and warmth.


     Thou art the organ, whose full breath is thunder;

     I am the keys, beneath thy fingers pressed.'

   If this be true, how it should deliver us from all overestimate of men,
   to which our human affections and our feeble faith tempt us so sorely!
   There is One man, and One man only, whose biography is a Gospel, who
   owes nothing to circumstances, and who originates the power which He
   wields; One who is a new beginning, and has changed the whole current
   of human history, One to whom we are right to bring offerings of the
   gold, and incense, and myrrh of our hearts, and wills, and minds, which
   it is blasphemy and degradation to lay at the feet of any others. We
   may utterly love, trust, and obey Jesus Christ. We dare not do so to
   any other. The inscription written over the whole book, that it may be
   transcribed on our whole nature, is, No man any more save Jesus only.'

   If this thought be true, what confidence it ought to give us as we
   think of the tasks and fortunes of the Church! If we think only of the
   difficulties and of the enormous work before us, so disproportioned to
   our weak powers, we shall be disposed to agree with our enemies, who
   talk as if Christianity was on the point of perishing, as they have
   been doing ever since it began. But the outlook is wonderfully
   different when we take Christ into the account. We are very apt to
   leave Him out of the reckoning. But one man with Christ to back him is
   always in the majority. He flings his sword clashing into one scale,
   and it weighs down all that is in the other. The walls are very lofty
   and strong, and the besiegers few and weak, badly armed, and quite
   unfit for the assault; but if we lift our eyes high enough, we, too,
   shall see a man with a drawn sword over against us, and our hearts may
   leap up in assured confidence of victory as we recognise in Him the
   Captain of the Lord's Host, who has already overcome, and will make us
   valiant in fight and more than conquerors.

   When conscious of our own weakness, and tempted to think of our task as
   heavy, or when complacent in our own power, and tempted to regard our
   task as easy, let us think of His ever-present work in and for His
   people, till it braces us for all duty, and rebukes our easy-going
   idleness. Surely from that thought of the active, ascended Christ may
   come to many of His slothful followers the pleading question, as from
   His own lips, Dost thou not care that thou hast left me to serve
   alone?' Surely to us all it should bring inspiration and strength,
   courage and confidence, deliverance from man, and elevation above the
   reverence of blind impersonal forces. Surely we may all lay to heart
   the grand lesson that union with Him is our only strength, and oblivion
   of ourselves our highest wisdom. Surely he has best learned his true
   place and the worth of Jesus Christ, who abides with unmoved humility
   at His feet, and, like the lonely, lowly forerunner, puts away all
   temptations to self-assertion while joyfully accepting it as the law of
   his life to


     Fade in the light of the planet he loves,

     To fade in his light and to die.'

   Blessed is he who is glad to say,' He must increase, I must decrease!'

   II. This same silence of Scripture as to so many of the apostles may be
   taken as suggesting what the real work of these delegated workers was.

   It certainly seems very strange that, if they were the possessors of
   such extraordinary powers as the theory of Apostolic Succession
   implies, we should hear so little of these in the narratives. The
   silence of Scripture about them goes a long way to discredit such
   ideas, while it is entirely accordant with a more modest view of the
   apostolic office.

   What was an apostle's function during the life of Christ? One of the
   evangelists divides it into three portions: to be with Jesus; to preach
   the kingdom; to cast out devils and to heal. There is nothing in these
   offices peculiar to them. The seventy had miraculous powers too, and
   some at least were our Lord's companions and preachers of His kingdom
   who were simple disciples. What was an apostle's function after the
   resurrection? Peter's words, on proposing the election of a new
   apostle, lay down the duty as simply to bear witness' of that
   resurrection. They were not supernatural channels of mysterious grace,
   not lords over God's heritage, not even leaders of the Church, but
   bearers of a testimony to the great historical fact, on the acceptance
   of which all belief in an historical Christ depended then and depends
   now. Each of the greater of the apostles is penetrated with the same
   thought. Paul disclaims anything beside in his Not I, but the grace of
   God in me.' Peter thrusts the question at the staring crowd, Why look
   ye on us as though by our power or holiness we had made this man to
   walk?' John, in his calm way, tells his children at Ephesus, Ye need
   not that any man teach you.'

   Such an idea of the apostolic office is far more reasonable and
   accordant with Scripture than a figment about unexampled powers and
   authority in the Church. It accounts for the qualifications as stated
   in the same address of Peter's, which merely secure the validity of
   their testimony. The one thing that must be found in an apostle was
   that he should have been in familiar intercourse with Christ during his
   earthly life, both before and after His resurrection, in order that he
   might be able to say, I knew Him well; I know that He died; I know that
   He rose again; I saw Him go up to heaven.' For such a work there was no
   need for men of commanding power. Plain, simple, honest men who had the
   requisite eye-witness were sufficient. The guidance and the missionary
   work of the Church need not necessarily be in their hands, and, in
   fact, does not seem to have been. In harmony with this view of the
   office and its requisites, we find that Paul rests the validity of his
   apostolate on the fact that He was seen of me also,' and regards that
   vision as his true appointment which left him not one whit behind the
   very chiefest apostles.' Miraculous gifts indeed they had, and
   miraculous gifts they imparted; but in both instances others shared
   these powers with them. It was no apostle who laid his hands on the
   blinded Saul in that house in Damascus and said, Receive the Holy
   Ghost.' An apostle stood by passive and wondering when the Holy Ghost
   fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In reality apostolic succession is
   absurd, because there is nothing to succeed to, except what cannot be
   transmitted, personal knowledge of the reality of the resurrection of
   Jesus Christ. To establish that fact as indubitable history is to lay
   the foundation of the Christian Church, and the eleven plain men, who
   did that, need no superstitious mist around them to magnify their
   greatness.

   In so far as any succession to them or any devolution of their office
   is possible, all Christian men inherit it, for to bear witness of the
   living power of the risen Lord is still the office and honour of every
   believing soul. It is still true that the sharpest weapon which any man
   can wield for Christ is the simple adducing of his own personal
   experience. That which we have seen and handled we declare' is still
   the best form into which our preaching can be cast. And such a voice
   every man and woman who has found the sweetness and the power of Christ
   filling their own souls, is bound--rather let us say, is privileged--to
   lift up. This honour have all the saints.' Christ is the true worker,
   and all our work is but to proclaim Him, and what He has done and is
   doing for ourselves and for all men.

   III. We may gather, too, the lesson of how often faithful work is
   unrecorded and forgotten.

   No doubt those apostles who have no place in the history toiled
   honestly and did their Lord's commands, and oblivion has swallowed it
   all. Bartholomew and Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus,' and the
   rest of them, have no place in the record, and their obscure work is
   faded, faithful and good as certainly it was.

   So it will be sooner or later with us all. For most of us, our service
   has to be unnoticed and unknown, and the memory of our poor work will
   live perhaps for a year or two in the hearts of some few who loved us,
   but will fade wholly when they follow us into the silent land. Well, be
   it so; we shall sleep none the less sweetly, though none be talking
   about us over our heads. The world has a short memory, and, as the
   years go on, the list that it has to remember grows so crowded that it
   is harder and harder to find room to write a new name on it, or to read
   the old. The letters on the tombstones are soon erased by the feet that
   tramp across the churchyard. All that matters very little. The
   notoriety of our work is of no consequence. The earnestness and
   accuracy with which we strike our blow is all-important; but it matters
   nothing how far it echoes. It is not the heaven of heavens to be talked
   about, nor does a man's life consist in the abundance of newspaper or
   other paragraphs about him. The love of fame' is, no doubt, sometimes
   found in minds' otherwise noble,' but in itself is very much the
   reverse of noble. We shall do our work best, and be saved from much
   festering anxiety which corrupts our purest service and fevers our
   serenest thoughts, if we once fairly make up our minds to working
   unnoticed and unknown, and determine that, whether our post be a
   conspicuous or an obscure one, we shall fill it to the utmost of our
   power--careless of praise or censure, because our judgment is with our
   God; careless whether we are unknown or well known, because we are
   known altogether to Him.

   The magnitude of our work in men's eyes is as little important as the
   noise of it. Christ gave all the apostles their tasks--to some of them
   to found the Gentile churches, to some of them to leave to all
   generations precious teaching, to some of them none of these things.
   What then? Were the Peters and the Johns more highly favoured than the
   others? Was their work greater in His sight? Not so. To Him all service
   done from the same motive is the same, and His measure of excellence is
   the quantity of love and spiritual force in our deeds, not the width of
   the area over which they spread. An estuary that goes wandering over
   miles of shallows may have less water in it, and may creep more
   languidly, than the torrent that thunders through some narrow gorge.
   The deeds that stand highest on the records in heaven are not those
   which we vulgarly call great. Many a cup of cold water only' will be
   found to have been rated higher there than jewelled golden chalices
   brimming with rare wines. God's treasures, where He keeps His
   children's gifts, will be like many a mother's secret store of relics
   of her children, full of things of no value, what the world calls
   trash,' but precious in His eyes for the love's sake that was in them.

   All service which is done from the same motive and with the same spirit
   is of the same worth in His eyes. It does not matter whether you have
   the gospel in a penny Testament printed on thin paper with black ink
   and done up in cloth, or in an illuminated missal glowing in gold and
   colour, painted with loving care on fair parchment, and bound in
   jewelled ivory. And so it matters little about the material or the
   scale on which we express our devotion and our aspirations; all depends
   on what we copy, not on the size of the canvas on which, or on the
   material in which, we copy it. Small service is true service while it
   lasts,' and the unnoticed insignificant servants may do work every whit
   as good and noble as the most widely known, to whom have been intrusted
   by Christ tasks that mould the ages.

   IV. Finally, we may add that forgotten work is remembered, and
   unrecorded names are recorded above.

   The names of these almost anonymous apostles have no place in the
   records of the advancement of the Church or of the development of
   Christian doctrine. They drop out of the narrative after the list in
   the first chapter of the Acts. But we do hear of them once more. In
   that last vision of the great city which the seer beheld descending
   from God, we read that in its foundations were the names of the twelve
   apostles of the Lamb.' All were graven there--the inconspicuous names
   carved on no record of earth, as well as the familiar ones cut deep in
   the rock to be seen of all men for ever. At the least that grand image
   may tell us that when the perfect state of the Church is realised, the
   work which these men did when their testimony laid its foundation, will
   be for ever associated with their names. Unrecorded on earth, they are
   written in heaven.

   The forgotten work and its workers are remembered by Christ. His
   faithful heart and all-seeing eye keep them ever in view. The world,
   and the Church whom these humble men helped, may forget, yet He will
   not forget. From whatever muster-roll of benefactors and helpers their
   names may be absent, they will be in His list. The Apostle Paul, in his
   Epistle to the Philippians, has a saying in which his delicate courtesy
   is beautifully conspicuous, where he half apologises for not sending
   his greetings to others my fellow-workers' by name, and reminds them
   that, however their names may be unwritten in his letter, they have
   been inscribed by a mightier hand on a better page, and are in the
   Lamb's book of life.' It matters very little from what record ours may
   be absent so long as they are found there. Let us rejoice that, though
   we may live obscure and die forgotten, we may have our names written on
   the breastplate of our High Priest as He stands in the Holy Place, the
   breastplate which lies close to His heart of love, and is girded to His
   arm of power.

   The forgotten and unrecorded work lives, too, in the great whole. The
   fruit of our labour may perhaps not be separable from that of others,
   any more than the sowers can go into the reaped harvest-field and
   identify the gathered ears which have sprung from the seed that they
   sowed, but it is there all the same; and whosoever may be unable to
   pick out each man's share in the blessed total outcome, the Lord of the
   harvest knows, and His accurate proportionment of individual reward to
   individual service will not mar the companionship in the general
   gladness, when he that soweth and he that reapeth shall rejoice
   together.'

   The forgotten work will live, too, in blessed results to the doers.
   Whatever of recognition and honour we may miss here, we cannot be
   robbed of the blessing to ourselves, in the perpetual influence on our
   own character, of every piece of faithful even if imperfect service.
   Habits are formed, emotions deepened, principles confirmed, capacities
   enlarged by every deed done for Christ, and these make an over-measure
   of reward here, and in their perfect form hereafter are heaven. Nothing
   done for Him is ever wasted. Thou shalt find it after many days.' We
   are all writing our lives' histories here, as if with one of these
   manifold writers'--a black blank page beneath the flimsy sheet on which
   we write, but presently the black page will be taken away, and the
   writing will stand out plain on the page behind that we did not see.
   Life is the filmy, unsubstantial page on which our pen rests; the black
   page is death; and the page beneath is that indelible transcript of our
   earthly actions, which we shall find waiting for us to read, with shame
   and confusion of face, or with humble joy, in another world.

   Then let us do our work for Christ, not much careful whether it be
   greater or smaller, obscure or conspicuous; assured that whoever
   forgets us and it, He will remember, and however our names may be
   unrecorded on earth, they will be written in heaven, and confessed by
   Him before His Father and the holy angels.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST'S CHARGE TO HIS HERALDS

   These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, do not into
   the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye
   not: 6. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7. And
   as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand. 8. Heal the
   sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils: freely ye
   have received, freely give. 9. Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor
   brass in your purses, 10. Nor scrip for your journey, neither two
   coats, neither shoes, nor yet staves: for the workman is worthy of his
   meat. 11. And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, enquire who
   in it is worthy: and there abide till ye go thence. 12. And when ye
   come into an house, salute it. 13. And if the house be worthy, let your
   peace come upon it: but if it be not worthy, let your peace return to
   you. 14. And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when
   ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.
   15. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of
   Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city. 16.
   Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye
   therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.' --Matt. x. 5-16.

   The letter of these instructions to the apostles has been abrogated by
   Christ, both in reference to the scope of, and the equipment for, their
   mission (Matt. xxviii. 19; Luke xxii. 36). The spirit of them remains
   as the perpetual obligation of all Christian workers, and every
   Christian should belong to that class. Some direct evangelistic work
   ought to be done by every believer, and in doing it he will find no
   better directory than this charge to the apostles.

   I. We have, first, the apostles' mission in its sphere and manner (vs.
   5-8). They are told where to go and what to do there. Mark that the
   negative prohibition precedes the positive injunction, as if the
   apostles were already so imbued with the spirit of universalism that
   they would probably have overpassed the bounds which for the present
   were needful. The restriction was transient. It continued in the line
   of divine limitation of the sphere of Revelation which confined itself
   to the Jew, in order that through him it might reach the world. That
   method could not be abandoned till the Jew himself had destroyed it by
   rejecting Christ. Jesus still clung to it. Even when the commission was
   widened to all the world,' Paul went to the Jew first,' till he too was
   taught by uniform failure that Israel was fixed in unbelief.

   How tenderly our Lord designates the nation as the lost sheep of the
   house of Israel'! He is still influenced by that compassion which the
   sight of the multitudes had moved in Him (chap. ix. 36). Lost indeed,
   wandering with torn fleece, and lying panting, in ignorance of their
   pasture and their Shepherd, they are yet sheep,' and they belong to
   that chosen seed, sprung from so venerable ancestors, and heirs of so
   glorious promises. Clear sight of, and infinite pity for, men's
   miseries, must underlie all apostolic effort.

   The work to be done is twofold--a glad truth is to be proclaimed,
   gracious deeds of power are to be done. How blessed must be the
   kingdom, the forerunners of which are miracles of healing and
   life-giving! If the heralds can do these, what will not the King be
   able to do? If such hues attend the dawn, how radiant will be the
   noontide! Note as ye go,' indicating that they were travelling
   evangelists, and were to speak as they went, and go when they had
   spoken. The road was to be their pulpit, and each man they met their
   audience. What a different world it would be if Christians carried
   their message with them so!

   Freely ye have received'; namely, in the first application of the
   words, the message of the coming kingdom and the power to work
   miracles. But the force of the injunction, as applied to us, is even
   more soul-subduing, as our gift is greater, and the freedom of its
   bestowal should evoke deeper gratitude. The deepest springs of the
   heart's love are set flowing by the undeserved, unpurchased gift of
   God, which contains in itself both the most tender and mighty motive
   for self-forgetting labour, and the pattern for Christian service. How
   can one who has received that gift keep it to himself? How can he sell
   what he got for nothing? Freely give'--the precept forbids the seeking
   of personal profit or advantage from preaching the gospel, and so makes
   a sharp test of our motives; and it also forbids clogging the gift with
   non-essential conditions, and so makes a sharp test of our methods.

   II. The prohibition to make gain out of the message, serves as a
   transition to the directions as to equipment. The apostles were to go
   as they stood; for the command is, Get you no gold,' etc. It has been
   already noted that these prohibitions were abrogated by Jesus in view
   of His departure, and the world-wide mission of the Church. But the
   spirit of them is not abrogated. Note that the descending value of the
   metals named makes an ascending stringency in the prohibition. Not even
   copper money is to be taken. The wallet' was a leather satchel or bag,
   used by shepherds and others to carry a little food; sustenance, then,
   was also to be left uncared for. Dress, too, was to be limited to that
   in wear; no change of inner robe nor a spare pair of shoes was to
   encumber them, nor even a spare staff. If any of them had one in his
   hand, he was to take it (Mark vi. 8). The command was meant to lift the
   apostles above suspicion, to make them manifestly disinterested, to
   free them from anxiety about earthly things, that their message might
   absorb their thoughts and efforts, and to give room for the display of
   Christ's power to provide. It had a promise wrapped in it. He who
   forbade them to provide for themselves thereby pledged Himself to take
   care of them. The labourer is worthy of his food.' They may be sure of
   subsistence, and are not to wish for more.

   All this has a distinct bearing on modern church arrangements. On the
   one hand, it vindicates the right of those who preach the gospel to
   live of the gospel, and sets any payments to them on the right footing,
   as not being charity or generosity, but the discharge of a debt. On the
   other hand, it enjoins on preachers and others who are paid for service
   not to serve for pay, not to be covetous of large remuneration, and to
   take care that no taint of greed for money shall mar their work, but
   that their conduct may confirm their words when they say with Paul, We
   seek not yours, but you.'

   III. The conduct required from, and the reception met with by, the
   messengers come next. Christ first enjoins discretion and
   discrimination of character, so far as possible. The messenger of the
   kingdom is not to be mixed up with disreputable people, lest the
   message should suffer. The principle of his choice of a home is to be,
   not position, comfort, or the like, but worthiness'; that is,
   predisposition to receive the message. However poor the chamber in the
   house of such, there is the apostle to settle himself. If ye have
   judged me to be faithful, come into my house,' said Lydia. The less
   Christ's messengers are at home with Christ's neglecters, the calmer
   their own hearts, and the more potent their message. They give the lie
   to it, if they voluntarily choose as their associates those to whom
   their dearest convictions are idle. Christian charity does not blind to
   distinctions of character. A little common sense in reading these will
   save many a scandal, and much weakening of influence.

   Christian earnestness does not abolish courtesy. The message is not to
   be blurted out in defiance of even conventional forms. Zeal for the
   Lord is no excuse for rude abruptness. But the salutation of the true
   apostle will deepen the meaning of such forms, and make the
   conventional the real expression of real goodwill. No man should say
   Peace be unto you' so heartily as Christ's servant. The servant's
   benediction will bring the Master's ratification; for Jesus says, Let
   your peace come upon it,' as if commanding the good which we can only
   wish. That will be so, if the requisite condition is fulfilled. There
   must be soil for the seed to root in.

   But no true wish for others' good--still more, no effort for it--is
   ever void of blessed issue. If the peace does not rest on a house into
   which jarring and sin forbid its entrance, it will not be homeless, but
   come back, like the dove to the ark, and fold its wings in the heart of
   the sender. The reflex influence of Christian effort is precious,
   whatever its direct results are. How the Church has been benefited by
   its missionary enterprises!

   Jesus encouraged no illusions in His servants as to their success. From
   the beginning they were led to expect that some would receive and some
   would reject their words. In this rapid preparatory mission, there was
   no time for long delay anywhere; but for us, it is not wise to conclude
   that patient effort will fail because first appeals have not succeeded.
   Much close communion with Jesus, not a little self-suppression, and
   abundant practical wisdom, are needed to determine the point at which
   further efforts are vain. No doubt, there is often great waste of
   strength in trying to impress unimpressible people, or to revive some
   moribund enterprise; but it is a pardonable weakness to be reluctant to
   abandon a field. Still it is a weakness, and there come times when the
   only right thing to do is to shake off the dust' of the messenger's
   feet in token that all connection is ended, and that he is clear from
   the blood of the rejecters. The awful doom of such is solemnly
   introduced by Verily, I say unto you.' It rests on the plain principle
   that the measure of light is the measure of criminality, and hence the
   measure of punishment. The rejecters of Christ among us are as much
   more guilty than that city' as its inhabitants were than the men of
   Sodom.

   The first section of this charge properly ends with verse 15´´, the
   following verse being a transition to the second part. The Greek puts
   strong emphasis on I.' It is He who sends among wolves, therefore He
   will protect. A strange thing for a shepherd to do! A strange
   encouragement for the apostles on the threshold of their work! But the
   words would often come back to them when beset by the pack with their
   white teeth gleaming, and their howls filling the night. They are not
   promised that they will not be torn, but they are assured that, even if
   they are, the Shepherd wills it, and will not lose one of His flock.

   What is the Christian defence? Prudence like the serpent's, but not the
   serpent's craft or malice; harmlessness like the dove's, but not
   without the other safeguard of wisdom.' The combination is a rare one,
   and the surest way to possess it is to live so close to Jesus that we
   shall be progressively changed into His likeness. Then our prudence
   will never degenerate into cunning, nor our simplicity become blindness
   to dangers. The Christian armour and arms are meek, unconquerable
   patience, and Christ-likeness, To resist is to be beaten; to endure
   unretaliating is to be victorious. Be not overcome of evil, but
   overcome evil with good.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE WIDENED MISSION, ITS PERILS AND DEFENCES

   Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye
   therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. 17. But beware of
   men: for they will deliver you up to the councils, and they will
   scourge you in their synagogues; 18. And ye shall be brought before
   governors and kings for My sake, for a testimony against them and the
   Gentiles. 19. But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what
   ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye
   shall speak. 20. For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your
   Father which speaketh in you. 21. And the brother shall deliver up the
   brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise
   up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death. 22. And ye
   shall be hated of all men for My name's sake: but he that endureth to
   the end shall be saved. 23. But when they persecute you in this city,
   flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone
   over the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be come. 24. The
   disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord. 25.
   It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the servant
   as his lord. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how
   much more shall they call them of his household? 26. Fear them not
   therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed;
   and hid, that shall not be known. 27. What I tell you in darkness, that
   speak ye in light: and what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the
   housetops. 28. And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able
   to kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both
   soul and body in hell. 29. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?
   and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. 30.
   But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. 31. Fear ye not
   therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.' --MATT. x. 16-31.

   We have already had two instances of Matthew's way of bringing together
   sayings and incidents of a like kind without regard to their original
   connection. The Sermon on the Mount and the series of miracles in
   chapters viii. and ix. are groups, the elements of which are for the
   most part found disconnected in Mark and Luke. This charge to the
   twelve in chapter x. seems to present a third instance, and to pass
   over in verse 16 to a wider mission than that of the twelve during our
   Lord's lifetime, for it forebodes persecution, whereas the preceding
   verses opened no darker prospect than that of indifference or
   non-reception. The city' which, in that stage of the gospel message,
   simply would not receive you nor hear your words,' in this stage has
   worsened into one where they persecute you,' and the persecutors are
   now kings' and Gentiles,' as well as Jewish councils and
   synagogue-frequenters. The period covered in these verses, too, reaches
   to the end,' the final revelation of all hidden things.

   Obviously, then, our Lord is looking down a far future, and giving a
   charge to the dim crowd of His later disciples, whom His prescient eye
   saw pressing behind the twelve in days to come. He had no dreams of
   swift success, but realised the long, hard fight to which He was
   summoning His disciples. And His frankness in telling them the worst
   that they had to expect was as suggestive as was His freedom from the
   rosy, groundless visions of at once capturing a world which enthusiasts
   are apt to cherish, till hard experience shatters the illusions. He
   knew the future in store for Himself, for His Gospel, for His
   disciples. And He knew that dangers and death itself will not appal a
   soul that is touched into heroic self-forgetfulness by His love. Set
   down my name,' says the man in Pilgrim's Progress, though he knew--may
   we not say, because he knew?--that the enemies were outside waiting to
   fall on him.

   A further difference between this and the preceding section is, that
   there the stress was laid on the contents of the disciples' message,
   but that here it is laid on their sufferings. Not so much by what they
   say, as by how they endure, are they to testify. The noble army of
   martyrs praise Thee,' and the primitive Church preached Jesus most
   effectually by dying for Him.

   The keynote is struck in verse 16, in which are to be noted the
   Behold,' which introduces something important and strange, and calls
   for close attention; the majestic I send you,' which moves to obedience
   whatever the issues, and pledges Him to defend the poor men who are
   going on His errands and the pathetic picture of the little flock
   huddled together, while the gleaming teeth of the wolves gnash all
   round them. A strange theme to drape in a metaphor! but does not the
   very metaphor help to lighten the darkness of the picture, as well as
   speak of His calmness, while He contemplates it? If the Shepherd sends
   His sheep into the midst of wolves, surely He will come to their help,
   and surely any peril is more courageously faced when they can say to
   themselves, He put us here.' The sheep has no claws to wound with nor
   teeth to tear with, but the defenceless Christian has a defence, and in
   his very weaponlessness wields the sharpest two-edged sword. Force from
   force must ever flow.' Resistance is a mistake. The victorious
   antagonist of savage enmity is patient meekness. Sufferance is the
   badge of all' true servants of Jesus. Wherever they have been misguided
   enough to depart from Christ's law of endurance and to give blow for
   blow, they have lost their cause in the long run, and have hurt their
   own Christian life more than their enemies' bodies. Guilelessness and
   harmlessness are their weapons. But be ye wise as serpents' is equally
   imperative with guileless as doves.' Mark the fine sanity of that
   injunction, which not only permits but enjoins prudent
   self-preservation, so long as it does not stoop to crooked policy, and
   is saved from that by dove-like guilelessness. A difficult combination,
   but a possible one, and when realised, a beautiful one!

   The following verses (17-22) expand the preceding, and mingle in a very
   remarkable way plain predictions of persecution to the death and
   encouragements to front the worst. Jewish councils and synagogues,
   Gentile governors and kings, will unite for once in common hatred, than
   which there is no stronger bond. That is a grim prospect to set before
   a handful of Galilean peasants, but two little words turn its terror
   into joy; it is for My sake,' and that is enough. Jesus trusted His
   humble friends, as He trusts all such always, and believed that for My
   sake' was a talisman which would sweeten the bitterest cup and would
   make cowards into heroes, and send men and women to their deaths
   triumphant. And history has proved that He did not trust them too much.
   For His sake'--is that a charm for us, which makes the crooked straight
   and the rough places plain, which nerves for suffering and impels to
   noble acts, which moulds life and takes the sting and the terror out of
   death? Nor is that the only encouragement given to the twelve, who
   might well be appalled at the prospect of standing before Gentile
   kings. Jesus seems to discern how they shrank as they listened, at the
   thought of having to bear testimony' before exalted personages, and,
   with beautiful adaptation to their weakness, He interjects a great
   promise, which, for the first time, presents the divine Spirit as
   dwelling in the disciples' spirits. The occasion of the dawning of that
   great Christian thought is very noteworthy, and not less so is the
   designation of the Spirit as of your Father,' with all the implications
   of paternal care and love which that name carries. Special crises bring
   special helps, and the martyrologies of all ages and lands, from
   Stephen outside the city wall to the last Chinese woman, have attested
   the faithfulness of the Promiser. How often have some calm, simple
   words from some slave girl in Roman cities, or some ignorant confessor
   before Inquisitors, been manifestly touched with heavenly light and
   power, and silenced sophistries and threats!

   The solemn foretelling of persecution, broken for a moment, goes on and
   becomes even more foreboding, for it speaks of dearest ones turned to
   foes, and the sweet sanctities of family ties dissolved by the solvent
   of the new Faith. There is no enemy like a brother estranged, and it is
   tragically significant that it is in connection with the rupture of
   family bonds that death is first mentioned as the price that Christ's
   messengers would have to pay for faithfulness to their message. But the
   prediction springs at a bound, as it were, from the narrow circle of
   home to the widest range, and does not fear to spread before the eyes
   of the twelve that they will become the objects of hatred to the whole
   human race if they are true to Christ's charge. The picture is dark
   enough, and it has turned out to be a true forecast of facts. It
   suggests two questions. What right had Jesus to send men out on such an
   errand, and to bid them gladly die for Him? And what made these men
   gladly take up the burden which He laid on them? He has the right to
   dispose of us, because He is the Son of God who has died for us.
   Otherwise He is not entitled to say to us, Do my bidding, even if it
   leads you to death. His servants find their inspiration to absolute,
   unconditional self-surrender in the Love that has died for them. That
   which gives Him His right to dispose of us in life and death gives us
   the disposition to yield ourselves wholly to Him, to be His apostles
   according to our opportunities, and to say, Whether I live or die, I am
   the Lord's.'

   That thought of world-wide hatred is soothed by the recurrence of the
   talisman, For My name's sake,' and by a moment's showing of a fair
   prospect behind the gloom streaked with lightning in the foreground. He
   that endureth to the end shall be saved.' The same saying occurs in
   chapter xxiv. 13, in connection with the prediction of the fall of
   Jerusalem, and in the same connection in Mark xiii. 13, in both of
   which places several other sayings which appear in this charge to the
   apostles are found. It is impossible to settle which is the original
   place for these, or whether they were twice spoken. The latter
   supposition is very unfashionable at present, but has perhaps more to
   say for itself than modern critics are willing to allow. But Luke (xxi.
   19) has a remarkable variation of the saying, for his version of it is,
   In your patience, ye shall win your souls.' His word patience' is a
   noun cognate with the verb rendered in Matthew and Mark endureth,' and
   to win one's soul' is obviously synonymous with being saved.' The
   saying cannot be limited, in any of its forms, to a mere securing of
   earthly life, for in this context it plainly includes those who have
   been delivered to death by parents and brethren, but who by death have
   won their lives, and have been, as Paul expected to be, thereby 'saved
   into His heavenly kingdom.' To the Christian, death is the usher who
   introduces him into the presence-chamber of the King, and he that
   loseth his life for My name's sake,' finds it glorified in, and into,
   life eternal.

   But willingness to endure the utmost is to be accompanied with
   willingness to take all worthy means to escape it. There has been a
   certain unwholesome craving for martyrdom generated in times of
   persecution, which may appear noble but is very wasteful. The worst use
   that you can put a man to is to burn him, and a living witness may do
   more for Christ than a dead martyr. Christian heroism may be shown in
   not being afraid to flee quite as much as in courting, or passively
   awaiting, danger. And Christ's Name will be spread when His lovers are
   hounded from one city to another, just as it was when they that were
   scattered abroad, went everywhere, preaching the word.' When the brands
   are kicked apart by the heel of violence, they kindle flames where they
   fall.

   But the reason for this command to flee is perplexing. Ye shall not
   have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.' Is
   Jesus here reverting to the narrower immediate mission of the apostles?
   What coming' is referred to? We have seen that the first mission of the
   twelve was the theme of verses 5-15, and was there pursued to its
   ultimate consequences of final judgment on rejecters, whilst the wider
   horizon of a future mission opens out from verse 16 onwards. A renewed
   contraction of the horizon is extremely unlikely. It would be as if a
   flower should shut and be a bud again.' The recurrence in verse 23 of
   Verily I say unto you,' which has already occurred in verse 15, closing
   the first section of the charge, makes it probable that here too a
   section is completed, and that probability is strengthened if it is
   observed that the same phrase occurs, for a third time, in the last
   verse of the chapter, where again the discourse soars to the height of
   contemplating the final reward. The fact that the apostles met with no
   persecution on their first mission, puts out of court the explanation
   of the words that refers them to that mission, and takes the coming' to
   be Jesus' own appearances in the places they had preceded Him as His
   heralds. The difficult question as to what is the terminus ad quem
   pointed to here seems best solved by taking the coming of the Son of
   Man' to be His judicial manifestation in the destruction of Jerusalem
   and the consequent desolation of many of the cities of Israel,' whilst
   at the same time, the nearer and smaller catastrophe is a prophecy and
   symbol of the remoter and greater day of the Son of Man' at the end of
   the days. The recognition of that aspect of the fall of Jerusalem is
   forced on us by the eschatological parts of the Gospels, which are a
   bewildering whirl without it. Here, however, it is the crash of the
   fall itself which is in view, and the thought conveyed is that there
   would be cities enough to serve for refuges, and scope enough for
   evangelistic work, till the end of the Jewish possession of the land.

   In verses 26-31, fear not' is thrice spoken, and at each occurrence is
   enforced by a reason. The first of these encouragements is the
   assurance of the certain ultimate world-wide manifestation of hidden
   things. That same dictum occurs in other connections, and with other
   applications, but in the present context can only be taken as an
   assurance that the Gospel message, little known as it thus far was, was
   destined to fill all ears. Therefore the disciples were to be fearless
   in doing their part in making it known, and so working in alliance with
   the divine purpose. It is the same thing that is meant by the covered'
   that shall be revealed,' the hidden' that shall be known,' that which
   is spoken in darkness,' and that which is whispered in the ear'; and
   all four designations refer to the word which every Christian has it in
   charge to sound out. We note that Jesus foresees a far wider range of
   publicity for His servants' ministry than for His own, just as He
   afterwards declared that they would do greater works' than His. He
   spoke to a handful of men in an obscure corner of the world. His
   teaching was necessarily largely confidential communication to the fit
   few. But the spark is going to be a blaze, and the whisper to become a
   shout that fills the world. Surely, then, we who are working in the
   line of direction of God's working should let no fear make us dumb, but
   should ever hear and obey the command: Lift up thy voice with strength,
   lift it up, be not afraid.'

   A second reason for fearlessness is the limitation of the enemy's power
   to hurt, reinforced by the thought that, while the penalties that man
   can inflict for faithfulness are only corporeal, transitory, and
   incapable of harming the true self, the consequences of unfaithfulness
   fling the whole man, body and soul, down to utter ruin. There is a fear
   that makes cowards and apostates; there is a fear which makes heroes
   and apostles. He who fears God, with the awe that has no torment and is
   own sister to love, is afraid of nothing and of no man. That holy and
   blessed fear drives out all other, as fire draws the heat out of a
   burn. He that serves Christ is lord of the world; he that fears God
   fronts the world, and is not afraid.

   The last reason for fearlessness touches a tender chord, and discloses
   a gracious thought of God as Father, which softens the tremendous
   preceding word: Who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.'
   Take both designations together, and let them work together in
   producing the awe which makes us brave, and the filial trust which
   makes us braver. A bird does not fall to the ground' unless wounded,
   and if it falls it dies. Jesus had looked pityingly on the great
   mystery, the woes of the creatures, and had stayed Himself on the
   thought of the all-embracing working of God. The very dying sparrow,
   with broken wing, had its place in that universal care. God is
   immanent' in nature. The antithesis often drawn between His universal
   care and His special providence' is misleading. Providence is special
   because it is universal. That which embraces everything must embrace
   each thing. But the immanent God is your Father,' and because of that
   sonship, ye are of more value than many sparrows.' There is an
   ascending order, and an increasing closeness and tenderness of
   relation. A man is better than a sheep,' and Christians, being God's
   children, may count on getting closer into the Father's heart than the
   poor crippled bird can, or than the godless man can. Your Father,' on
   the one hand, can destroy soul and body, therefore fear Him; but, on
   the other, He determines whether you shall fall to the ground' or soar
   above dangers, therefore fear none but Him.
     __________________________________________________________________

LIKE TEACHER, LIKE SCHOLAR

   The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his lord.
   26. It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the
   servant as his lord.' --MATT. x. 24, 25.

   These words were often on Christ's lips. Like other teachers, He too
   had His favourite sayings, the light of which He was wont to flash into
   many dark places. Such a saying, for instance, was, To him that hath
   shall be given.' Such a saying is this of my text; and probably several
   other of our Lord's utterances, which are repeated more than once in
   different Gospels, and have too hastily been sometimes assumed to have
   been introduced erroneously by the evangelists, in varying connections.

   This half-proverb occurs four times in the Gospels, and in three very
   different connections, pointing to three different subjects. Here, and
   once in John's Gospel, in the fifteenth chapter, it is employed to
   enforce the lesson of the oneness of Christ and His disciples in their
   relation to the world; and that His servants cannot expect to be better
   off than the Master was. If they have called Me Beelzebub they will not
   call you anything else.'

   Then in Luke's Gospel (vi. 40) it is employed to illustrate the
   principle that the scholar cannot expect to be wiser than his master;
   that a blind teacher will have blind pupils, and that they will both
   fall into the ditch. Of course, the scholar may get beyond his master,
   but then he will get up and go away from the school, and will not be
   his scholar any longer. As long as he is a scholar, the best that can
   happen to him, and that will not often happen, is to be on the level of
   his teacher.

   Then in another place in John's Gospel (xiii. 16) the saying is
   employed in reference to a different subject, viz. to teach the meaning
   of the pathetic, symbolical foot-washing, and to enforce the
   exhortation to imitate Jesus Christ, as generally in conduct, so
   specially in His wondrous humility. The servant is not greater than his
   lord.' I have left you an example that ye should do as I have done to
   you.'

   So if we put these three instances together we get a threefold
   illustration of the relation between the disciple and the teacher, in
   respect to wisdom, conduct, and reception by the world. And these
   three, with their bearing on the relation between Christians and Jesus
   Christ, open out large fields of duty and of privilege. The very centre
   of Christianity is discipleship, and the very highest hope, as well as
   the most imperative command which the Gospel brings to men is, Be like
   Him whom you profess to have taken as your Master. Be like Him here,
   and you shall be like Him hereafter.'

   I. Likeness to the teacher in wisdom is the disciple's perfection.

   If the blind lead the blind both shall fall into the ditch.' The
   disciple is not greater than his master.' It is enough for the disciple
   that he be as his master.' If that be a true principle, that the best
   that can happen to the scholar is to tread in his teacher's footsteps,
   to see with his eyes, to absorb his wisdom, to learn his truth, we may
   apply it in two opposite directions. First, it teaches us the
   limitations, and the misery, and the folly of taking men for our
   masters; and then, on the other hand, it teaches us the large hope, the
   blessing, freedom, and joy of having Christ for our Master.

   Now, first, look at the principle as bearing upon the relation of
   disciple and human teacher. All such teachers have their limitations.
   Each man has his little circle of favourite ideas that he is
   perpetually reiterating. In fact, it seems as if one truth was about as
   much as one teacher could manage, and as if, whensoever God had any
   great truth to give to the world, He had to take one man and make him
   its sole apostle. So that teachers become mere fragments, and to listen
   to them is to dwarf and narrow oneself.

   The chances are that no scholar shall be on his master's level. The
   eyes that see truth directly and for themselves in this world are very
   few. Most men have to take truth at second-hand, and few indeed are
   they who, like a perfect medium, receive even the fragmentary truth
   that human lips can impart to them, and transmit it as pure as they
   receive it. Disciples present exaggerations, caricatures,
   misconceptions, the limitations of the master becoming even more rigid
   in the pupil. Schools spring up which push the founder's teaching to
   extremes, and draw conclusions from it which he never dreamed of.
   Instead of a fresh voice, we have echoes, which, like all echoes, give
   only a syllable or two out of a sentence. Teachers can tell what they
   see, but they cannot give their followers eyes, and so the followers
   can do little more than repeat what their leader said he saw. They are
   like the little suckers that spring up from the stool' of a cut-down
   tree, or like the kinglets among whose feebler hands the great empire
   of an Alexander was divided at his death.

   It is a dwarfing thing to call any man master upon earth. And yet men
   will give to a man the credence which they refuse to Christ. The
   followers of some of the fashionable teachers of to-day--Comte,
   Spencer, or others--protest, in the name of mental independence,
   against accepting Christ as the absolute teacher of morals and
   religion, and then go away and put a man in the very place which they
   have denied to Him, and swallow down his dicta whole.

   Such facts show how heart and mind crave a teacher; how discipleship is
   ingrained in our nature; how we all long for some one who shall come to
   us authoritatively and say, Here is truth--believe it and live on it.'
   And yet it is fatal to pin one's faith on any, and it is miserable to
   have to change guides perpetually and to feel that we have outgrown
   those whom we reverence, and that we can look down on the height which
   once seemed to touch the stars--and, if we cut ourselves loose from all
   men's teaching, the isolation is dreary, and few of us are strong
   enough of arm, or clear enough of eye, to force or find the path
   through the tangled jungles of error.

   So take this thought, that the highest hope of a disciple is to be like
   the master in wisdom, in its bearing on the relation between us and
   Christ, and look how it then flashes up into blessedness and beauty.

   Such a teacher as we have in Him has no limitations, and it is safe to
   follow Him absolutely and Him alone. All others have plainly borne the
   impress of their age, or their nation, or their idiosyncrasy, in some
   way or another; Christ Jesus is the only teacher that the world has
   ever heard of, in whose teaching there is no mark of the age or
   generation or set of circumstances in which it originated. This water
   does not taste of any soil through which it has passed, it has come
   straight down from Heaven, and is pure and uncontaminated as the Heaven
   from which it has come. This teacher is safe to listen to absolutely:
   there are no limitations there; you never hear Him arguing; there is no
   sign about His words as if He had ever dug out for Himself the wisdom
   that He is proclaiming, or had ever seen it less distinctly than He
   sees it at the moment. The great peculiarity of His teaching is that He
   does not reason, but declares that His Verily! Verily!' is the
   confirmation of all His message. His teaching is Himself; other men
   bring lessons about truth; He says, I am the Truth.' Other teachers
   keep their personality in the background; He clashes His down in the
   foreground. Other men say, Listen to what I tell you, never mind about
   me.' He says, This is life eternal, that ye should believe on Me.' This
   Teacher has His message level to all minds, high and low, wise and
   foolish, cultivated and rude. This Teacher does not only impart wisdom
   by words as from without, though He does that too, but He comes into
   men's spirits, and communicates Himself, and so makes them wise. Other
   teachers fumble at the outside, but in the hidden parts He makes me to
   know wisdom.' So it is safe to take this Teacher absolutely, and to
   say, Thou art my Master, Thy word is truth, and the opening of Thy lips
   to me is wisdom.'

   In following Christ as our absolute Teacher, there is no sacrifice of
   independence or freedom of mind, but listening to Him is the way to
   secure these in their highest degree. We are set free from men, we are
   growingly delivered from errors and misconceptions, in the measure in
   which we keep close to Christ as our Master. The Lord is that Teacher,
   and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there, and there only, is liberty;
   freedom from self, from the dominion of popular opinion, from the
   coterie-speech of schools, from the imposing authority of individuals,
   and from all that makes cowardly men say as other people say, and fall
   in with the majority; and freedom from our own prejudices and our own
   errors, which are cleared away when we take Christ for our Master and
   cleave to Him.

   His teaching can never cease until it has accomplished its purpose, and
   not until we have gathered into our consciousness all the truth that He
   has to give, and have received all the wisdom that He can impart unto
   us as to God and Himself, does His teaching cease. Here we may grow
   indefinitely in the knowledge of Christ, and in the future we shall
   know even as we are known. His merciful teaching will not come to a
   close till we have drunk in all His wisdom, and till He has declared to
   us all which He has heard of the Father. He will pass us from one form
   to another of His school, but in Heaven we shall still be His scholars;
   Every one shall sit at Thy feet, every one shall receive of Thy words.'

   So, then, let us turn away from men, from rabbis and Sanhedrins, from
   authorities and schools, from doctors and churches. Why resort to
   cisterns when we may draw from the spring? Why listen to men when we
   may hear Christ? He is, as Dante called the great Greek thinker, the
   Master of those who know.' Why should we look to the planets when we
   can see the sun? Call no man master upon earth, for One is your Master,
   and all ye are brethren.' And His merciful teaching will never cease
   until everyone that is perfected shall be as his Master.'

   II. Now, turn to the second application of this principle. Likeness to
   the Master in life is the law of a disciple's conduct.

   That pathetic and wonderful story about the foot-washing in John's
   Gospel is meant for a symbol. It is the presenting, in a picturesque
   form, of the very heart and essence of Christ's Incarnation in its
   motive and purpose. The solemn prelude with which the evangelist
   introduces it lays bare our Lord's heart and His reason for His action.
   Having loved His own, which were in the world, He loved them to the
   end.' His motive, then, was love. Again, the exalted consciousness
   which accompanied His self-abasement is made prominent in the words,
   Knowing that the Father had given all things into His hand, and that He
   was come from God and went to God.' And the majestic deliberation and
   patient continuance in resolved humility with which He goes down the
   successive steps of the descent, are wonderfully given in the
   evangelist's record of how He riseth from supper, and laid aside His
   garments and girded Himself, and poured water into the basin.' It is a
   parable. Thus, in the consciousness of His divine authority and
   dignity, and moved by His love to the whole world, He laid aside the
   garments of His glory, and vested Himself with the towel of His
   humanity, the servant's garb, and took the water of His cleansing
   power, and came to wash the feet of all who will let Him cleanse them
   from their soil. And then, having reassumed His garments, He speaks
   from His throne to those who have been cleansed by His humiliation and
   His sacrifice, Know ye what I have done to you? The servant is not
   greater than his lord.'

   That is to say, dear brethren, in this one incident, which is the
   condensation, so to speak, of the whole spirit of His life, is the law
   for our lives as well. We, too, are bound to that same love as the main
   motive of all our actions; we, too, are bound to that same stripping
   off of dignity and lowly equalising of ourselves with those below us
   whom we would help, and we, too, are bound to make it our main object,
   in our intercourse with men, not merely that we should please nor
   enlighten them, nor succour their lower temporal needs, but that we
   should cleanse them and make them pure with the purity that Christ
   gives.

   A Christian life all moved and animated by self-denuding love, and
   which came amongst men to make them better and purer, and all the
   influence of which tended in the direction of helping poor foul hearts
   to get rid of their filth, how different it would be from our lives!
   What a grim contrast much of our lives is to the Master's example and
   command! Did you ever strip yourself of anything, my brother, in order
   to make some poor, wretched creature a little purer and liker the
   Saviour? Did you ever drop your dignity and go down to the low levels
   in order to lift up the people that were there? Do men see anything of
   that example, as reproduced in your lives, of the Master that lays
   aside the garments of Heaven for the vesture of earth, and dies upon
   the Cross in order that He might make our poor hearts purer and liker
   His own?

   But, hard as such imitation is, it is only one case of a general
   principle. Discipleship is likeness to Jesus Christ in conduct. There
   is no discipleship worth naming which does not, at least, attempt that
   likeness. What is the use of a man saying that he is the disciple of
   Incarnate Love if his whole life is incarnate selfishness? What is the
   use of your calling yourselves Christians, and saying that you are
   followers of Jesus Christ, when He came to do God's will and delighted
   in it, and you come to do your own, and never do God's will at all, or
   scarcely at all, and then reluctantly and with many a murmur? What kind
   of a disciple is he, the habitual tenor of whose life contradicts the
   life of his Master and disobeys His commandments? And I am bound to say
   that that is the life of an enormously large proportion of the
   professing disciples in this age of conventional Christianity.

   The disciple shall be as his master.' Do you make it your effort to be
   like Him? If so, then the saying is not only a law, but a promise, for
   it assures us that our effort shall not fail but progressively succeed,
   and lead on at last to our becoming what we behold, and being conformed
   to Him whom we love, and like the Master to whose wisdom we profess to
   listen. They whose earthly life is a following of Christ, with
   faltering steps and afar off, shall have for their heavenly
   blessedness, that they shall follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.'

   III. And now, lastly, likeness to the Master in relation to the world
   is the fate that the disciple must put up with.

   If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how much more
   shall they call them of his household?' The disciple is not above his
   master, nor the servant above his lord.' Our Lord reiterated the
   statement in another place in John's Gospel, reminding them that He had
   said it before.

   If we are like Jesus Christ in conduct, and if we have received His
   Word as the truth upon which we repose, depend upon it, in our measure
   and in varying fashions, we shall have to bear the same kind of
   treatment that He received from the world. The days of so-called
   persecution are over in so-called Christian countries, but if you are a
   disciple in the sense of believing all that Jesus Christ says, and
   taking Him for your Teacher, the public opinion of this day will have a
   great many things to say about you that will not be very pleasant. You
   will be considered to be old-fashioned,' narrow,' behind the times,'
   etc. etc. etc. Look at the bitter spirit of antagonism to an earnest
   and simple Christianity and adoption of Christ as our authoritative
   Teacher which goes through much of our high-class literature to-day. It
   is a very small matter as measured with what Christian men used to have
   to bear; but it indicates the set of things. We may make up our minds
   that if we are not contented with the pared-down Christianity which the
   world allows to pass at present, but insist upon coming to the New
   Testament for our beliefs and practices, and avow--I believe all that
   Jesus Christ says, and I believe it because He says it, and I take Him
   as my model'; we shall find out that the disciple has to be as his
   Master,' and that the Pharisees and the Scribes of to-day stand in the
   same relation to the followers as their predecessors did to the Leader.
   If you are like your Master in conduct, you will be no more popular
   with the world than He was. As long as Christianity will be quiet, and
   let the world go its own gait, the world is very well contented to let
   it alone, or even to say polite things to it. Why should the world take
   the trouble of persecuting the kind of Christianity that so many of us
   display? What is the difference between our Christianity and their
   worldliness? The world is quite willing to come to church on Sundays,
   and to call itself a Christian world, if only it may live as it likes.
   And many professing Christians have precisely the same idea. They
   attend to the externals of Christianity, and call themselves
   Christians, but they bargain for its having very little power over
   their lives. Why, then, should two sets of people who have the same
   ideas and practices dislike each other? No reason at all! But let
   Christian men live up to their profession, and above all let them
   become aggressive, and try to attack the world's evil, as they are
   bound to do; let them fight drunkenness, let them go against the lust
   of great cities, let them preach peace in the face of a nation howling
   for war, let them apply the golden rules of Christianity to commerce
   and social relationships and the like, and you will very soon hear a
   pretty shout that will tell you that the disciple who is a disciple has
   to share the fate of the Master, notwithstanding nineteen centuries of
   Christian teaching.

   If you do not know what it is to find yourselves out of harmony with
   the world, I am afraid it is because you have less of the Master's
   spirit than you have of the world's. The world loves its own. If you
   are not of the world, the world will hate you.' If it does not, it must
   be because, in spite of your name, you belong to it.

   But if we are like Him in our relation to the world, because we are
   like Him in character, our very share in His reproach,' and our sense
   of being aliens' here, bear the promise that we shall be like Him in
   all worlds. His fortune is ours. The disciple shall be as his master.'
   If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. No cross, no
   crown;--if cross, then crown! The end of discipleship is not reached
   until the Master's image and the Master's lot are repeated in the
   scholar.

   Take Christ for your sacrifice, trust to His blood, listen to His
   teaching, walk in His footsteps, and you shall share His sovereignty
   and sit on His throne. It is enough,'--ay! more than enough, and
   nothing less than that is enough,--for the disciple that he be as'--and
   with--his master.' I shall be satisfied when I awake in Thy likeness.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE KING'S CHARGE TO HIS AMBASSADORS

   Whosoever therefore shall confess Me before men, him will I confess
   also before My Father which is in heaven. 33. But whosoever shall deny
   Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in
   heaven. 34. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not
   to send peace, but a sword. 35. For I am come to set a man at variance
   against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the
   daughter in law against her mother in law. 36. And man's foes shall be
   they of his own household. 37. He that loveth father or mother more
   than Me is not worthy of Me: and he that loveth son or daughter more
   than Me is not worthy of Me. 38. And he that taketh not his cross, and
   followeth after Me, is not worthy of Me. 39. He that findeth his life
   shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for My sake shall find it
   40. He that receiveth you receiveth Me, and he that receiveth Me
   receiveth Him that sent Me. 41. He that receiveth a prophet in the name
   of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a
   righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous
   man's reward. 42. And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these
   little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily
   I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.' --MATT. x. 32-42.

   The first mission of the apostles, important as it was, was but a short
   flight to try the young birds' wings. The larger portion of this charge
   to them passes far beyond the immediate occasion, and deals with the
   permanent relations of Christ's servants to the world in which they
   live, for the purpose of bringing it into subjection to its true King.
   These solemn closing words, which make our present subject, contain the
   duty and blessedness of confessing Him, the vision of the antagonisms
   which He excites, His demand for all-surrendering following, and the
   rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers, and therein receive
   Himself and His Father.

   I. The duty and blessedness of confessing Him (vs. 32, 33). The
   therefore' is significant. It attaches the promise which follows to the
   immediately preceding thoughts of a watchful, fatherly care, extending
   like a great invisible hand over the true disciple. Because each is
   thus guarded, each shall be preserved to receive the honour of being
   confessed by Christ. No matter what may befall His witnesses, the
   extremest disaster shall not rob them of their reward. They may be
   flung down from the house-tops where they lift up their bold voices,
   but He who does not let a sparrow fall to the ground uncared for, will
   give His angels charge concerning them who are so much more precious,
   and they shall be borne up on outstretched wings, lest they be dashed
   on the pavement below. Thus preserved, they shall all attain at last to
   their guerdon. Nothing can come between Christ's servant and his crown.
   The tender providence of the Father, whose mercy is over all His works,
   makes sure of that. The river of the confessor's life may plunge
   underground, and be lost amid persecutions, but it will emerge again
   into the brighter sunshine on the other side of the mountains.

   The confession which is to be thus rewarded, like the denial opposed to
   it, is, of course, not merely a single utterance of the lip. So far
   Judas Iscariot confessed Christ, and Peter denied Him. But it is the
   habitual acknowledgment by lip and life, unwithdrawn to the end. The
   context implies that the confession is maintained in the face of
   opposition, and that the denial is a cowardly attempt to save one's
   skin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not come in
   that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be made brave if
   it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and the fire, and screw
   oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than to resist the more
   specious blandishments of the world, especially when it has been
   christened, and calls itself religious. The light laugh of scorn, the
   silent pressure of the low average of Christian character, the close
   associations in trade, literature, public and domestic life which
   Christians have with non-Christians, make many a man's tongue lie
   silent, to the sore detriment of his own religious life. Ye have not
   yet resisted unto blood,' and find it hard to fulfil the easier
   conflict to which you are called. The sun has more power than the
   tempest to make the pilgrim drop his garment. But the duty remains the
   same for all ages. Every man is bound to make the deepest springs of
   his life visible, and to stand to his convictions, whatever they be. If
   he do not, his convictions will disappear like a piece of ice hid in a
   hot hand, which will melt and trickle away. This obligation lies with
   infinitely increased weight on Christ's servants; and the consequences
   of failing to discharge it are more tragic in their cases, in the exact
   proportion of the greater preciousness of their faith. Corn hoarded is
   sure to be spoiled by weevils and rust. The bread of life hidden in our
   sacks will certainly go mouldy.

   The reward and punishment of confession and denial come to them not as
   separate acts, but as each being the revelation of the spiritual
   condition of the doers. Christ implies that a true disciple cannot but
   be a confessor, and that therefore the denier must certainly be one
   whom He has never known. Because, therefore, each act is symptomatic of
   the doer, each receives the congruous and correspondent reward. The
   confessor is confessed; the denier is denied. What calm and assured
   consciousness of His place as Judge underlies these words! His
   recognition is God's acceptance; His denial is darkness and misery. The
   correspondence between the work and the reward is beautifully brought
   out by the use of the same word to express each. And yet what a
   difference between our confession of Him and His of us! And what a hope
   is here for all who have tremblingly, and in the consciousness of much
   unworthiness, ventured to say that they were Christ's subjects, and He
   their King, brother, and all! Their poor, feeble confession will be
   endorsed by His. He will say, Yes, this man is mine, and I am his.'
   That will be glory, honour, blessedness, life, heaven.

   II. The vision of the discord which follows the coming of the King of
   peace. It is not enough to interpret these words as meaning that our
   Lord's purpose indeed was to bring peace, but that the result of His
   coming was strife. The ultimate purpose is peace; but an immediate
   purpose is conflict, as the only road to the peace. He is first King of
   righteousness, and after that also King of peace. But, if His kingdom
   be righteousness, purity, love, then unrighteousness, filthiness, and
   selfishness will fight against it for their lives. The ultimate purpose
   of Christ's coming is to transform the world into the likeness of
   heaven; and all in the world which hates such likeness is embattled
   against Him. He saw realities, and knew men's hearts, and was under no
   illusion, such as many an ardent reformer has cherished, that the fair
   form of truth need only be shown to men, and they will take her to
   their hearts. Incessant struggle is the law for the individual and for
   society till Christ's purpose for both is realised.

   That conflict ranges the dearest in opposite ranks. The gospel is the
   great solvent. As when a substance is brought into contact with some
   chemical compound, which has greater affinity for one of its elements
   than the other element has, the old combination is dissolved, and a new
   and more stable one is formed, so Christianity analyses and destroys in
   order to synthesis and construction. In verse 21 our Lord had foretold
   that brother should deliver up brother to death. Here the severance is
   considered from the opposite side. The persons who are set at variance'
   with their kindred are here Christians. Perhaps it is fanciful to
   observe that they are all junior members of families, as if the young
   would be more likely to flock to the new light. But however that may
   be, the separation is mutual, but the hate is all on one side. The
   man's foes' are of his own household; but he is not their foe, though
   he be parted from them.

   III. Earthly love may be a worse foe to a true Christian than even the
   enmity of the dearest; and that enmity may often be excited by the
   Christian subordination of earthly to heavenly love. So our Lord passes
   from the warnings of discord and hate to the danger of the
   opposite--undue love.

   He claims absolute supremacy in our hearts. He goes still farther, and
   claims the surrender, not only of affections, but of self and life to
   Him. What a strange claim this is! A Jewish peasant, dead nineteen
   hundred years since, fronts the whole race of man, and asserts His
   right to their love, which is strange, and to their supreme love, which
   is stranger still. Why should we love Him at all, if He were only a
   man, however pure and benevolent? We may admire, as we do many another
   fair nature in the past; but is there any possibility of evoking
   anything as warm as love to an unseen person, who can have had no
   knowledge of or love to us? And why should we love Him more than our
   dearest, from whom we have drawn, or to whom we have given, life? What
   explanation or justification does He give of this unexampled demand?
   Absolutely none. He seems to think that its reasonableness needs no
   elucidation. Surely never did teacher professing wisdom, modesty, and,
   still more, religion, put forward such a claim of right; and surely
   never besides did any succeed in persuading generations unborn to yield
   His demand, when they heard it. The strangest thing in the world's
   history is that to-day there are millions who do love Jesus Christ more
   than all besides, and whose chief self-accusation is that they do not
   love Him more. The strange, audacious claim is most reasonable, if we
   believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for each of us, and that
   each man and woman to the last of the generations had a separate place
   in His divine human love when He died. It is meet to love Him, if that
   be true; it is not, unless it be. The requirement is as stringent as
   strange. If the two ever seem to conflict, the earthly must give way.
   If the earthly be withdrawn, there must be found sufficiency for
   comfort and peace in the heavenly. The lower must not be permitted to
   hinder the flight of the heavenly to its home. More than Me' is a
   rebuke to most of us. What a contrast between the warmth of our earthly
   and the tepidity or coldness of our heavenly love! How spontaneously
   our thoughts, when left free, turn to the one; how hard we find it to
   keep them fixed on the other! How sweet service is to the dear ones
   here; how reluctantly it is given to Christ! How we long, when parted,
   to rejoin them; how little we are drawn to the place where He is! We
   have all to confess that we are not worthy of' Him; that we requite His
   love with inadequate returns, and live lives which tax His love for its
   highest exercise, the free forgiveness of sins against itself.
   Compliance with that stringent law, and subordinating all earthly love
   to His, is the true elevating and ennobling of the earthly. It is
   promoted, not degraded, when it is made second, and is infinitely
   sweeter and deeper then than when it was set in the place of supremacy,
   where it had no right to be.

   But Christ's demand is not only for the surrender of the heart, but for
   the giving up of self, and, in a very profound sense, for the surrender
   of life. How enigmatical that saying about taking up the cross must
   have sounded to the disciples! They knew little about the cross, as a
   punishment; they had not yet associated it in any way with their Lord.
   This seems to have been the first occasion of His mentioning it, and
   the allusion is so veiled as to be but partially intelligible. But what
   was intelligible was bewildering. A strange royal procession that, of
   the King with a cross on His shoulder, and all His subjects behind Him
   with similar burdens! Through the ages that procession has marched, and
   it marches still. Self-denial for Christ's sake is the badge of all our
   tribe.' Observe that word take.' The cross must be willingly and by
   ourselves assumed. No other can lay it on our shoulders. Observe that
   other word his.' Each man has his own special form in which self-denial
   is needful for him. We require pure eyes, and hearts kept in very close
   communion with Jesus, to ascertain what our particular cross is. He has
   them of many patterns, shapes, sizes, and materials. We can always make
   sure of strength to carry the one which He means us to carry, but not
   of strength to bear what is not ours.

   IV. We have the rewards of those who receive Christ's messengers, and
   therein receive Him and His Father. Our Lord first identifies these
   twelve with Himself in a manner which must have sounded strange to them
   then, but have heartened them for their work by the consciousness of
   His mysterious oneness with them. The whole doctrine of Christ's unity
   with His people lay in germ in these words, though much more was
   needed, both of teaching and of experience, before their depth of
   blessing and strengthening could be apprehended. We know that He dwells
   in His true subjects by His Spirit, and that a most real union subsists
   between the head and the members, of which the closest unions of earth
   are but faint shadows, so as that not only those who receive His
   followers receive Him, but, more wonderful still, His followers are
   received at the last by God Himself as joined to Him, and portions of
   His very self, and therefore accepted in the Beloved.' Our Lord adds to
   these words the thought that, in like manner, to receive Him is to
   receive the Father, and so implies that our relation to Him is in
   certain real respects parallel with His relation to the Father. We too
   are sent. He who sends abides with us, as the Son ever abode in God,
   and God in Him. We are sent to be the brightness of Christ's glory, and
   to manifest Him to men, as He was sent to reveal the Father.
     __________________________________________________________________

A LIFE LOST AND FOUND [1]

   He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.' --MATT. x. 39.

   My heart impels me to break this morning my usual rule of avoiding
   personal references in the pulpit. Death has been busy in our own
   congregation this last week, and yesterday we laid in the grave all
   that was mortal of a man to whom Manchester owes more than it knows.
   Mr. Crossley has been for thirty years my close and dear friend. He was
   long a member of this church and congregation. I need not speak of his
   utter unselfishness, of his lifelong consecration, of his lavish
   generosity, of his unstinted work for God and man; but thinking of him
   and of it, I have felt as if the words of my text were the secret of
   his life, and as if he now understood the fulness of the promise they
   contain: He that loseth his life for My sake shall find it.' Now,
   looking at these words in the light of the example so tenderly beloved
   by some of us, so sharply criticised by many, but now so fully
   recognised as saintly by all, I ask you to consider--

   I. The stringent requirement for the Christian life that is here made.

   Now we shall very much impoverish the meaning and narrow the sweep of
   these great and penetrating words, if we understand by losing one's
   life' only the actual surrender of physical existence. It is not only
   the martyr on whose bleeding brows the crown of life is gently placed;
   it is not only the temples that have been torn by the crown of thorns,
   that are soothed by that unfading wreath; but there is a daily dying,
   which is continually required from all Christian people, and is,
   perhaps, as hard as, or harder than, the brief and bloody passage of
   martyrdom by which some enter into rest. For the true losing of life is
   the slaying of self, and that has to be done day by day, and not once
   for all, in some supreme act of surrender at the end, or in some
   initial act of submission and yielding at the beginning, of the
   Christian life. We ourselves have to take the knife into our own hands
   and strike, and that not once, but ever, right on through our whole
   career. For, by natural disposition, we are all inclined to make our
   own selves to be our own centres, our own aims, the objects of our
   trust, our own law; and if we do so, we are dead whilst we live, and
   the death that brings life is when, day by day, we crucify the old man
   with his affections and lusts.' Crucifixion was no sudden death; it was
   an exquisitely painful one, which made every nerve quiver and the whole
   frame thrill with anguish; and that slow agony, in all its terribleness
   and protractedness, is the image that is set before us as the true
   ideal of every life that would not be a living death. The world is to
   be crucified to me, and I to the world.

   We have our centre in ourselves, and we need the centre to be shifted,
   or we live in sin. If I might venture upon so violent an image, the
   comets that career about the heavens need to be caught and tamed, and
   bound to peaceful revolution round some central sun, or else they are
   wandering stars to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for
   ever.' So, brethren, the slaying of self by a painful, protracted
   process, is the requirement of Christ.

   But do not let us confine ourselves to generalities. What is meant?
   This is meant--the absolute submission of the will to commandments and
   providences, the making of that obstinate part of our nature meek and
   obedient and plastic as the clay in the potter's hands. The tanner
   takes a stiff hide, and soaks it in bitter waters, and dresses it with
   sharp tools, and lubricates it with unguents, and his work is not done
   till all the stiffness is out of it and it is flexible. And we do not
   lose our lives in the lofty, noble sense, until we can say--and verify
   the speech by our actions--Not my will but Thine be done.' They who
   thus submit, they who thus welcome into their hearts, and enthrone upon
   the sovereign seat in their wills, Christ and His will--these are they
   who have lost their lives. When we can say, I live, yet not I, but
   Christ liveth in me,' then, and only then, have we in the deepest sense
   of the words lost our lives.'

   The phrase means the suppression, and sometimes the excision, of
   appetites, passions, desires, inclinations. It means the hallowing of
   all aims; it means the devotion and the consecration of all activities.
   It means the surrender and the stewardship of all possessions. And only
   then, when we have done these things, shall we have come to practical
   obedience to the initial requirement that Christ makes from us all--to
   lose our lives for His sake.

   I need not diverge here to point to that life from which my thoughts
   have taken their start in this sermon. Surely if there was any one
   characteristic in it more distinct and lovely than another, it was that
   self was dead and that Christ lived. There may be sometimes a call for
   the actual--which is the lesser--surrender of the bodily life, in
   obedience to the call of duty. There have been Christian men who have
   wrought themselves to death in the Master's service. Perhaps he of whom
   I have been speaking was one of these. It may be that, if he had done
   like so many of our wealthy men--had flung himself into business and
   then collapsed into repose--he would have been here to-day. Perhaps it
   would have been better if there had been a less entire throwing of
   himself into arduous and clamant duties. I am not going to enter on the
   ethics of that question. I do not think there are many of this
   generation of Christians who are likely to work themselves to death in
   Christ's cause; and perhaps, after all, the old saying is a true one,
   Better to wear out than to rust out.' But only this I will say: we
   honour the martyrs of Science, of Commerce, of Empire, why should not
   we honour the martyrs of Faith? And why should they be branded as
   imprudent enthusiasts, if they make the same sacrifice which, when an
   explorer or a soldier makes, his memory is honoured as heroic, and his
   cold brows are crowned with laurels? Surely it is as wise to die for
   Christ as for England. But be that as it may; the requirement, the
   stringent requirement, of my text is not addressed to any spiritual
   aristocracy, but is laid upon the consciences of all professing
   Christians.

   II. Observe the grounds of this requirement.

   Did you ever think--or has the fact become so familiar to you that it
   ceases to attract notice?--did you ever think what an extraordinary
   position it is for the son of a carpenter in Nazareth to plant Himself
   before the human race and say, You will be wise if you die for My sake,
   and you will be doing nothing more than your plain duty'? What business
   has He to assume such a position as that? What warrants that autocratic
   and all-demanding tone from His lips? Who art Thou'--we may fancy
   people saying--that Thou shouldst put out a masterful hand and claim to
   take as Thine the life of my heart?' Ah! brethren, there is but one
   answer: Who loved me, and gave Himself for me.' The foolish, loving,
   impulsive apostle that blurted out, before his time had come, I will
   lay down my life for Thy sake,' was only premature; he was not
   mistaken. There needed that His Lord should lay down His life for
   Peter's sake; and then He had a right to turn to the apostle and say,
   Thou shalt follow Me afterwards,' and lay down thy life for My sake.'
   The ground of Christ's unique claim is Christ's solitary sacrifice. He
   who has died for men, and He only, has the right to require the
   unconditional, the absolute surrender of themselves, not only in the
   sacrifice of a life that is submitted, but, if circumstances demand, in
   the sacrifice of a death. The ground of the requirement is laid, first
   in the fact of our Lord's divine nature, and second, in the fact that
   He who asks my life has first of all given His.

   But that same phrase, for My sake,' suggests--

   III. The all-sufficient motive which makes such a loss of life
   possible.

   I suppose that there is nothing else that will wholly dethrone self but
   the enthroning of Jesus Christ. That dominion is too deeply rooted to
   be abolished by any enthusiasms, however noble they may be, except the
   one that kindles its undying torch at the flame of Christ's own love.
   God forbid that I should deny that wonderful and lovely instances of
   self-oblivion may be found in hearts untouched by the supreme love of
   Christ! But whilst I recognise all the beauty of such, I, for my part,
   humbly venture to believe and assert that, for the entire deliverance
   of a man from self-regard, the one sufficient motive power is the
   reception into his opening heart of the love of Jesus Christ.

   Ah! brethren, you and I know how hard it is to escape from the
   tyrannous dominion of self, and how the evil spirits that have taken
   possession of us mock at all lesser charms than the name which devils
   fear and fly'; the Name that is above every name.' We have tried other
   motives. We have sought to reprove our selfishness by other
   considerations. Human love--which itself is sometimes only the love of
   self, seeking satisfaction from another--human love does conquer it,
   but yet conquers it partially. The demons turn round upon all other
   would-be exorcists, and say, Jesus we know . . . but who are ye?' It is
   only when the Ark is carried into the Temple that Dagon falls prone
   before it. If you would drive self out of your hearts--and if you do
   not it will slay you--if you would drive self out, let Christ's love
   and sacrifice come in. And then, what no brooms and brushes, no spades
   nor wheelbarrows, will ever do--namely, cleanse out the filth that
   lodges there--the turning of the river in will do, and float it all
   away. The one possibility for complete, conclusive deliverance from the
   dominion and tyranny of Self is to be found in the words For My sake.'
   Ah! brethren, I suppose there are none of us so poor in earthly love,
   possessed or remembered, but that we know the omnipotence of these
   words when whispered by beloved lips, For My sake'; and Jesus Christ is
   saying them to us all.

   IV. Lastly, notice the recompense of the stringent requirement.

   Shall find it,' and that finding, like the losing, has a twofold
   reference and accomplishment: here and now, yonder and then.

   Here and now, no man possesses himself till he has given himself to
   Jesus Christ. Only then, when we put the reins into His hands, can we
   coerce and guide the fiery steeds of passion and of impulse, And so
   Scripture, in more than one place, uses a remarkable expression, when
   it speaks of those that believe to the acquiring of their souls.' You
   are not your own masters until you are Christ's servants; and when you
   fancy yourselves to be most entirely your own masters, you have
   promised yourselves liberty and have become the slave of corruption. So
   if you would own yourselves, give yourselves away. And such an one
   shall find' his life, here and now, in that all earthly things will be
   sweeter and better. The altar sanctifies the gift. When some pebble is
   plunged into a sunlit stream, the water brings out the veined
   colourings of the stone that looked all dull and dim when it was lying
   upon the bank. Fling your whole being, your wealth, your activities,
   and everything, into that stream, and they will flash in splendour else
   unknown. Did not my friend, of whom I have been speaking, enjoy his
   wealth far more, when he poured it out like water upon good causes,
   than if he had spent it in luxury and self-indulgence? And shall we not
   find that everything is sweeter, nobler, better, fuller of capacity to
   delight, if we give it all to our Master? The stringent requirement of
   Christ is the perfection of prudence. Who pleasure follows pleasure
   slays,' and who slays pleasure finds a deeper and a holier delight. The
   keenest epicureanism could devise no better means for sucking the last
   drop of sweetness out of the clustering grapes of the gladnesses of
   earth than to obey this stringent requirement, and so realise the
   blessed promise, Whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it.' The
   selfish man is a roundabout fool. The self-devoted man, the
   Christ-enthroning man, is the wise man.

   And there will be the further finding hereafter, about which we cannot
   speak. Only remember, how in a passage parallel with this of my text,
   spoken when almost within sight of Calvary, our Lord laid down not only
   the principle of His own life but the principle for all His servants,
   when He said, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it
   abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.' The
   solitary grain dropped into the furrow brings forth a waving harvest.
   We may not, we need not, particularise, but the life that is found at
   last is as the fruit an hundredfold of the life that men called lost'
   and God called 'sown.'

   Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; they rest from their
   labours, and their works do follow them.'
     __________________________________________________________________

   [1] Preached after the funeral of Mr. F. W. Crossley.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE GREATEST IN THE KINGDOM, AND THEIR REWARD

   He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a
   prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of
   a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward. 42. And
   whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of
   cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he
   shall in no wise lose his reward.' --MATT. x. 41, 42.

   There is nothing in these words to show whether they refer to the
   present or to the future. We shall probably not go wrong if we regard
   them as having reference to both. For all godliness has promise of the
   life that now is, as well as of that which is to come,' and in keeping
   God's commandments,' as well as for keeping them, there is great
   reward,' a reward realised in the present, even although Death holds
   the keys of the treasure-house in which the richest rewards are stored.
   No act of holy obedience is here left without foretastes of joy, which,
   though they be but brooks by the way,' contain the same water of life
   which hereafter swells to an ocean.

   Some people tell us that it is defective morality in Christianity to
   bribe men to be good by promising them Heaven, and that he who is
   actuated by such a motive is selfish. Now that fantastic and
   overstrained objection may be very simply answered by two
   considerations: self-regard is not selfishness, and Christianity does
   not propose the future reward as the motive for goodness. The motive
   for goodness is love to Jesus Christ; and if ever there was a man who
   did acts of Christian goodness only for the sake of what he would get
   by them, the acts were not Christian goodness, because the motive was
   wrong. But it is a piece of fastidiousness to forbid us to reinforce
   the great Christian motive, which is love to Jesus Christ, by the
   thought of the recompense of reward. It is a stimulus and an
   encouragement of, not the motive for, goodness. This text shows us that
   it is a subordinate motive, for it says that the reception of a
   prophet, or of a righteous man, or of one of these little ones,' which
   is rewardable, is the reception in the name of' a prophet, a disciple,
   and so on, or, in other words, is the recognising of the prophet, or
   the righteous man, or the disciple for what he is, and because he is
   that, and not because of the reward, receiving him with sympathy and
   solace and help.

   So, with that explanation, let us look at these very remarkable words
   of our text.

   I. The first thing which I wish to observe in them is the three classes
   of character which are dealt with--prophet,' righteous man,' these
   little ones.'

   Now the question that I would suggest is this: Is there any meaning in
   the order in which these are arranged? If so, what is it? Do we begin
   at the bottom, or at the top? Have we to do with an ascending or with a
   descending scale? Is the prophet thought to be greater than the
   righteous man, or less? Is the righteous man thought to be higher than
   the little one, or to be lower? The question is an important one, and
   worth considering.

   Now, at first sight, it certainly does look as if we had here to do
   with a descending scale, as if we began at the top and went downwards.
   A prophet, a man honoured with a distinct commission from God to
   declare His will, is, in certain very obvious respects, loftier than a
   man who is not so honoured, however pure and righteous he may be. The
   dim and venerable figures, for instance, of Isaiah and Jeremiah, tower
   high above all their contemporaries; and godly men who hung upon their
   lips, like Baruch on Jeremiah's, felt themselves to be, and were,
   inferior to them. And, in like manner, the little child who believes in
   Christ may seem to be insignificant in comparison with the prophet with
   his God-touched lips, or the righteous man of the old dispensation with
   his austere purity; as a humble violet may seem by the side of a rose
   with its heart of fire, or a white lily regal and tall. But one
   remembers that Jesus Christ Himself declared that the least of the
   little ones' was greater than the greatest who had gone before; and it
   is not at all likely that He who has just been saying that whosoever
   received His followers received Himself, should classify these
   followers beneath the righteous men of old. The Christian type of
   character is distinctly higher than the Old Testament type; and the
   humblest believer is blessed above prophets and righteous men because
   his eyes behold and his heart welcomes the Christ.

   Therefore I am inclined to believe that we have here an ascending
   series--that we begin at the bottom and not at the top; that the
   prophet is less than the righteous man, and the righteous man less than
   the little one who believes in Christ. For, suppose there were a
   prophet who was not righteous, and a righteous man who was not a
   prophet. Suppose the separation between the two characters were
   complete, which of them would be the greater? Balaam was a prophet;
   Balaam was not a righteous man; Balaam was immeasurably inferior to the
   righteous whose lives he did not emulate, though he could not but envy
   their deaths. In like manner the humblest believer in Jesus Christ has
   something that a prophet, if he is not a disciple, does not possess;
   and that which he has, and the prophet has not, is higher than the
   endowment that is peculiar to the prophet alone.

   May we say the same thing about the difference between the righteous
   man and the disciple? Can there be a righteous man that is not a
   disciple? Can there be a disciple that is not a righteous man? Can the
   separation between these two classes be perfect and complete? No! in
   the profoundest sense, certainly not. But then at the time when Christ
   spoke there were some men standing round Him, who, as touching the
   righteousness which is of the law,' were blameless.' And there are many
   men to-day, with much that is noble and admirable in their characters,
   who stand apart from the faith that is in Jesus Christ; and if the
   separation be so complete as that, then it is to be emphatically and
   decisively pronounced that, if we have regard to all that a man ought
   to be, and if we estimate men in the measure in which they approximate
   to that ideal in their lives and conduct, the Christian is the highest
   style of man.' The disciple is above the righteous men adorned with
   many graces of character, who, if they are not Christians, have a worm
   at the root of all their goodness, because it lacks the supreme
   refinement and consecration of faith; and above the fiery-tongued
   prophet, if he is not a disciple.

   Now, brethren, this thought is full of very important practical
   inferences. Faith is better than genius. Faith is better than brilliant
   gifts. Faith is better than large acquirements. The poet's imagination,
   the philosopher's calm reasoning, the orator's tongue of fire, even the
   inspiration of men that may have their lips touched to proclaim God to
   their brethren, are all less than the bond of living trust that knits a
   soul to Jesus Christ, and makes it thereby partaker of that indwelling
   Saviour. And, in like manner, if there be men, as there are, and no
   doubt some of them among my hearers, adorned with virtues and graces of
   character, but who have not rested their souls on Jesus Christ, then
   high above these, too, stands the lowliest person who has set his faith
   and love on that Saviour. Neither intellectual endowments nor moral
   character are the highest, but faith in Jesus Christ. A man may be
   endowed with all brilliancy of intellect and fair with many beauties of
   character, and he may be lost; and on the other hand simple faith,
   rudimentary and germlike as it often is, carries in itself the prophecy
   of all goodness, and knits a man to the source of all blessedness.
   Whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge,
   it shall vanish away. Now abideth these three, faith, hope, charity.'
   Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice
   because your names are written in Heaven.'

   Ah! brethren, if we believed in Christ's classification of men, and in
   the order of importance and dignity in which He arranges them, it would
   make a wonderful practical difference to the lives, to the desires, and
   to the efforts of a great many of us. Some of you students, young men
   and women that are working at college or your classes, if you believed
   that it was better to trust in Jesus Christ than to be wise, and gave
   one-tenth, ay! one-hundredth part of the attention and the effort to
   secure the one which you do to secure the other, would be different
   people. Not many wise men after the flesh,' but humble trusters in
   Jesus Christ, are the victors in the world. Believe you that, and order
   your lives accordingly.

   Oh! what a reversal of this world's estimates is coming one day, when
   the names that stand high in the roll of fame shall pale, like
   photographs that have been shut up in a portfolio, and when you take
   them out have faded off the paper. The world knows nothing of its
   greatest men,' but there is a time coming when the spurious mushroom
   aristocracy that the world has worshipped will be forgotten, like the
   nobility of some conquered land, who are brushed aside and relegated to
   private life by the new nobility of the conquerors, and when the true
   nobles, God's aristocrats, the righteous, who are righteous because
   they have trusted in Christ, shall shine forth like the sun in the
   Kingdom of My Father.'

   Here is the climax: gifts and endowments at the bottom, character and
   morality in the middle, and at the top faith in Jesus Christ.

   II. Now notice briefly in the second place the variety of the reward
   according to the character.

   The prophet has his, the righteous man has his, the little one has his.
   That is to say, each level of spiritual or moral stature receives its
   own prize. There is no difficulty in seeing that this is so in regard
   to the rewards of this life. Every faithful message delivered by a
   prophet increases that prophet's own blessedness, and has joys in the
   receiving of it from God, in the speaking of it to men, in the marking
   of its effects as it spreads through the world, which belong to him
   alone. In all these, and in many other ways, the prophet' has rewards
   that no stranger can intermeddle with. All courses of obedient conduct
   have their own appropriate consequences and satisfaction. Every
   character is adapted to receive, and does receive, in the measure of
   its goodness, certain blessings and joys, here and now. Surely the
   righteous shall be recompensed in the earth.'

   And the same principle, of course, applies if we think of the reward as
   altogether future. It must be remembered, however, that Christianity
   does not teach, as I believe, that if there be a prophet or a righteous
   man who is not a disciple, that prophet or righteous man will get
   rewards in the future life. It must be remembered, too, that every
   disciple is righteous in the measure of his faith. Discipleship being
   presupposed, then the disciple who is a prophet will have one reward,
   and the disciple who is a righteous man shall have another; and where
   all three characteristics coincide, there shall be a triple crown of
   glory upon his head.

   That is all plain and obvious enough, if only we get rid of the
   prejudice that the rewards of a future life are merely bestowed upon
   men by God's arbitrary good pleasure. What is the reward of Heaven?
   Eternal life,' people say. Yes! Blessedness.' Yes! But where does the
   life come from, and where does the blessedness come from? They are both
   derived, they come from God in Christ; and in the deepest sense, and in
   the only true sense, God is Heaven, and God is the reward of Heaven. I
   am thy shield,' so long as dangers need to be guarded against, and
   then, thereafter, I am thine exceeding great Reward.' It is the
   possession of God that makes all the Heaven of Heaven, the immortal
   life which His children receive, and the blessedness with which they
   are enraptured. We are heirs of immortality, we are heirs of life, we
   are heirs of blessedness, because, and in the measure in which, we
   become heirs of God.

   And if that be so, then there is no difficulty in seeing that in
   Heaven, as on earth, men will get just as much of God as they can hold;
   and that in Heaven, as on earth, capacity for receiving God is
   determined by character. The gift is one, the reward is one, and yet
   the reward is infinitely various. It is the same light which glows in
   all the stars, but star differeth from star in glory.' It is the same
   wine, the new wine of the Kingdom, that is poured into all the vessels,
   but the vessels are of divers magnitudes, though each be full to the
   brim.

   And so in those two sister parables of our Master's, which are so
   remarkably discriminated and so remarkably alike, we have both these
   aspects of the Heavenly reward set forth--both that which declares its
   identity in all cases, and the other which declares its variety
   according to the recipient's character. All the servants receive the
   same welcome, the same prize, the same entrance into the same joy;
   although one of them had ten talents, and another five, and another
   two. But the servants who were each sent out to trade with one poor
   pound in their hands, and by their varying diligence reaped varying
   profits, were rewarded according to the returns that they had brought;
   and one received ten, and the other five, and the other two, cities
   over which to have authority and rule. So the reward is one, and yet
   infinitely diverse. It is not the same thing whether a man or a woman,
   being a Christian, is an earnest, and devoted, and growing Christian
   here on earth, or a selfish, and an idle, and a stagnant one. It is not
   the same thing whether you content yourselves with simply laying hold
   on Christ, and keeping a tremulous and feeble hold of Him for the rest
   of your lives, or whether you grow in the grace and knowledge of our
   Lord and Saviour. There is such a fate as being saved, yet so as by
   fire, and going into the brightness with the smell of the fire on your
   garments. There is such a fate as having just, as it were, squeezed
   into Heaven, and got there by the skin of your teeth. And there is such
   a thing as having an abundant entrance ministered, when its portals are
   thrown wide open. Some imperfect Christians die with but little
   capacity for possessing God, and therefore their heaven will not be as
   bright, nor studded with as majestic constellations, as that of others.
   The starry vault that bends above us so far away, is the same in the
   number of its stars when gazed on by the savage with his unaided eye,
   and by the astronomer with the strongest telescope; and the Infinite
   God, who arches above us, but comes near to us, discloses galaxies of
   beauty and oceans of abysmal light in Himself, according to the
   strength and clearness of the eye that looks upon Him. So, brethren,
   remember that the one glory has infinite degrees; and faith, and
   conduct, and character here determine the capacity for God which we
   shall have when we go to receive our reward.

   III. The last point that is here is the substantial identity of the
   reward to all that stand on the same level, however different may be
   the form of their lives.

   He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a
   prophet's reward.' And so in the case of the others. The active
   prophet, righteous man, or disciple, and the passive recogniser of each
   in that character, who receives each as a prophet, or righteous man, or
   disciple, stand practically and substantially on the same level, though
   the one of them may have his lips glowing with the divine inspiration
   and the other may never have opened his mouth for God.

   That is beautiful and deep. The power of sympathising with any
   character is the partial possession of that character for ourselves. A
   man who is capable of having his soul bowed by the stormy thunder of
   Beethoven, or lifted to Heaven by the ethereal melody of Mendelssohn,
   is a musician, though he never composed a bar. The man who recognises
   and feels the grandeur of the organ music of Paradise Lost' has some
   fibre of a poet in him, though he be but a mute, inglorious Milton.'

   All sympathy and recognition of character involve some likeness to that
   character. The poor woman who brought the sticks and prepared food for
   the prophet entered into the prophet's mission and shared in the
   prophet's work and reward, though his task was to beard Ahab, and hers
   was only to bake Elijah's bread. The old knight that clapped Luther on
   the back when he went into the Diet of Worms, and said to him, Well
   done, little monk!' shared in Luther's victory and in Luther's crown.
   He that helps a prophet because he is a prophet, has the making of a
   prophet in himself.

   As all work done from the same motive is the same in God's eyes,
   whatever be the outward shape of it, so the work that involves the same
   type of spiritual character will involve the same reward. You find the
   Egyptian medal on the breasts of the soldiers that kept the base of
   communication as well as on the breasts of the men that stormed the
   works at Tel-el-Kebir. It was a law in Israel, and it is a law in
   Heaven: As his part is that goeth down into the battle, so shall his
   part be that tarrieth by the stuff, they shall part alike.' I am going
   down into the pit, you hold the ropes,' said Carey, the pioneer
   missionary. They that hold the ropes, and the daring miner that swings
   away down in the blackness, are one in the work, may be one in the
   motive, and, if they are, shall be one in the reward. So, brethren,
   though no coal of fire may be laid upon your lips, if you sympathise
   with the workers that are trying to serve God, and do what you can to
   help them, and identify yourself with them, and so hold the ropes, my
   text will be true about you. He that receiveth a prophet in the name of
   a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward.' They who by reason of
   circumstances, by deficiency of power, or by the weight of other tasks
   and duties, can only give silent sympathy, and prayer, and help, are
   one with the men whom they help.

   Dear brethren! remember that this awful, mystical life of ours is full
   everywhere of consequences that cannot be escaped. What we sow we reap,
   and we grind it, and we bake it, and we live upon it. We have to drink
   as we have brewed; we have to lie on the beds that we have made. Be not
   deceived: God is not mocked.' The doctrine of reward has two sides to
   it. Nothing human ever dies.' All our deeds drag after them inevitable
   consequences; but if you will put your trust in Jesus Christ, He will
   not deal with you according to your sins, nor reward you according to
   your iniquities; and the darkest features of the recompense of your
   evil will all be taken away by the forgiveness which we have in His
   blood. If you will trust yourselves to Him you will have that eternal
   life, which is not wages, but a gift; which is not reward, but a free
   bestowment of God's love. And then, if we build upon that Foundation on
   which alone men can build their hopes, their thoughts, their
   characters, their lives, however feeble may be our efforts, however
   narrow may be our sphere,--though we be neither prophets nor sons of
   prophets, and though our righteousness may be all stained and
   imperfect, yet, to our own amazement and to God's glory, we shall find,
   when the fire is kindled which reveals and tests our works, that, by
   the might of humble faith in Christ, we have built upon that
   Foundation, gold and silver and precious stones; and shall receive the
   reward given to every man whose work abides that trial by fire.
     __________________________________________________________________

JOHN'S DOUBTS OF JESUS, AND JESUS' PRAISE OF JOHN

   Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two
   of his disciples, 3. And said unto Him, Art Thou He that should come,
   or do we look for another? 4. Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and
   shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: 5. The blind
   receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and
   the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel
   preached to them. 6. And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended
   in Me. 7. And as they departed, Jesus began to say unto the multitudes
   concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed
   shaken with the wind? 8. But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed
   in soft raiment? behold, they that wear soft clothing are in kings'
   houses. 9. But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto
   you, and more than a prophet. 10. For this is he, of whom it is
   written. Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face, which shall
   prepare Thy way before Thee. 11. Verily I say unto you, Among them that
   are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist:
   notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater
   than he. 12. And from the days of John the Baptist until now the
   kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
   13. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John--And if ye
   will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come. 16. He that hath
   ears to hear, let him hear.'--MATT. xi. 2-15.

   This text falls into two parts: the first, from verses 2-6 inclusive,
   giving us the faltering faith of the great witness, and Christ's gentle
   treatment of the waverer; the second, from verse 7 to the end, giving
   the witness of Christ to John, exuberant in recognition,
   notwithstanding his momentary hesitation.

   I. We do not believe that this message of John's was sent for the sake
   of strengthening his disciples' faith in Jesus as Messiah, nor that it
   was merely meant as a hint to Jesus to declare Himself. The question is
   John's. The answer is sent to him: it is he who is to ponder the things
   which the messengers saw, and to answer his own question thereby. The
   note which the evangelist prefixes to his account gives the key to the
   incident. John was in prison,' in that gloomy fortress of Machaerus
   which Herod had rebuilt at once for a sinful pleasure-house' and for an
   impregnable refuge, among the savage cliffs of Moab. The halls of
   luxurious vice and the walls of defence are gone; but the dungeons are
   there still, with the holes in the masonry into which the bars were
   fixed to which the prisoners--John, perhaps, one of them--were chained.
   No wonder that in the foul atmosphere of a dark dungeon the spirit
   which had been so undaunted in the free air of the desert began to
   flag; nor that even he who had seen the fluttering dove descend on
   Christ's head, and had pointed to Him as the Lamb of God, felt that all
   his mind was clouded with a doubt.' It would have been wiser if
   commentators, instead of trying to save John's credit at the cost of
   straining the narrative, had recognised the psychological truth of the
   plain story of his wavering conviction and had learned its lessons of
   self-distrust. There is only one Man with whom it was always
   high-water; all others have ebbs and flows in their religious life, and
   variations in their grasp of truth.

   The narrative further gives the motive for John's embassy, in the
   report which had reached him of the works of Christ.' We need only
   recall John's earlier testimony to understand how these works would not
   seem to him to fill up the role which he had anticipated for Messiah.
   Where is the axe that was to be laid at the root of the trees, or the
   fan that was to winnow out the chaff? Where is the fiery spirit which
   he had foretold? This gentle Healer is not the theocratic judge of his
   warning prophecies. He is tending and nurturing, rather than felling,
   the barren trees. A nimbus of merciful deeds, not of flashing wrath to
   come,' surrounds His head. So John began to wonder if, after all, he
   had been premature in his recognition. Perhaps this Jesus was but a
   precursor, as he himself was, of the Messiah. Evidently he continues
   firm in the conviction of Christ's being sent from God, and is ready to
   accept His answer as conclusive; but, as evidently, he is puzzled by
   the contrariety between Jesus' deeds and his own expectations. He asks,
   Art Thou He that cometh' --a well-known name for Messiah--or are we to
   expect another?' where it should be noted that the word for another'
   means not merely a second, but a different kind of, person, who should
   present the aspects of the Messiah as revealed in prophecy, and as
   embodied in John's own preaching, which Jesus had left unfulfilled.

   We may well take to heart the lesson of the fluctuations possible to
   the firmest faith, and pray to be enabled to hold fast that we have. We
   may learn, too, the danger to right conceptions of Christ, of
   separating the two elements of mercy and judgment in His character and
   work. John was right in believing that the Christ must come to judge. A
   Christ without the fan in His hand is a maimed Christ. John was wrong
   in stumbling at the gentleness, just as many to-day, who go to the
   opposite extreme, are wrong in stumbling at the judicial side of His
   work. Both halves are needed to make the full-orbed character. We have
   not to look for a different' Christ, but we have to look for Him,
   coming the second time, the same Jesus, but now with His axe in His
   pierced hands, to hew down trees which He has patiently tended. Let
   John's profound sense of the need for a judicial aspect in the Christ
   who is to meet the prophecies written in men's hearts, as well as in
   Scripture, teach us how one-sided and superficial are representations
   of His work which suppress or slur over His future coming to judgment.

   Our Lord does not answer Yes' or No.' To do so might have stilled, but
   would not have removed, John's misconception. A more thorough cure is
   needed. So Christ attacks it in its roots by referring him back for
   answer to the very deeds which had excited his doubt. In doing so, He
   points to, or indeed, we may say, quotes, two prophetic passages (Isa.
   xxxv. 5, 6; lxi. 1) which give the prophetic notes' of Messiah. It is
   as if He had said, Have you forgotten that the very prophets whose
   words have fed your hopes, and now seem to minister to your doubts,
   have said this and this about the Messiah?' Further, there is deep
   wisdom in sending John back again to think over the very deeds at which
   he was stumbling. It is not Christ's work which is wanting in
   conformity to the divine idea; it is John's conceptions of that idea
   that need enlarging. What he wants is not so much to be told that Jesus
   is the Christ, as to grow up to a truer, because more comprehensive,
   notion of what the Christ is to be. A wide principle is taught us here.
   The very points in Christ's work which may occasion difficulty, will,
   when we stand at the right point of view, become evidences of His
   claims. What were stumbling-blocks become stepping-stones. Arguments
   against become proofs of, the truth when we look at them with clearer
   eyes, and from the proper angle. Further, we are taught here, that what
   Christ does is the best answer to the question as to who He is. Still
   He is doing these works among us. Darkened eyes are flooded with light
   by His touch, and see a new world, because they gaze with faith on Him.
   Lame limbs are endowed with strength, and can run in the way of His
   commandments, and walk with unfainting perseverance the thorniest paths
   of duty and self-sacrifice. Lepers are cleansed from the rotting
   leprosy of sin, and their flesh comes again, as the flesh of a little
   child.' Deaf ears hear the voice of the Son of God, and the dead who
   hear live. Good news is preached to all the poor in spirit, and
   whosoever knows himself to be in need of all things may claim all
   things as his own in Christ. He who through the ages has been working
   such works, and works them still, needs not to speak anything' to
   confirm His claims, neither is there salvation in any other.' We look
   for no second Christ; but we look for that same Jesus to come the
   second time to be the Judge of the world of which He is the Saviour.

   The benediction on him who finds none occasion of stumbling in Christ,
   is at once a beatitude and a warning. It rebukes in the gentlest
   fashion John's temper, which found difficulty in even the perfect
   personality of Jesus, and made that which should have been the sure
   foundation' of his spirit a stone of stumbling. Our Lord's
   consciousness of absolute perfection of moral character, and of
   absolute perfectness in His office and work, is distinct in the words.
   He knows that there is none occasion of stumbling in Him,' and that
   whoever finds any, brings it or makes it. He knows and warns us that
   all blessedness lies for us in recognising Him for what He is--God's
   sure foundation of our hopes, our peace, our thoughts, our lives. He
   knows that all woe and loss are involved in stumbling on this stone,
   against which whosoever falls is broken, and by which, when it begins
   to move, and falls on a man, he is ground to powder, like the dust of
   the threshing-floor. What tremendous arrogance of assertion! Who is he
   who can venture on such words without blasphemy against God, and
   universal ridicule from men?

   II. The witness of Christ to John. Praise from Jesus is praise indeed;
   and it is poured out here with no stinted hand on the languishing
   prisoner whose doubts had just been brought to Him. Such an eulogium at
   such a time is a wonderful instance of loving forbearance with a
   true-hearted follower's weakness, and of a desire which, in a man, we
   should call magnanimous, to shield John's character from depreciation
   on account of his message. The world praises a man to his face, and
   speaks of his faults behind his back. Christ does the opposite. Not
   till the messengers were departing does He begin to speak concerning
   John.' He lays bare the secret of the Baptist's power, and allocates
   his place as greatest in one epoch and as less than the least in
   another, with an authority more than human, and on principles which set
   Himself high above all comparison with men, whether the greatest or the
   least. The King places His subjects, and Himself sits enthroned above
   them all.

   First, Christ praises John's great personal character in the dramatic
   and vivid questions which begin this section. He recalls the scenes of
   popular enthusiasm when all Israel streamed out to the desert preacher.
   A small man could not have made such an upheaval. What drew the crowds?
   Just what will draw them; the qualities without which, either possessed
   in reality or in popular estimation, no man can be a power religiously.
   The first essential is heroic firmness. It was not reeds swaying in the
   wind by Jordan's banks, nor a poor feeble man like these, that the
   people flocked to listen to. His emblem was not the reed, but an iron
   pillar.' His whole career had been marked by decisiveness, constancy,
   courage. Nothing can be done worth doing in the world without a
   wholesome obstinacy and imperturbability, which keep a man true to his
   convictions and his task, whatever winds blow in his teeth. The
   multitudes will not flock to listen to a teacher who does not speak
   with the accent of conviction, nor will truths feebly grasped touch the
   lips with fire. The first requisite for a religious teacher is that he
   shall be sure of his message and of himself. Athanasius has to stand
   against the world' before the world accepts his teaching. Though there
   were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the house-tops, go I
   will,' said Luther. That is the temper for God's instruments.

   The next requisite, which John also had, is manifest indifference to
   material ease. Silken courtiers do not haunt the desert. Kings' houses,
   and not either the wilderness or kings' dungeons, are the sunny spots
   where they spread their plumage. If the gaunt ascetic, with his girdle
   of camel's hair and his coarse fare, had been a self-indulgent
   sybarite, his voice would never have shaken a nation. The least breath
   of suspicion that a preacher is such a man ends his power, and ought to
   end it; for self-indulgence and the love of fleshly comforts eat the
   heart out of goodness, and make the eyes too heavy to see visions. John
   was the same man then as they had known him to be; therefore it was no
   impatience of the hardships of his prison that had inspired his doubts.

   Our Lord next speaks of John's great office. He was a prophet. The dim
   recognition that God spoke in His fiery words had drawn the crowds,
   weary of teachers in whose endless jangle and jargon of casuistry was
   no inspiration. The voice of a man who gets his message at first-hand
   from God has a ring in it which even dull ears detect as something
   genuine. Alas for the bewildering babble of echoes and the paucity of
   voices to-day!

   So far Jesus had been appealing to His hearers' knowledge; He now goes
   on to add higher truth concerning John. He declares that he is more
   than a prophet, because he is His messenger before His face; that is,
   immediately preceding Himself. We cannot stay to comment on the
   remarkable variation between the original form of the quotation from
   Malachi and Christ's version of it, which, in its substitution of thee'
   for me,' bears so forcibly on the divinity of Christ; but we may mark
   the principle on which John's superiority to the whole prophetic order
   is based. It is that nearness to Jesus makes greatness. The closer the
   relation to Him, the higher the honour. In that long procession the
   King comes last; and of them that go before, crying, Hosanna to Him
   that cometh,' the order of precedence is that the first are last, and
   that the highest is he who walks in front of the Sovereign.

   Next, we have the limitations of the forerunner and his relative
   inferiority to the least in the kingdom of heaven. Another standard of
   greatness is here from that of the world, which smiles at the contrast
   between the uncultured preacher of repentance and the mighty thinkers,
   poets, legislators, kingdom-makers, whom it enrols among the great. In
   Christ's eyes greatness is nearness to Him, and understanding of Him
   and His work. Neither natural faculty nor worth is in question, but
   simply relation to the Kingdom and the King. He who had only to preach
   of Him who should come after him, and had but a partial apprehension of
   Christ and His work, stood on a lower level than the least who has to
   look to a Christ who has come, and has opened the gates of the kingdom
   to the humblest believer. The truths which were hid from ages, and were
   but visible as in morning twilight to John, are sunlit to us. The
   scholars in our Sunday-schools know familiarly more than prophets and
   kings ever knew. We hold the grey barbarian lower than the Christian
   child'; and not merely he, but the wisest of the prophets, and the
   forerunner himself. The history of the world is parted into two by the
   coming of Jesus Christ, as every dictionary of dates tells, and the
   least of the greater is greater than the greatest of the less. What a
   place, then, does Christ claim! Our relation to Him determines
   greatness. To recognise Him is to be in the Kingdom of Heaven. Union to
   Him brings us to fulfil the ideal of human nature; and this is life, to
   know and trust Him, the King.

   Our Lord adds a brief characterisation of the effect of John's
   ministry. It was of mingled good and evil, and there is a tone of
   sadness perceptible in the ambiguous words. John had aroused great
   popular excitement, and had stirred multitudes to seek to enter the
   Kingdom. So far was good. But had all the crowds understood what sort
   of kingdom it was? Had they not too often dragged down the lofty
   conception to their own vulgar level, and, with their dream of an
   outward sovereignty, thought to gain it for their own by violence
   instead of meekness, by arms and worldly force rather than by
   submission? The earnestness was good, but Christ's sad insight saw how
   much strange fire had mingled in the blaze, as if some earth-born smoky
   flame should seek to blend with the pure sunlight. Such seems the most
   natural interpretation of the words, but they are ambiguous, and may
   possibly mean by the violent' those who had been roused to genuine
   earnestness by the clarion voice which rang in the ears of that
   slumbering generation.

   Then follows the explanation of this new interest in the kingdom. All
   the prophets and the law prophesied until John.' The whole period till
   his coming was one of preparation, and it all converged on the epoch of
   the forerunner. The eagerness to flock into the Kingdom which
   characterised his time would have been impossible in the earlier days.
   He closes that order of things, standing, as it were, on the isthmus
   between prophecy and fulfilment, belonging properly to neither, but
   having affinities with both, and being the transition from the one to
   the other. Then our Lord closes His words concerning John with the
   distinct statement, which He expects His hearers to have difficulty in
   receiving, probably from the contradiction to it which John's present
   condition seemed to give, that in him was fulfilled Malachi's prophecy
   of the sending of Elijah the prophet before . . . day of the Lord.' The
   fiery Tishbite, gaunt and grim, ascetic and solitary, who bearded Ahab,
   and flamed across a corrupt age with a stern message of repentance or
   destruction, was repeated in the lonely ascetic who had his Ahab in
   Herod, and his Jezebel in Herodias, and like his prototype, knew no
   fear, but flashed out the lightnings of his words on every sin. The two
   men were brothers, and their voices answer each other across the
   centuries. Christ crowns His witness to John while thus quoting the
   last swansong of ancient prophecy, and thereby at once sets John on a
   pinnacle of greatness, and advances a claim concerning Himself all the
   more weighty, because He leaves it to be inferred. He that hath ears to
   hear, let him hear'--this eulogium on the forerunner needs to be
   reflected on ere all its bearings are seen. If John was Elias, the day
   of the Lord was at hand, and the Sun of Righteousness' was already
   above the horizon. Jesus' witness concerning John ends in witness
   concerning Himself.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FRIEND OF PUBLICANS AND SINNERS

   The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man
   gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners. But
   wisdom is justified of her children,'--MATT. xi. 19.

   Jesus very seldom took notice of His enemies' slanders. When He was
   reviled He reviled not again.' If ever He did, it was for the sake of
   those whom it harmed to distort His beauty. Thus, here He speaks,
   without the slightest trace of irritation, of the capricious
   inconsistency of condemning Himself and John on precisely opposite
   grounds. John will not suit them because he neither eats nor drinks.
   Well, one would think that Jesus would be hailed since He does both.
   But He pleases them just as little. What was at the root of this
   contrary working dislike? It was the dislike for the truths they both
   preached, the rejection of the wisdom of which they were the
   messengers. When men do not like the message, nothing that the
   messengers do, or are, is right. Never mind consistency, but object to
   this form of Christian teaching that it is too harsh, and to that, that
   it is too soft; to this man that he is always thundering condemnation,
   to that, that he is always preaching mercy; to one, that he has too
   much to say about duty, to another, that he dwells too much on grace;
   to this presentation of the gospel, that it is too learned and
   doctrinal, to that, that it is too sentimental and emotional, and so
   on, and so on. The generation of children who neither like piping nor
   lamenting, lives still.

   But my purpose now is not to dwell on the conduct with which our Lord
   is dealing, but on this caricature of Him which His own lips repeat
   without a sign of anger. It is the only calumny of antagonists reported
   by Himself. We owe our knowledge of its currency to this saying. Like
   other words of His enemies, this saying is a distorted refraction of
   His glory. The facts it embodies are facts; the conclusions it draws
   are false. If Jesus had not come eating and drinking, He could not have
   been called gluttonous and a wine-bibber. If He had not drawn publicans
   and sinners to Him in a conspicuous manner and degree, He could not
   have been called their friend. The charge, like all others, is a
   tribute. Let us try to see what was the blessed truth that it
   caricatured. We may take the two points separately, for though closely
   connected they are distinct, and cover different ground.

   I. His enemies' witness to Christ's participation in common life.

   (a) That participation witnesses to His true manhood.

   Significant use of Son of Man' in context.

   Because He is so, He must pass into all human circumstances.

   Looked at in the light of incarnation, the simple fact that He shared
   our common lot in all things assumes proportions of majestic
   condescension.

   Extend to all physical necessities, and to simple material pleasures.

   What a witness this hostile criticism is to Christ's genial
   identification of Himself with homely feasters!

   (b) It sets forth the highest type of manhood.

   John could be ascetic, but the Pattern Man could not.

   The true perfecting of humanity is not the extirpation, but the
   control, of the flesh by the spirit. And in accordance with this
   thought, we may see in the eating and drinking Christ, the pattern for
   the religious life. Asceticism is not the noblest form of sanctity.
   There is nothing more striking in Old Testament than the way in which
   its heroes and saints mingle in all ordinary duties. They are warriors,
   statesmen, shepherds, they buy, they sell. Asceticism came later, along
   with formalisms of other sorts. When devotion cools, it is crusted with
   superstition and external marks of godliness. Propriety in posturing in
   worship, casuistry in the interpretation of law, and abstinence from
   common enjoyments, came in Pharisaic times. And into such a world Jesus
   came, eating and drinking.

   But His bearing in these matters is example for us. They were rigidly
   kept in subordination. They were all done in communion with God.

   So He has hallowed all by taking part in them.

   Christ should be present in all our material enjoyments. If you cannot
   think that He is with you, if you cannot conceive of His being there,
   that is no place for you. If you cannot feel that He approves, that is
   no fit enjoyment for you.

   The tendency of this day is to take a wider view of the liberty allowed
   to Christians in regard to partaking in material enjoyment, and I dare
   say that many of you who have thought that I spoke well in insisting on
   all things belonging to the Christian, will think that I am dropping
   back into the old narrow groove in my next remark, that all such
   thoughts need guarding.

   One has heard the example of Christ invoked to justify unchristian
   laxity and excess. Therefore I wish to say that the liberty permitted
   to Christians in these matters is to be limited within the limits
   within which Christ's was confined.

   The excessive use of innocent things is not justified by His example,
   nor is the use of things innocent in themselves, which are mixed up
   with harmful things.

   Christ's example does not warrant the importance attached to luxury,
   the waste on mere eating and drinking. It is sometimes quoted as
   against total abstinence. It has no bearing on the question. But if He
   gave up heaven for His brethren, I think that they who give up an
   indulgence for the sake of theirs are in the line of His action. I
   venture to think that if Jesus Christ lived in England to-day, He would
   be a total abstinence fanatic.

   If thy hand offend thee, cut it off.' Asceticism is not the highest,
   but it is sometimes necessary. If my indulgence in innocent things
   hurts me, or if my abstinence from them would help others, or increase
   my power for good, or if innocent things are intertwisted with things
   not innocent, then it is vain to try to shelter under Christ's example,
   and the only right course for His disciple is to abridge his liberty.
   He came eating and drinking, therefore His followers may use all
   innocent earthly blessings and bodily pleasures, subject to this one
   law: Whether ye eat or drink, or whatever ye do, do all to the glory of
   God,' and to this solemn warning: He that soweth to the flesh shall of
   the flesh reap corruption.'

   II. His enemies' witness to Jesus as the friend of the outcasts.

   The fact was that He drew them to Himself and evidently was glad to
   have them round Him. The inference natural to low natures was noscitur
   a sociis and that the bond between Him and them was common evil
   tendencies and ways. His censors could not conceive of any one's
   seeking the outcasts from pity and for their good.

   (a) Christ's consorting with these was the revelation of His love to
   them.

   It meant no complicity with, nor minimising of, sinfulness.

   His sternness is as conspicuous as His love.

   He warned, rebuked, tried to win back.

   The highest purity is not repellent to sinners.

   So in Jesus is the combination of tenderest love and intense moral
   earnestness.

   How difficult for anything but actual sight of such a life to have
   painted it! Where did the evangelists get such an embodiment of two
   attitudes so unlike each other, and which we so seldom see united in
   fact? I venture to think that the combination in perfect harmony and
   proportion of these, is a strong presumption in favour of the
   historical truth of the Christ of the gospels.

   But remember that if we take His own statement (He that hath seen Me
   hath seen the Father'), we are to see in this kindly consorting with
   sinners not only the love of a perfectly pure manhood, but a revelation
   of the heart of God. And that adds wonderfulness and awe to the fact.
   This man to whom sinners were drawn by strange attraction, in whom they
   found the highest purity and yet softest tenderness, therein revealed
   God.

   (b) It witnesses to His boundless hope.

   No outcasts were hopeless in His view. To man's eyes there are hopeless
   classes, but He sees deeper. Perhaps a spark lies hid.' There are
   dormant possibilities in all souls.

   None are so hard as that they cannot be melted by the high temperature
   of love, just as there are no metals that cannot be volatilised if
   exposed to intense heat.

   Carry the most thick-ribbed ice into the sun and it will thaw.

   So the Christian view of mankind is much more hopeful than that of mere
   educationists or moralists.

   None of them paint human nature so black as it does, but none of them
   have such boundless confidence in the possibility of making it
   lustrously white.

   Urge, then, that none are beyond the power of Christ's gospel. His
   divine Spirit can change any man. There are no incurables in the
   judgment of the great Physician.

   (c) It witnesses to the truth that gross sin does not shut out from Him
   so much as does self-complacent ignorance of our own need.

   They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.'
   Where should the physician be but at the sick man's bedside?

   The one impassable barrier between us and Christ is fancying that we
   are not sinners and do not need Him.

   This boundless hopefulness and seeking after the outcasts is the unique
   glory of Christianity. What has been the mainspring of all movements
   for their elevation? What broke the chains of slavery? What has sent
   men to the ends of the earth for the elevation of savage races? What is
   the motive power in the benevolent works of this day? Is it
   philosophical altruism or is it Christian faith? No doubt, there are
   some sporadic movements among people who do not accept the gospel. At
   present, I do not ask how far these are due to the underground
   influence of Christianity filtering to men who stand apart from it. But
   I gravely doubt whether you will ever get any large, continuous,
   self-sacrificing efforts for the outcasts, unless they are the direct
   result of the spirit of Christ moving on men who owe their own
   deliverance to Him. We have not yet seen agnostic missionary societies
   or the like.

   This spirit must mark all living Christianity. If ever churches forget
   their obligations to the publicans and sinners, they will cease to
   grow. It will be a sign that they have lost their hold of Christ. They
   will soon die, and no mourners will attend their funerals. It is a good
   sign to-day that all Christian churches are waking up to feel more
   their obligations to the outcasts. Only, we must take heed that we go
   to them as Christ did, making no compromise with sin, speaking no false
   flatteries, and bent on one thing, their emancipation from the evil
   which is slaying them.

   Let us all take the blessed thought for ourselves, that Jesus Christ is
   our friend because He is the friend of sinners, and we are sinners.
   Degrees of sinfulness vary, but the fact is invariable. The
   universality of sinfulness makes the universality of Christ's love the
   more wonderful and blessed. If He did not love sinners, there would be
   none for Him to love. We may be His enemies, or may neglect all His
   beseechings; but He is still our friend, wishing us well, and desiring
   to bless us. But He cannot give us His deepest friendship unless we are
   willing to recognise our sin. We must come to Him on the footing of
   transgressors if we are to come to Him at all.

   He will deliver us from our sins.

   Appeal to give hearts to Him.

   How has He shown His friendship? Greater love hath no man than this,'
   that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.'

   To be friends of Christ is the highest honour and blessing.

   Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you.'

   He was called the friend of God.' Abraham's name in Mohammedan lands is
   still El Khalil, the companion or friend. That is our highest title.
   Christ's friends will not continue sinners.
     __________________________________________________________________

SODOM, CAPERNAUM, MANCHESTER

   Then began He to upbraid the cities wherein most of His mighty works
   were done, because they repented not.' --MATT. xi. 20.

   These words, and the woes which they introduce, are found in another
   connection in Luke's Gospel. He attaches them to his report of the
   mission of the seventy disciples. Matthew here introduces them in an
   order which seems not to depend upon time, but upon identity of
   subject. It is his method in his Gospel to group together similar
   events, as we have it exemplified, for instance, in the Sermon on the
   Mount, and in the long procession of miracles which immediately follows
   it, as well as in other parts of the Gospel. In this chapter it is not
   difficult to discover the common idea which binds its parts into a
   whole. We have a number of instances strung together, illustrating the
   different effects of Christ's appearance and work on different classes
   of persons. There pass before us, John the Baptist with his doubts, the
   excitable multitude ready to take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm, the
   critics who cavilled with impartial inconsistency alike at John's
   asceticism and at Christ's freedom. Then follow the woes pronounced by
   Him upon the indifference of those who knew Him best, and these are
   succeeded by His rejoicing in spirit over the babes who accepted Him;
   and the whole is crowned by great words of invitation which extend
   equally over those and over all other varieties of disposition, and,
   since all labour and are heavy laden,' summon all, be they what they
   may, to come and find rest in Him. Obviously, then, the order in this
   chapter is not that of time, but that of subject.

   Notice that of all these different classes and types of character that
   pass in review before us, the one that is singled out for the solemn
   denunciation of heavy judgment is that of the people who stood in a
   blaze of light, and simply paid no attention to it. These are the worst
   sort. I wonder how many of them are in my audience now?

   Let me try, then, to bring before you the thoughts naturally suggested
   by these introductory words, and the solemn, sorrowful forebodings of
   retribution which follow them. I ask you to look at three things,--the
   blaze of light; the neglect of the light; the rebuke for the neglected
   light. Jesus began to upbraid the cities wherein most of His mighty
   works were done.'

   I. First, then, consider the blaze of light.

   According to the words of my text, the larger number of the miracles of
   our Lord were wrought in these three places. Cities,' our Bible calls
   them; two of them were little fishing villages, the third a somewhat
   considerable town. Where are these miracles recorded? Not in our
   gospels. As for Chorazin, we never hear its name except in this verse,
   and in the parallel in Luke's Gospel; and all that He did there is
   swallowed up in oblivion. As for Bethsaida, there are a couple of
   miracles, probably, recorded as having been wrought there, though there
   is some obscurity in reference to the locality of at least one of them.
   As for Capernaum, there are several miracles recorded as having been
   performed in that place, and several others referred to as having been
   done there. But there is nothing in the four gospels that would suggest
   the statement of the text.

   Now the inference (which has nothing to do with my present subject, but
   which I just note in passing) is,--how extremely fragmentary and
   incomplete these four gospels avowedly are! They harvest for us a few
   ears plucked in the great waving cornfield,--and all the others
   withered and died where they grew. The light falls upon one or two
   groups in the crowd of miserables whom He helped, the rest lie in dim
   shadow. You have to think of dozens, I suppose I should not be
   exaggerating if I were to say hundreds, of miracles unrecorded but
   known, lying behind the specimens that we have in the gospels. Many
   other things truly did Jesus, which are not written in this book.'

   Our Lord takes these two little fishing villages, and He parallels and
   contrasts them with the two great maritime cities of Tyre and Sidon,
   and says that these insignificant places have far more light than those
   had. Then He isolates Capernaum, a place of more importance, and His
   own usual settled residence; and, in like manner, He contrasts it with
   the long-buried Sodom, and proclaims the superiority of the
   illumination which fell on the more modern three. Why were they so
   superior? Because they had Moses? because they had the prophets, the
   law, the temple, the priesthood? By no means. Because they had Him. So
   He sets Himself forth as being the highest and clearest of all the
   revelations that God has made to the world, and asserts that in Him, in
   His character, in His deeds, men ought to find motives that should bow
   them in penitence before God; motives sweeter, tenderer, stronger than
   any that the world knows besides. There is no such light of the
   knowledge of the glory of God anywhere else as there is in the face of
   Jesus Christ. And oh! brother; no thoughts of the nobleness of
   rectitude, and the imperfection of one's own life, no thoughts of a
   divine justice and a divine punishment, will bow a man in penitence
   like having once caught a glimpse of the perfect sweetness and perfect
   beauty of the perfect Humanity that is revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

   But now, mark;--as Capernaum is to Sodom, so is Manchester to
   Capernaum! I wonder if Jesus Christ were to come amongst us now,
   whether He would not repeat in spirit the same lesson that is in my
   text, and bid us contrast our greater illumination with the morning
   twilight that dawned upon these men, and yet was light enough to bring
   condemnation? Think,--these people of whom our Lord is speaking here,
   and setting them high above Tyre and Sidon and Sodom, knew nothing
   about His cross, death, resurrection, ascension. They knew Him only as
   a dubious Name,' as a possible Divine Messenger and a Miracle-worker;
   but all the sweetest and the deepest thoughts about Him lay unrevealed.
   Whilst they stood but in the morning twilight, you and I stand in the
   noonday blaze. They might be pardoned for doubting whether the light
   that shone from Him was sunshine or candle, but men of this twentieth
   century, who have the whole story of Christ, which is the gospel for
   the world, wrought out through all the tragedy and pathos of His death,
   and triumph and power of His resurrection, and who have, besides, the
   history of the world and of the Church for nineteen centuries, are more
   unpardonable unless they listen to Him with penitence and faith, than
   were any of His contemporaries.

   My brother, we stand in the very focus and fountain, as it were, of the
   heavenly radiance. A whole Christ, a crucified Christ, a risen Christ,
   an ascended Christ, a Christ who is the Lord of the Spirit, a Christ
   who through the centuries is saving and blessing men, a Christ who can
   point to nineteen hundred years and say, That is My work, in so far as
   it is good and noble,'--this Christ shines with a clearer evidence than
   the Miracle-worker of Capernaum and Bethsaida. And to you the word
   comes, If the mighty works which have been done in thee, had been done
   in Bethsaida and Chorazin, they would have remained until this day.'

   There are many of you here saturated with the knowledge of the gospel,
   who from childhood have heard it and heard it and heard it. You have
   lived in the light all your days. Alas! If the light that is' round
   thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!'

   II. That brings me in the next place to notice the negligent
   indifference to the Light in all its blaze.

   The men of these three little fishing towns were not sinners above all
   the Galileans of their day. Their crime was that they did nothing. No
   persecution is recorded as having been raised against Him by them;
   there were no angry antagonisms, no scornful words, no violent
   opposition. They simply stolidly stood like some black rock in the
   sunshine, and let the sunshine pour down upon them, and remained grim
   and black as ever. That was all.

   That is to say, the thing that brings down the severest rebuke is not
   the angry antagonism of the men who are contending in half-darkness,
   with a misunderstood and therefore disliked Christ, but the sleek,
   passive apathy that is never touched deeper than its ears by the
   message of God's word. It is not a difficult thing to incur this
   condemnation. You have simply to do what some of you are doing, and
   have been doing all your lives, as to Christianity, and that
   is--nothing! You have simply to acquiesce politely and respectfully, as
   many of you do, and say you are Christians; and there an end. You have
   simply to take my words (as I fear so many of those that listen to them
   do) as matters of course, the proper things to be said on a Sunday, and
   for me to say, which may be very true in some vague, general way, but
   which have no felt application to you. That is all you have to do. It
   is quite enough. Negative vices will ruin a man, in mind, body, and
   estate; and the negative sin of simple indifference avails to put a
   barrier between you and Jesus Christ, through which none of His
   blessing can filter. If a sailor does not lash himself to something
   fixed, the next sea that comes across the deck will do the rest. If a
   sick man does not take the medicine, by doing nothing he has committed
   suicide. And simple passivity, that is to say (to translate it out of
   Latin into good, honest English), doing nothing, is all that is needed
   in order to part you from Christ and Christ from you. He upbraided the
   cities because they repented not.'

   One can fancy some well-to-do and thoroughly respectable and
   clean-living native of Capernaum saying, What! those foul beasts in
   Sodom better off than I? Impossible!' Well, Jesus Christ says so upon
   very intelligible grounds. The measure of light is the measure of
   responsibility. That is one ground. And the not preferring Him is the
   preferring of self and the world, and that is the sin of sins. He will
   convince the world of sin because they believe not on Me.'

   Now, one more point, viz. this gelatinous kind of indifference, as of a
   disposition not stiff enough to take any impression, is found most
   deeply seated, and hopeless, amongst--shall I venture?--amongst people
   like you, who have been listening, listening, listening, until your
   systems have become so habituated to this Christian preaching that it
   does not produce the least effect. It all runs off you like rain off
   waterproof. You have waterproofed your consciences and your spiritual
   susceptibilities by long habit of listening and doing nothing.

   And some of you have come to this point, that you positively rather
   like the titillation and excitement, slight though it may be, which is
   produced by coming in contact now and then with a good, wholesome,
   rousing Christian appeal. Not that you ever intend to do anything, but
   it is pleasant to see a man in earnest, and preaching as if he believed
   what he was saying. And so perhaps some of you are feeling here
   to-night.

   Ah! my dear friends, it is possible for a man to live by the side of
   Niagara until he cannot hear the cataract; and it is an awful thing for
   men and women to live under the sound of Christian teaching until it
   produces no more effect upon their wills and natures than the ringing
   of the church bells, to which they pay no attention.

   You do not know the despair that comes over us preachers time after
   time, as we look down upon the faces of our congregations, and feel,
   What shall I do to put a sharp enough point upon this truth to get it
   into the heart of some man that has been sitting there as long as I
   have been standing here, and is never a bit the better for it?' Our
   most earnest preaching is like putting a red-hot iron into a pond: the
   cold water puts it out and closes above it, and there is no more heard
   nor seen of it. Our old Puritan forefathers used to talk about
   gospel-hardened hearers.' I believe that there are people listening to
   me now who have become so inured to Christian preaching that, like
   artillery horses, they will not move a muscle or quiver if a whole
   battery of cannon is fired off under their noses. God knows I despair
   sometimes, many a time, when I think of the hundreds of people to whom
   I speak, year after year, and how there seems next to nothing in the
   world to come of it all.

   III. Now lastly, notice here the rebuke of this negligence of the
   light.

   He began to upbraid the cities.' But oh! we shall misunderstand Him and
   His purpose if we think that that upbraiding was anything but the
   sorrowful expression of His own loving heart, which warned of what was
   coming in order that He might never need to send it. Woe unto you; woe
   unto you,' and His own lips quivered and His own heart felt the woe, as
   He laid bare the sin and foreannounced the retribution.

   I do not feel that I dare dwell upon, or that it beseems me to say much
   about, this solemn thought. Only, dear friends, I do desire, if I
   could, to wake some of you to look realities for once in the face, and
   to be sure of this, that retribution is proportioned to light, and that
   the sin of sins is the rejection of Jesus Christ. Beneath the broad
   folds of that more tolerable' there lie infinite degrees of
   retribution. The same deed done by a group of men may be indefinitely
   varied in its culpability, according to the motives and the clearness
   of knowledge which accompany or prompt the doing of it. And so, just
   because the life beyond is the accurate outcome and issue of the whole
   character and conduct, estimated according to motive and knowledge,
   therefore there must be differences infinitely wide between the fate of
   the servant that knew his Lord's will, and the servant that knew not.

   Where do you think we gospel-drenched English men and women will stand
   in that allocation of culpability? I do not presume to say more, but I
   beseech you,--let no present controversies about the duration and the
   possible termination of retribution in another state, or the possible
   prolongation of a probation into another state, blind you to the fact
   that however these questions be settled, this is a truth, independent
   of them, but being forgotten amidst the dust of controversy, that the
   next life is a life of retribution, and that there you and I will give
   account of our deeds, and chiefly of our attitude to Jesus.

   And now let me say, in one word,--hoisting the danger-signal is the
   work of kindness, and Jesus Christ was never more loving than when from
   His lips there came these words, heavy with His own sorrow, and stern
   with the prophecy of retribution. I know that Christian teachers have
   often spoken of the solemn things beyond, in tones much to be deplored,
   and which weaken the force of their message. But surely, surely, if we
   believe in a judgment to come, and if we believe that some of those
   that listen to us are in peril of it, surely, surely, the plainest duty
   is that with tears in our voice and pleading tenderness in our tone,
   seeing the sword coming, we should give warning, and beseech men to
   flee for refuge to the hope of the Gospel. The solemn words that we
   have been looking at now, lead up to, and are intended to make more
   impressive and gracious, the invitation with which this chapter ends:
   Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
   you rest.'

   Dear friends, we stand in the blaze of the light. Our familiarity with
   Jesus Christ may be our ruin. We are tempted to pay no heed to His
   words because we know them so well. Neglect of Christ on your part will
   bring deeper woes on your head than the people of Capernaum pulled down
   upon theirs. The brighter the sunshine, the louder the thunder and the
   fiercer the lightning; the longer the summer day, the longer the winter
   night; the closer the comet comes to the sun, the further away it
   plunges, at the other extremity of its orbit, into space and darkness.
   So I beseech you, listen as if you had never heard it before, and
   listen as if your lives depended upon it (as indeed they do) to that
   merciful invitation, Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy
   laden,' and then you will get rest for your souls here, and at that day
   when Sodom and Capernaum and Manchester--they and we--shall stand
   before His throne, you may lift up your eyes, and be glad to see who it
   is that sits on the tribunal, and that you learned to know and love the
   face of your Saviour, before you saw Him enthroned as your Judge.
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST'S STRANGE THANKSGIVING

   I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid
   these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
   babes.' --MATT. xi. 25.

   When Jesus was about to cure one dumb man, He lifted up His eyes to
   heaven and sighed. Sorrow filled His soul in the act of working
   deliverance. The thought of the depth of the miseries He had come to
   heal, and of the ocean of them which He was then diminishing but by one
   poor drop, saddened Him. When Jesus thought of the woes that had fallen
   on the impenitent Sodom, and of the worse that still remained to be
   revealed at the day of judgment, He rejoiced in spirit. Strange! and
   yet all in harmony with His depth of love. This once, and this once
   only, do we read that His heart filled with joy. Did He lift up His
   solemn thanksgiving to God, for the woes that had fallen on Chorazin?
   Oh no! For the blinding of the wise and prudent? Oh no! For the
   revelation to babes? Yes, and not only for that, but for that full and
   universal offer and possibility of salvation, which forms the reason
   for both the revelation to babes and the hiding from the wise. If we
   attend to the connection of this passage we get light on its force. It
   begins with a clear prophecy of endless woe and sorrow upon the
   rejecters. Then comes my text, alleviating the terror of that thought
   of destruction by showing the principles on which the reception and
   rejection are especially based, the sort of people who receive and who
   reject. Then follows the reason why the wise are shut out and the babes
   let in. That reason is not only God's inscrutable decree, but something
   in the very nature of the Gospel. God is hidden from all human sight.
   There is one divine Revealer apart from whom all is darkness. Neither
   doth any man know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son
   willeth to reveal Him.' That is the characteristic which shuts out the
   wise and lets in the simple.

   Then follows the great call to all to come to Him. The practical issue
   of all these solemn thoughts is that the Gospel is a Gospel for all the
   world, and that the one qualification for coming within the terms of
   its offer is to be weary and heavy laden.' Thus all ends in the broad
   universality of the message, in its adaptation to all, in its offer to
   all; and thus it is shown that every apparent exclusion of any is but
   the result of its free offer to all, and that to say Thou hast hid
   these things from the wise and prudent' is but to say, Ho, every one
   that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.' Well then might joy fill the
   heart of the Man of Sorrows. Well might He lift up His solemn
   thanksgiving to God and say, I thank Thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and
   Earth.'

   Consider--

   I. The Great Characteristics of the Gospel.

   We shall only understand the ground of the revealing and of the hiding
   if we understand what it is which is offered. It is of such a nature as
   necessarily to involve a twofold effect, caused by a twofold attitude
   towards it.

   1. The Gospel addresses itself to all men--man as man--not to what is
   sectional or accidental, not to classes, not to schools, not to the
   鬩te. It is broad and universal. It speaks no dialect of a province,
   but the universal language. It is addressed to Man as Man. We have all
   of us one human heart.' It appeals to the noble and the peasant, to the
   beggar on the dunghill and to the prince on his throne, in precisely
   the same fashion. It is equal as the providence of God, impartial as
   the light, universal as the air which reddens equally the blood that
   flows in long-descended veins and that of the foundling on the streets.
   In its sublime universality there are no distinctions. Death and the
   Gospel know no ranks. In both, the rich and the poor meet together, the
   Lord is the Maker of them all.' In Christ Jesus there is neither
   circumcision nor uncircumcision.' The blue sky which bends above all
   alike is like that great word.

   2. It treats all as utterly helpless.

   3. It offers to all Redemption as their most pressing want.
   Consequently, in substance it is the gift not of culture, but
   deliverance, and in form it is not a theory but a fact, not a system of
   credenda but an action, not an -ology but a power.

   4. It demands from all submission and trust.

   These being the characteristics, consider--

   II. The qualifications for reception as necessarily resulting from the
   characteristics.

   The persons who receive must be those who consent to take the station
   which the Gospel assigns. They must be babes, by which is meant not
   such as are innocent, but such as are reliant on a higher Power,
   self-distrustful, willing to obey.

   These qualifications are all moral. The organ for reception of the
   Gospel is the heart, not the head. To receive it by faith is a
   spiritual, not an intellectual process. Ignorance is no qualification
   nor no disqualification. Ignorance or knowledge is immaterial. The one
   condition is to be willing to accept.

   III. The disqualification of the wise as necessarily resulting from the
   qualification.

   The organ for the reception is not the head but the heart. Therefore,
   wisdom is a barrier only in this way, that it has nothing to do in the
   matter. Its presence or its absence is quite indifferent here as in
   many other spheres of experience. The joys of the affections, the joys
   of common emotions, the joys of bodily life--all these are utterly
   independent of the culture of the understanding.

   Hence wisdom' becomes a barrier, because its possessors are accustomed
   to think it the master key. Not intellect, but the pride of intellect,
   trusting in it, glorying in wisdom is the disqualification.

   It is not true that there is any discord between religion and
   cultivated thought. The loftier the soul, the loftier all its
   attributes, the nobler should be, may be, its religion. It is not true
   that there is any natural affinity between ignorance and religion,
   between narrow understandings and deep faith. That is not the Bible
   truth. The religion of Christ is not like owls that love the twilight,
   but like eagles that purge their sight at the very fountain itself of
   heavenly radiance.'

   Take history: the great names--an Augustine and a Luther, a Dante and a
   Milton, a Bacon and a Pascal--are enough to show that there is no
   antagonism. On the other hand, names enough rise to show that there is
   no alliance. The inference is that the intellect has little to do with
   a man's attitude towards the Revelation of God in Christ, but that the
   moral is all.

   Let me close with the repetition of the thought that the apparent
   exclusion is the result of the universality, and that Come unto Me' is
   Christ's commentary on my text. Well then may we rejoice when we think
   of a gospel for the world. Whatever you are, it is for you if you are a
   man. However foolish, though you cannot read a letter and know nothing,
   it is for you. If you be enriched with all knowledge, you must come on
   the same terms as that beggar at your side. That is a healthy
   discipline. You are more than a student, than a scholar, than a
   thinker; you are a man, you are a sinful man. There is a deeper chamber
   in your heart than any into which knowledge can penetrate. Christ
   brings a gospel for all. When we think of it, with its sublime
   disregard of all peculiarities, we may well rejoice with him who said,
   Ye see your calling, brethren,' and with Him, the loftiest, the
   incarnate, Wisdom who said, I thank Thee, Father.' For if you rightly
   grasp the bearing of this text, and mark what follows it in our Lord's
   heart and thoughts, you will see these deep eyes of solemn joy turned
   from the heaven to you, filmy with compassion, and those hands, then
   lifted in rapt devotion, stretched out to beckon you and all the world
   to His breast, and hear the voice that rose in that burst of
   thanksgiving melting into tenderness as it woos you, be you wise or
   ignorant, to come to Him and rest.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE REST GIVER

   Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
   you rest. 29. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and
   lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.'--MATT. xi. 28,
   29.

   One does not know whether tenderness or majesty is predominant in these
   wonderful words. A divine penetration into man's true condition, and a
   divine pity, are expressed in them. Jesus looks with clearsighted
   compassion into the inmost history of all hearts, and sees the toil and
   the sorrow which weigh on every soul. And no less remarkable is the
   divine consciousness of power, to succour and to help, which speaks in
   them. Think of a Jewish peasant of thirty years old, opening his arms
   to embrace the world, and saying to all men, Come and rest on My
   breast.' Think of a man supposing himself to be possessed of a charm
   which could soothe all sorrow and lift the weight from every heart.

   A great sculptor has composed a group where there diverge from the
   central figure on either side, in two long lines, types of all the
   cruel varieties of human pains and pangs; and in the midst stands,
   calm, pure, with the consciousness of power and love in His looks, and
   with outstretched hands, as if beckoning invitation and dropping
   benediction, Christ the Consoler. The artist has but embodied the claim
   which the Master makes for Himself here. No less remarkable is His own
   picture of Himself, as meek and lowly in heart.' Did ever anybody
   before say, I am humble,' without provoking the comment, He that says
   he is humble proves that he is not'? But Jesus Christ said it, and the
   world has allowed the claim; and has answered, Though Thou bearest
   record of Thyself, Thy record is true.'

   But my object now is not so much to deal with the revelation of our
   Lord contained in these marvellous words, as to try, as well as I can,
   to re-echo, however faintly, the invitation that sounds in them. There
   is a very striking reduplication running through them which is often
   passed unnoticed. I shall shape my remarks so as to bring out that
   feature of the text, asking you to look first with me at the twofold
   designation of the persons addressed; next at the twofold invitation;
   and last at the twofold promise of rest.

   I. Consider then the twofold designation here of the persons addressed,
   Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.'

   The one word expresses effort and toil, the other a burden and
   endurance. The one speaks of the active, the other of the passive, side
   of human misery and evil. Toil is work which is distasteful in itself,
   or which is beyond our faculties. Such toil, sometime or other, more or
   less, sooner or later, is the lot of every man. All work becomes
   labour, and all labour, sometime or other, becomes toil. The text is,
   first of all, and in its most simple and surface meaning, an invitation
   to all the men who know how ceaseless, how wearying, how empty the
   effort and energy of life is, to come to this Master and rest.

   You remember those bitter words of the Book of Ecclesiastes, where the
   preacher sets forth a circle of labour that only comes back to the
   point where it began, as being the law for nature and the law for man.
   And truly much of our work seems to be no better than that. We are like
   squirrels in a cage, putting forth immense muscular effort, and nothing
   to show for it after all. All is vanity, and striving after wind.'

   Toil is a curse; work is a blessing. But all our work darkens into
   toil; and the invitation, Come unto Me, all ye that labour,' reaches to
   the very utmost verge of the world and includes every soul.

   And then, in like manner, the other side of human experience is set
   forth in that other word. For most men have not only to work, but to
   bear; not only to toil, but to sorrow. There are efforts that need to
   be put forth, which task all our energy, and leave the muscles flaccid
   and feeble. And many of us have, at one and the same moment, to work
   and to weep, to toil whilst our hearts are beating like a forge-hammer;
   to labour whilst memories and thoughts that might enfeeble any worker,
   are busy with us. A burden of sorrow, as well as effort and toil, is,
   sooner or later, the lot of all men.

   But that is only surface. The twofold designation here before us goes a
   great deal deeper than that. It points to two relationships to God and
   to God's law of righteousness. Men labour with vague and yet with noble
   effort, sometimes, to do the thing that is right, and after all efforts
   there is left a burden of conscious defect. In the purest and the
   highest lives there come both of these things. And Jesus Christ, in
   this merciful invitation of His, speaks to all the men that have tried,
   and tried in vain, to satisfy their consciences and to obey the law of
   God, and says to them, Cease your efforts, and no longer carry that
   burden of failure and of sin upon your shoulders. Come unto Me, and I
   will give you rest.'

   I should be sorry to think that I was speaking to any man or woman who
   had not, more or less, tried to do what is right. You have laboured at
   that effort with more or less of consistency, with more or less of
   earnestness. Have you not found that you could not achieve it?

   I am sure that I am speaking to no man or woman who has not upon his or
   her conscience a great weight of neglected duties, of actual
   transgressions, of mean thoughts, of foul words and passions, of deeds
   that they would be ashamed that any should see; ashamed that their
   dearest should catch a glimpse of. My friend, universal sinfulness is
   no mere black dogma of a narrow Calvinism; it is no uncharitable
   indictment against the race; it is simply putting into definite words
   the consciousness that is in every one of your hearts. You know that,
   whether you like to think about it or not, you have broken God's law,
   and are a sinful man. You carry a burden on your back whether you
   realise the fact or no, a burden that clogs all your efforts, and that
   will sink you deeper into the darkness and the mire. Come unto Me, all
   ye that labour,' and with noble, but, at bottom, vain, efforts have
   striven after right and truth. Come unto Me all ye that are burdened,'
   and bear, sometimes forgetting it, but often reminded of its pressure
   by galled shoulders and wearied limbs, the burden of sin on your bent
   backs.

   This invitation includes the whole race. In it, as in a blank form, you
   may each insert your name. Jesus Christ speaks to thee, John, Thomas,
   Mary, Peter, whatever thy name may be, as distinctly as if you saw your
   name written on the pages of your New Testament, when He says to you,
   Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden.' For the all' is
   but the sum of the units; and I, and thou, and thou, have our place
   within the word.

   II. Now, secondly, look at the twofold invitation that is here.

   Come unto Me . . . Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.' These two
   things are not the same. Coming unto Me,' as is quite plain to the most
   superficial observation, is the first step in the approach to a
   companionship, which companionship is afterwards perfected and kept up
   by obedience and imitation. The coming' is an initial act which makes a
   man Christ's companion. And the Take My yoke upon you, and learn of
   Me,' is the continuous act by which that companionship is manifested
   and preserved. So that in these words, which come so familiarly to most
   of our memories that they have almost ceased to present a sharp
   meaning, there is not only a merciful summons to the initial act, but a
   description of the continual life of which that act is the
   introduction.

   And now, to put that into simpler words, when Jesus Christ says Come
   unto Me,' He Himself has taught us what is His inmost meaning in that
   invitation, by another word of His: He that cometh unto Me shall never
   hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst'; where the
   parallelism of the clauses teaches us that to come to Christ is simply
   to put our trust in Him. There is in faith a true movement of the whole
   soul towards the Master. I think that this metaphor teaches us a great
   deal more about that faith that we are always talking about in the
   pulpit, and which, I am afraid, many of our congregations do not very
   distinctly understand, than many a book of theology does. To come to
   Him' implies, distinctly, that He, and no mere theological dogma,
   however precious and clear, is the Object on which faith rests.

   And, therefore, if Christ, and not merely a doctrinal truth about
   Christ, be the Object of our faith, then it is very clear that faith,
   which grasps a Person, must be something more than the mere act of the
   understanding which assents to a truth. And what more is it? How is it
   possible for one person to lay hold of and to come to another? By trust
   and love, and by these alone. These be the bonds that bind men
   together. Mere intellectual consent may be sufficient to fasten a man
   to a dogma, but there must be will and heart at work to bind a man to a
   person; and if it be Christ and not a theology, to which we come by our
   faith, then it must be with something more than our brains that we
   grasp Him and draw near to Him. That is to say, your will is engaged in
   your confidence. Trust Him as you trust one another, only with the
   difference befitting a trust directed to an absolute and perfect object
   of trust, and not to a poor, variable human heart. Trust Him as you
   trust one another. Then, just as husband and wife, parent and child,
   friend and friend, pass through all intervening hindrances and come
   together when they trust and love, so you come closer to Christ as the
   very soul of your soul by an inward real union, than you do even to
   your dear ones, if you grapple Him to your heart with the hoops of
   steel, which, by simple trust in Him, the Divine Redeemer forges for
   us. Come unto Me,' being translated out of metaphor into fact, is
   simply Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.'

   And still further, we have here, not only the initial act by which
   companionship and union with Jesus Christ is brought about, but the
   continual course by which it is kept up, and by which it is manifested.
   The faith which saves a man's soul is not all which is required for a
   Christian life. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me.' The yoke is
   that which, laid on the broad forehead or the thick neck of the ox, has
   attached to it the cords which are bound to the burden that the animal
   draws. The burden, then, which Christ gives to His servants to pull, is
   a metaphor for the specific duties which He enjoins upon them to
   perform; and the yoke by which they are fastened to their burdens,
   obliged' to their duties, is His authority, So to take His yoke' upon
   us is to submit our wills to His authority. Therefore this further call
   is addressed to all those who have come to Him, feeling their weakness
   and their need and their sinfulness, and have found in Him a Saviour
   who has made them restful and glad; and it bids them live in the
   deepest submission of will to Him, in joyful obedience, in constant
   service; and, above all, in the daily imitation of the Master.

   You must put both these commandments together before you get Christ's
   will for His children completely expressed. There are some of you who
   think that Christianity is only a means by which you may escape the
   penalty of your sins; and you are ready enough, or fancy yourselves so,
   to listen when He says, Come to Me that you may be pardoned,' but you
   are not so ready to listen to what He says afterwards, when He calls
   upon you to take His yoke upon you, to obey Him, to serve Him, and
   above all to copy Him. And I beseech you to remember that if you go and
   part these two halves from one another, as many people do, some of them
   bearing away the one half and some the other, you have got a maimed
   Gospel; in the one case a foundation without a building, and in the
   other case a building without a foundation. The people who say that
   Christ's call to the world is Come unto Me,' and whose Christianity and
   whose Gospel is only a proclamation of indulgence and pardon for past
   sin, have laid hold of half of the truth. The people who say that
   Christ's call is Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me,' and that
   Christianity is a proclamation of the duty of pure living after the
   pattern of Jesus Christ our great Example, have laid hold of the other
   half of the truth. And both halves bleed themselves away and die, being
   torn asunder; put them together, and each has power.

   That separation is one reason why so many Christian men and women are
   such poor Christians as they are--having so little real religion, and
   consequently so little real joy. I could lay my fingers upon many men,
   professing Christians--I do not say whether in this church or in other
   churches--whose whole life shows that they do not understand that Jesus
   Christ has a twofold summons to His servants; and that it is of no
   avail once, long ago, to have come, or to think that you have come, to
   Him to get pardon, unless day by day you are keeping beside Him, doing
   His commandments, and copying His sweet and blessed example.

   III. And now, lastly, look at the twofold promise which is here.

   I do not know if there is any importance to be attached to the slight
   diversity of language in the two verses, so as that in the one case the
   promise runs, I will give you rest,' and in the other, Ye shall find
   rest.' That sounds as if the rest that was contingent upon the first of
   the invitations was in a certain and more direct and exclusive fashion
   Christ's gift than the rest which was contingent upon the second. It
   may be so, but I attach no importance to that criticism; only I would
   have you observe that our Lord distinctly separates here between the
   rest of coming,' and the rest of wearing His yoke.' These two,
   howsoever they may be like each other, are still not the same. The one
   is the perfecting and the prolongation, no doubt, of the other, but has
   likewise in it some other, I say not more blessed, elements. Dear
   brethren, here are two precious things held out and offered to us all.
   There is rest in coming to Christ; the rest of a quiet conscience which
   gnaws no more; the rest of a conscious friendship and union with God,
   in whom alone are our soul's home, harbour, and repose; the rest of
   fears dispelled; the rest of forgiveness received into the heart. Do
   you want that? Go to Christ, and as soon as you go to Him you will get
   that rest.

   There is rest in faith. The very act of confidence is repose. Look how
   that little child goes to sleep in its mother's lap, secure from harm
   because it trusts. And, oh! if there steal over our hearts such a sweet
   relaxation of the tension of anxiety when there is some dear one on
   whom we can cast all responsibility, how much more may we be delivered
   from all disquieting fears by the exercise of quiet confidence in the
   infinite love and power of our Brother Redeemer, Christ! He will be a
   covert from the storm, and a refuge from the tempest'; as rivers of
   water in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.'
   If we come to Him, the very act of coming brings repose.

   But, brethren, that is not enough, and, blessed be God! that is not
   all. There is a further, deeper rest in obedience, and emphatically and
   most blessedly there is a rest in Christ-likeness. Take My yoke upon
   you.' There is repose in saying Thou art my Master, and to Thee I bow.'
   You are delivered from the unrest of self-will, from the unrest of
   contending desires, you get rid of the weight of too much liberty.
   There is peace in submission; peace in abdicating the control of my own
   being; peace in saying, Take Thou the reins, and do Thou rule and guide
   me.' There is peace in surrender and in taking His yoke upon us.

   And most especially the path of rest for men is in treading in Christ's
   footsteps. Learn of Me,' it is the secret of tranquillity. We have done
   with passionate hot desires,--and it is these that breed all the
   disquiet in our lives--when we take the meekness and the lowliness of
   the Master for our pattern. The river will no longer roll, broken by
   many a boulder, and chafed into foam over many a fall, but will flow
   with even foot, and broad, smooth bosom, to the parent sea.

   There is quietness in self-sacrifice, there is tranquillity in ceasing
   from mine own works and growing like the Master.


     The Cross is strength; the solemn Cross is gain.

     The Cross is Jesus' breast,

     Here giveth He the rest,

     That to His best beloved doth still remain.'

   Take up thy cross daily,' and thou enterest into His rest.

   My brother, the wicked is like the troubled sea that cannot rest, whose
   waters cast up mire and dirt.' But you, if you come to Christ, and if
   you cleave to Christ, may be like that sea of glass, mingled with
   fire,' that lies pure, transparent, waveless before the Throne of God,
   over which no tempests rave, and which, in its deepest depths, mirrors
   the majesty of Him that sitteth upon the Throne, and of the Lamb.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE PHARISEES' SABBATH AND CHRIST'S

   At that time Jesus went on the Sabbath day through the corn; and His
   disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to
   eat. 2. But when the Pharisees saw it they said unto Him, Behold, Thy
   disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day. 3.
   But he said unto them, Have ye not read what David did, when he was an
   hungred, and they that were with him; 4. How he entered into the house
   of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him to eat,
   neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests! 5. Or
   have ye not read in the law, how that on the Sabbath days the priests
   in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are blameless! 6. But I say unto
   you, That in this place is one greater than the temple. 7. But if ye
   had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye
   would not have condemned the guiltless. 8. For the Son of Man is Lord
   even of the Sabbath day 9. And when he was departed thence, He went
   into their synagogue: 10. And, behold, there was a man which had his
   hand withered. And they asked Him, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the
   Sabbath days? that they might accuse Him. 11. And He said unto them,
   What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it
   fall into a pit on the Sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and
   lift it out? 12. How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore
   it is lawful to do well on the Sabbath days. 13. Then saith He to the
   man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it forth; and it was
   restored whole, like as the other. 14. Then the Pharisees went out, and
   held a counsel against Him, how they might destroy Him.' --MATT. xii.
   1-14.

   We have had frequent occasion to point out that this Gospel is
   constructed, not on chronological, but on logical lines. It groups
   together incidents related in subject, though separated in time. Thus
   we have the collection of Christ's sayings in the Sermon on the Mount,
   followed by the collection of doings in chapters viii. and ix., the
   collected charge to His ambassadors in chapter x., the collection of
   instances illustrative of the relations of different classes to the
   message of the Kingdom and its King in chapter xi., and now in this
   chapter a series of incidents setting forth the growing bitterness of
   antagonism on the part of the guardians of traditional and ceremonial
   religion. This is followed, in the next chapter, with a series of
   parables.

   The present lesson includes two Sabbath incidents, in the first of
   which the disciples are the transgressors of the sabbatic tradition; in
   the second, Christ's own action is brought into question. The scene of
   the first is in the fields, that of the second is in the synagogue. In
   the one, Sabbath observance is set aside at the call of personal needs;
   in the other, at the call of another's calamity. So the two correspond
   to the old Puritan principle that the Sabbath law allowed of works of
   necessity and of mercy.'

   I. The Sabbath and personal needs. This is a strange sort of King who
   cannot even feed His servants. What a glimpse into the penury of their
   usual condition the quiet statement that the disciples were hungry
   gives us, especially if we remember that it is not likely that the
   Master had fared better than they! Indeed, His reference to David and
   his band of hungry heroes suggests that He was an hungred' as well as
   they that were with Him.' As they traversed some field path through the
   tall yellowing corn, they gathered a few ears, as the merciful
   provision of the law allowed, and hastily began to eat the rubbed-out
   grains. As soon as they began,' the eager Pharisees, who seem to have
   been at their heels, call Him to behold' this dreadful crime, which,
   they think, requires His immediate remonstrance. If they had had as
   sharp eyes for men's necessities as for their faults, they might have
   given them food which it was lawful' to eat, and so obviated this
   frightful iniquity. But that is not the way of Pharisees. Moses had not
   forbidden such gleaning, but the casuistry which had spun its
   multitudinous webs over the law, hiding the gold beneath their dirty
   films, had decided that plucking the ears was of the nature of reaping,
   and reaping was work, and work was forbidden, which being settled, of
   course the inferential prohibition became more important than the law
   from which it was deduced. That is always the case with human
   conclusions from revelation; and the more questionable these are, the
   more they are loved by their authors, as the sickly child of a family
   is the dearest.

   Our Lord does not question the authority of the tradition, nor ask
   where Moses had forbidden what His disciples were doing. Still less
   does He touch the sanctity of the Jewish Sabbath. He accepts His
   questioners' position, for the time, and gives them a perfect answer on
   their own ground. Perhaps there may be just a hint in the double Have
   ye not read?' that they could not produce Scripture for their
   prohibition, as He would do for the liberty which He allowed. He quotes
   two instances in which ceremonial obligations gave way before higher
   law. The first, that of David and his followers eating the shew-bread,
   which was tabooed to all but priests, is perhaps chosen with some
   reference to the parallel between Himself, the true King, now
   unrecognised and hunted with His humble followers, and the fugitive
   outlaw with his band. It is but a veiled allusion at most; but, if it
   fell on good soil, it might have led some one to ask, If this is David,
   where is Saul, and where is Doeg, watching him to accuse him?' This
   example serves our Lord's purpose of showing that even a divine
   prohibition, if it relates to mere ceremonial matter, melts, like wax,
   before even bodily necessities. What a thrill of holy horror would meet
   the enunciation of the doctrine that such a carnal thing as hunger
   rightfully abrogated a sacred ritual proscription! The law of right is
   rigid; that of external ceremonies is flexible. Better that a man
   should die than that the one should be broken; better that the other
   should be flung to the winds than that a hungry man should go unfed. It
   may reasonably be doubted whether all Christian communities have
   learned the sweep of that principle yet, or so judge of the relative
   importance of keeping up their appointed forms of worship, and of
   feeding their hungry brother. The brave Ahimelech, the son of Ahitub,'
   was ahead of a good many people of to-day.

   The second example comes still closer to the question in hand, and
   supplies the reference to the Sabbath law, which the former had not.
   There was much hard work done in the temple on the Sabbath--sacrifices
   to be slain, fires and lamps to be kindled, and so on. That was not
   Sabbath desecration. Why? Because it was done in the temple, and as a
   part of divine service. The sanctity of the place, and the consequent
   sanctity of the service, exempted it from the operation of the law. The
   question, no doubt, was springing to the lips of some scowling
   Pharisee, And what has that to do with our charge against your
   disciples?' when it was answered by the wonderful next words, In this
   place'--here among the growing corn, beneath the free heaven, far away
   from Jerusalem--is one greater than the temple.' Profound words, which
   could only sound as blasphemy or nonsense to the hearers, but which
   touch the deepest truths concerning His person and His relations to
   men, and which involve the destruction of all temples and rituals. He
   is all that the temple symbolised. In Him the Godhead really dwells; He
   is the meeting-place of God and man, the place of the oracle, the place
   of sacrifice. Then, where He stands is holy ground, and all work done
   with reference to Him is worship. These poor followers of His are
   priests; and if, for His sake, they had broken a hundred Sabbath
   regulations, they were guiltless.

   So far our Lord has been answering His opponents; now He attacks. The
   quotation from Hosea is often on His lips. Here He uses it to unmask
   the real motives of His assailants. Their murmuring came not from more
   religion, but from less love. If they had had a little more milk of
   human kindness in them, it would have died on their lips; if they had
   grasped the real meaning of the religion they professed, they would
   have learned that its soul was mercy'--that is, of course, man's
   gentleness to man--and that sacrifice and ceremony were but the body,
   the help, and sometimes the hindrance, of that soul. They would have
   understood the relative importance of disposition and of external
   worship, as end and means, and not have visited a mere breach of
   external order with a heat of disapprobation only warranted by a sin
   against the former. Their judgment would have been liker God's if they
   had looked at those poor hungry men with merciful eyes and with
   merciful hearts, rather than with eager scrutiny that delighted to find
   them tripping in a triviality of outward observance. What mountains of
   harsh judgment by Christ's own followers on each other would have been
   removed into the sea if the spirit of these great words had played upon
   them!

   The for' at the beginning of verse 8 seems to connect with the last
   words of the preceding verse, I call them guiltless, for,' etc. It
   states more plainly still the claim already put forward in verse 6. The
   Son of Man,' no doubt, is equivalent to Messiah'; but it is more, as
   revealing at once Christ's true manhood and His unique and complete
   manhood, in which the very ideal of man is personally realised. It can
   never be detached from His other name, the Son of God.' They are the
   obverse and reverse of the same golden coin. He asserts His power over
   the Sabbath, as enjoined upon Israel. His is the authority which
   imposed it. It is plastic in His hands. The whole order of which it is
   part has its highest purpose in witnessing of Him. He brings the true
   rest.'

   II. The Sabbath, and works of beneficence. Matthew appears to have
   brought together here two incidents which, according to Luke, were
   separated in time. The scene changes to a synagogue, perhaps that of
   Capernaum. Among the worshippers is a man with a withered hand,' who
   seems to have been brought there by the Pharisees as a bait to try to
   draw out Christ's compassion. What a curious state of mind that
   was,--to believe that Christ could work miracles, and to want Him to do
   one, not for pity's sake, nor for confirmation of faith, but to have
   material for accusing Him! And how heartlessly careless of the poor
   sufferer they are, when they use him thus! He for his part stands
   silent. Desire and faith have no part in evoking this miracle. Deadly
   hatred and calculating malignity ask for it, and for once they get
   their wish. Having baited their hook, and set the man with his shrunken
   hand full in view, they get into their corners and wait the event.
   Matthew tells us that they ask our Lord the question which Luke
   represents Him as asking them. Perhaps we may say that He gave voice to
   the question which they were asking in their hearts. Their motive is
   distinctly given here. They wanted material for a legal process before
   a local tribunal. The whole thing was an attempt to get Jesus within
   the meshes of the law. Again, as in the former case, it is the
   traditional, not the written, law, which healing would have broken. The
   question evidently implies that, in the judgment of the askers, healing
   was unlawful. Talmudical scholars tell us that in later days the rabbis
   differed on the point, but that the prevalent opinion was, that only
   sicknesses threatening immediate danger to life could lawfully be
   treated on the Sabbath. The more rigid doctrine was obviously held by
   Christ's questioners. It is a significant instance of the absurdity and
   cruelty which are possible when once religion has been made a matter of
   outward observance. Nothing more surely and completely ossifies the
   heart and blinds common sense.

   In His former answer Jesus had appealed to Scripture to bear out His
   teaching that Sabbath observance must bend to personal necessities.
   Here He appeals to the natural sense of compassion to confirm the
   principle that it must give way to the duty of relieving others. His
   question is as confident of an answer as the Pharisees' had been. But
   though He takes it for granted that His hearers could only answer it in
   one way, the microscopic and cold-blooded ingenuity of the rabbis,
   since His day, answers it in another. They say, Don't lift the poor
   brute out, but throw in a handful of fodder, and something for him to
   lie upon, and let him be till next day.' A remarkable way of making
   thine ox and thine ass' keep the Sabbath! There is a delicacy of
   expression in the question; the owner of one sheep' would be more
   solicitous about it than if he had a hundred; and our Shepherd looks on
   all the millions of His flock with a heart as much touched by their
   sorrow and needs as if each were His only possession. The question
   waits for no answer; but Christ goes on (as if there could be but one
   reply) to His conclusion, which He binds to His first question by
   another, equally easy to answer. Man's superiority to animals makes his
   claim for help more imperative. You would not do less for one another
   than for a sheep in a hole, surely.' But the form in which our Lord put
   His conclusive answer to the Pharisees gives an unexpected turn to the
   reply. He does not say, It is lawful to heal,' but, It is lawful to do
   well,' thus at once showing the true justification of healing, namely,
   that it was a beneficent act, and widening the scope of His answer to
   cover a whole class of cases. To do well' here means, not to do right,
   but to do good, to benefit men. The principle is a wide one: the
   charitable succour of men's needs, of whatever kind, is congruous with
   the true design of that day of rest. Have the churches laid that lesson
   to heart? On the whole, it is to be observed that our Lord here
   distinctly recognises the obligation of the Sabbath, that He claims
   power over it, that He permits the pressure of one's own necessities
   and of others' need of help, to modify the manner of its observance,
   and that He leaves the application of these principles to the spiritual
   insight of His followers.

   The cure which follows is done in a singular fashion. Without a whisper
   of request from the sufferer or any one else, He heals him by a word.
   His command has a promise in it, and He gives the power to do what He
   bids the man do. Give what Thou commandest,' says St. Augustine, and
   command what Thou wilt.' We get strength to obey in the act of
   obedience. But beyond the possible symbolical significance of the mode
   of cure, and beyond the revelation of Christ's power to heal by a word,
   the manner of healing had a special reason in the very cavils of the
   Pharisees. Not even they could accuse Him of breaking any Sabbath law
   by such a cure. What had He done? Told the man to put out his hand.
   Surely that was not unlawful. What had the man done? Stretched it
   forth. Surely that broke no subtle rabbinical precept. So they were
   foiled at every turn, driven off the field of argument, and baffled in
   their attempt to find ground for laying an information against Him. But
   neither His gentle wisdom nor His healing power could reach these
   hearts, made stony by conceit and pedantic formalism; and all that
   their contact with Jesus did was to drive them to intenser hostility,
   and to send them away to plot His death. That is what comes of making
   religion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is always blind
   as an owl to the light of God and true goodness; keen-sighted as a hawk
   for trivial breaches of his cobweb regulations, and cruel as a vulture
   to tear with beak and claw. The race is not extinct. We all carry one
   inside us, and need God's help to cast him out.
     __________________________________________________________________

AN ATTEMPT TO ACCOUNT FOR JESUS

   But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This man doth not cast out
   demons, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons.'--MATT. xii. 24.

   Mark's Gospel tells us that this astonishing explanation of Christ and
   His work was due to the ingenious malice of an ecclesiastical
   deputation, sent down from Jerusalem to prevent the simple folk in
   Galilee from being led away by this new Teacher. They must have been
   very hard put to it to explain undeniable but unwelcome facts, when
   they hazarded such a preposterous theory.

   Formal religionists never know what to make of a man who is in manifest
   touch with the unseen. These scribes, like Christ's other critics,
   judged themselves in judging Him, and bore witness to the very truths
   that they were eager to deny. For this ridiculous explanation admits
   the miraculous, recognises the impossibility of accounting for Christ
   on any naturalistic hypothesis, and by its very outrageous absurdity
   indicates that the only reasonable explanation of the facts is the
   admission of His divine message and authority. So we may learn, even
   from such words as these, how the glory of Jesus Christ shines, though
   distorted and blurred, through the fogs of prejudice and malice.

   I. Note, then, first, the unwelcome and undeniable facts that insist
   upon explanation.

   I have said that these hostile critics attest the reality of the
   miracles. I know that it is not fashionable at present to attach much
   weight to the fact that none of all the enemies that saw them ever had
   a doubt about the reality of Christ's miracles. I know quite well that
   in an age that believed in the possibility of the supernatural, as this
   age does not, credence would be more easy, and that such testimony is
   less valuable than if it had come from a jury of scientific twentieth
   century sceptics. But I know, on the other hand, that for long
   generations the expectation of the miraculous had died out before
   Christ came; that His predecessor, John the Baptist, made no such
   claims; and that, at first, at all events, there was no expectation of
   Jesus working miracles, to lead to any initial ease of acceptance of
   His claims. And I know that there were never sharper and more hostile
   eyes brought to bear upon any man and his work than the eyes of these
   ecclesiastical triers.' It would have been so easy and so triumphant a
   way of ending the whole business if they could have shown, what they
   were anxious to be able to show, that the miracle was a trick. And so I
   venture to think that not without some weight is the attestation from
   the camp of the enemy, This man casteth out demons.'

   But you have to remember that amongst the facts to be explained is not
   only this one of Christ's works having passed muster with His enemies,
   but the other of His own reiterated and solemn claim to have the power
   of working what we call miracles. Now, I wish to dwell on that for one
   moment, because it is fashionable to put one's thumb upon it nowadays.
   It is not unusual to eliminate from the Gospel narrative all that side
   of it, and then to run over in eulogiums about the rest. But what we
   have to deal with is this fact, that the Man whom the world admits to
   be the consummate flower of humanity, meek, sane, humble, who has given
   all generations lessons in self-abnegation and devotion, claimed to be
   able to raise the dead, to cast out demons, and to do many wonderful
   works. And though we should be misrepresenting the facts if we said
   that He did what His followers have too often been inclined to do, i.e.
   rested the stress of evidence upon that side of His work, yet it is an
   equal exaggeration in the other direction to do, as so many are
   inclined to do to-day, i.e. disparage the miraculous evidence as no
   evidence at all. Go and tell John the things that ye see and
   hear,'--that is His own answer to the question, Art Thou He that should
   come?' And though I rejoice to believe that there are far loftier and
   more blessed answers to it than these outward signs and tokens, they
   are signs and tokens; and they are part of the whole facts that have to
   be accounted for.

   I would venture to widen the reference of my text for a moment, and
   include not only the actual miracles of our Lord's earthly life, but
   all the beneficent, hallowing, elevating, ennobling, refining results
   which have followed upon the proclamation of His truth in the world
   ever since. I believe, as I think Scripture teaches me to believe, that
   in the world today Christ is working; and that it is a mistake to talk
   about the results of Christianity,' meaning thereby some abstract
   system divorced from Him. It is the working of Jesus Christ in the
   world that has brought nobler manners, purer laws'; that has given a
   new impulse and elevation to art and literature; that has lifted the
   whole tone of society; that has suppressed ancient evils; that has
   barred the doors of old temples of devildom, of lust, and cruelty, and
   vice; and that is still working in the world for the elevation and the
   deifying of humanity. And I claim the whole difference between B.C. and
   A.D.'--the whole difference between Christendom and Heathendom--as
   being the measure of the continuous power with which Jesus Christ has
   grappled with and throttled the snakes that have fastened on men. That
   continuous operation of His in delivering from the powers of evil has,
   indeed, not yielded such results as might have been expected. But just
   as on earth He was hindered in the exercise of His supernatural power
   by men's unbelief, so that He could do no mighty works, save that He
   laid His hands on a few sick folk' here and there, and healed them,' so
   He has been thwarted by His Church, and hindered in the world, from
   manifesting the fulness of His power. But yet, sorrowfully admitting
   that, and taking as deserved the scoffs of the men that say, Your
   Christianity does not seem to do so very much after all,' I still
   venture to allege that its record is unique; and that these are facts
   which wise men ought to take into account, and have some fairly
   plausible way of explaining.

   II. Secondly, note the preposterous explanation. This man doth not cast
   out demons, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons.' That is the
   last resort of prejudice so deep that it will father an absurdity
   rather than yield to evidence. And Christ has no difficulty in putting
   it aside, as you may remember, by a piece of common sense: If Satan
   cast out Satan, he is divided against himself, and his kingdom cannot
   stand.' There is an old play which has for its title, The Devil as an
   Ass. He is not such an ass as that, to build up with one hand and cast
   down with the other. As the proverb has it, Hawks do not pick out
   hawks' eyes.' But this plainly hopeless attempt to account for Christ
   and His work may be turned into a witness for both, and yield not
   unimportant lessons.

   This explanation witnesses to the insufficiency of all explanations
   which omit the supernatural. These men felt that they had to do with a
   Man who was in touch with a whole world of unseen powers; and that they
   had here to deal with something to which ordinary measuring lines were
   palpably inapplicable. And so they fell back upon by Beelzebub'; and
   they thereby admitted that humanity without something more at the back
   of it never made such a man as that. And I beg you to lay that to
   heart. It is very easy to solve an insoluble problem if you begin by
   taking all the insoluble elements out of it. And that is how a great
   deal of modern thinking does with Christianity. Knock out all the
   miracles; pooh-pooh all Christ's claims; say nothing about Incarnation;
   declare Resurrection to be entirely unhistorical, and you will not have
   much difficulty in accounting for the rest; and it will not be worth
   the accounting for. But here is the thing to be dealt with, that whole
   life, the Christ of the Gospels. And I venture to say that any
   explanation professing to account for Him which leaves out His coming
   from an unseen world, and His possession of powers above this world of
   sense and nature, is ludicrously inadequate. Suppose you had a chain
   which for thousands of years had been winding on to a drum, and link
   after link had been rough iron, and all at once there comes one of pure
   gold, would it be reasonable to say that it had been dug from the same
   mine, and forged in the same fires, as its black and ponderous
   companions? Generation after generation has passed across the earth,
   each begetting sons after its own likeness; and lo! in the midst of
   them starts up one sinless Man. Is it reasonable to say that He is the
   product of the same causes which have produced all the millions, and
   never another like Him? Surely to account for Jesus without the
   supernatural is hopeless.

   Further, this explanation may be taken as an instance showing the
   inadequacy of all theories and explanations of Christ and Christianity
   from an unbelieving point of view. It was the first attempt of
   unbelievers to explain where Christ's power came from. Like all first
   attempts, it was crude, and it has been amended and refined since.
   Earlier generations did not hesitate to call the Apostles liars, and
   Christ's contemporaries did not hesitate to call Him this deceiver.' We
   have got beyond that; but we still are met by explanations of the power
   of the Gospel and of Christ, its subject and Author, which trace these
   to ignoble elements, and do not shrink from asserting that a blunder or
   a hallucination lies at the foundation.

   Now, I am not going to enter upon these matters at any length, but I
   would just recall to you our Lord's broad, simple principle: A corrupt
   tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither doth a good tree bring
   forth evil fruit.' And I would apply that all round. Christian teachers
   have often made great mistakes, as it seems to me, by tracing the
   prevalence of the power of some heathen religions to their vices and
   lies. No system has ever had great moral power in this world but by
   reason of its excellences and truths. Mohammedanism, for instance,
   swept away, and rightly, a mere formal superstition which called itself
   Christianity, because it grasped the one truth: There is no God but
   God'; and it had faith of a sort. Monasticism held the field in Europe,
   with all its faults, for centuries, because it enshrined the great
   Christian truth of self-sacrifice and absolute obedience. And you may
   take it as a fixed rule, that howsoever some mixture of falsehood doth
   ever please,' as Bacon says, in his cynical way, the reason for the
   power of any great movement has been the truth that was in it and not
   the lie; and the reason why great men have exercised influence has been
   their greatness and their goodness, and not their smallnesses and their
   vices.

   I apply that all round, and I ask you to apply it to Christianity; and
   in the light of such plain principles to answer the question: Where did
   this Man, so fair, so radiant, so human and yet so superhuman, so
   universal and yet so individual--where did He come from? and where did
   the Gospel, which flows from Him, and which has done such things in the
   world as it has done--where did it come from? Do men gather grapes of
   thorns, or figs of thistles?' If it is true that Jesus Christ is either
   mistakenly represented in the Gospels, or that He made enthusiastic
   claims which cannot be verified; and if it is true that the faith in a
   Resurrection on which Christianity is suspended, and which has produced
   such fruits as we know have been produced, is a delusion; then all I
   can say is that the noblest lives that ever were lived in the world
   have found their impulse in a falsehood or a dream; and that the
   richest clusters that ever have yielded wine for the cup have grown
   upon a thorn. If like produces like, you cannot account for Christ and
   Christianity by anything short of the belief in His Divine mission.
   Serpents' eggs do not hatch out into doves. This Man, when He claimed
   to be God's Son and the world's Saviour, was no brain-sick enthusiast;
   and the results show that the Gospel which His followers proclaim rests
   upon no lie.

   Again, this explanation is an instance of the credulity of unbelief.
   Think of the mental condition which could swallow such an explanation
   of such a Worker and such work. It is more difficult to believe the
   explanation than the alternative which it is framed to escape. So it is
   always. The difficulties of faith are small by comparison with those of
   unbelief, gnats beside camels, and that that is so is plain from the
   short duration of each unbelieving explanation of Jesus. One can
   remember in the compass of one's own life more than one assailant
   taking the field with much trumpeting and flag-waving, whose attack
   failed and is forgotten. The child's story tells of a giant who
   determined to slay his enemy, and belaboured an empty bed with his club
   all night, and found his foe untouched and fresh in the morning. The
   Gospel is here; what has become of its assailants? They are gone, and
   the limbo into which the scribes' theory has passed will receive all
   the others. So we may be quite patient, and sure that the sieve of
   time, which is slowly and constantly working, will riddle out all the
   rubbish, and cast it on the dunghill where so many exploded theories
   rot forgotten.

   III. And now, one word about the last point; and that is--the true
   explanation.

   Now, at this stage of my sermon, I must not be tempted to say a word
   about the light which our Lord throws, in these declarations in the
   context, into that dim unseen world. His words seem to me to be too
   solemn and didactic to be taken as accommodations to popular prejudice,
   and a great deal too grave to be taken as mere metaphor. And I, for my
   part, am not so sure that, apart from Him, I know all things in heaven
   and earth, as to venture to put aside these solemn words of His--which
   lift a corner of the veil which hides the unseen--and to dismiss them
   as unworthy of notice. Is it not a strange thing that a world which is
   so ready to believe in spiritual communications when they are vouched
   for by a newspaper editor, is so unwilling to believe them when they
   are in the Bible? And is it not a strange thing that scientists, who
   are always taunting Christians with the importance they attach to man
   in the plan of the universe, and ask if all these starry orbs were
   built for him, should be so incredulous of teachings which fill the
   waste places with loftier beings? But that is by the way.

   What does Christ say in the context? He tells the secret of His power.
   I, by the Spirit of God, cast out demons.' And then He goes on to speak
   about a conflict that He wages with a strong man; and about His binding
   the strong man, and spoiling his house. All which, being turned into
   modern language, is just this, that the Lord, by His incarnation, life,
   death, resurrection, ascension, and government at the right hand of
   God, has broken the powers of evil in their central hold. He has
   crushed the serpent's head; and though He may still, as Milton puts it,
   swinge the scaly horror of his folded tail,' it is but the flurries of
   the dying brute. The conquering heel is firm on his head. So, brethren,
   evil is conquered, and Christ is the Conqueror; and by His work in life
   and death He has delivered them that were held captive of the devil.
   And you and I may, if we will, pass into the liberty wherewith Christ
   has made us free.'

   That is the only explanation of Him--in His person, in His character,
   in His work, and in the effects of that work in the world--that covers
   all the facts, and will hold water. All others fail, and they mostly
   fail by boldly eliminating the very facts that need to be accounted
   for. Let us rather look to Him, thankful that our Brother has
   conquered; and let us put our trust in that Saviour. For, if His
   explanation is true, then a very solemn personal consideration arises
   for each of us, If I, by the Spirit of God, cast out demons, then the
   Kingdom of God is come unto you,' it stands beside us; it calls for our
   obedience. Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone, can cast the evils out
   of our natures. It is the Incarnate Christ, the Divine Christ, the
   crucified Christ, the ascended Christ, the indwelling Christ, who will
   so fill our hearts that there shall be no aching voids there to invite
   the return of the expelled tyrants. If any other reformation pass upon
   us than the thorough one of receiving Him by faith into our hearts,
   then, though they may be swept and garnished, they will be empty; and
   the demons will come back. With Jesus inside--they will be outside.
     __________________________________________________________________

MAKE THE TREE GOOD'

   . . . Make the tree good, and his fruit good. . ..' --MATT. xii. 33.

   In this Gospel we find that our Lord twice uses this image of a tree
   and its fruit. In the Sermon on the Mount He applies it as a test to
   false teachers, who hide, beneath the wool of the sheep's clothing, the
   fangs and paws of ravening wolves. He says, By their deeds ye shall
   know them; for as is the tree so is its fruit.' That is a rough and
   ready test, which applies rather to the teacher than to his doctrine,
   but it applies, to some extent, to the doctrine too, on the hypothesis
   that the teacher's life fairly represents it. Of course, it is not the
   only thing that we have to take into account; but it may prick many a
   bladder, and unmask many an error, and it is the way by which the
   masses generally judge of systems and of their apostles. A saintly life
   has more power than dusty volumes of controversy.

   But in our text Christ applies the same thoughts in rather a deeper
   fashion. Here the lesson that He would have us draw is of the
   connection between character and conduct; how what we do is determined
   by what we are, and how, not of course with the same absolute
   regularity and constancy, but still somewhat in the same fashion as the
   fruit is true to the tree, so, after all allowance made for ups and
   downs, for the irregular play of will and conscience, for the strife
   that is waged within a man, for the temptations of external
   circumstances, and the like--still, in general, as is the inner man, so
   is the outward manifestation. The facts of a life are important mainly
   as registering and making visible the inner condition of the doer. Now,
   that seems very elementary. Everybody believes that out of the heart
   are the issues of life,' as a wise man said long ago, but it is one of
   the truths that, if grasped and worked into our consciousness, and out
   in our lives, would do much to revolutionise them. And so, though it is
   a very old story, and though we all admit it, I wish now to come face
   to face with the consequences of this thought, that behind action lies
   character, and that Doing is the second step, and Being is the first.

   I. I would ask you to notice how here we are confronted with the great
   problem for every man.

   Make the tree good.' It takes a good man to do good things. So how
   shallow is all that talk, do, do, do,' this, that, and the other thing.
   All right, but be; that is the first thing; or, as Christ said, Make
   the tree good, and the fruit' will take care of itself. So do you not
   see how, if that is true about us, we are each brought full front up to
   this, Am I trying to make my tree good? And what kind of success am I
   having in the attempt?' The water that rises from some spring will
   bring up with it, in solution, a trace of a bed of salt through which
   it has come, and of all the minerals in the soil through which it has
   passed. And as its sparkling waters come out into the light, if one
   could analyse them completely, one might register a geological section
   of the strata through which it has risen. So, our acts bear in them a
   revelation of all the hidden beds through which they have risen; and
   sometimes they are bitter and salt, but they are always true to the
   self whose apocalypse they are to the world, or at all events to God.

   Therefore, brethren, I have to urge this, that we shall not be doing
   our true work as men and women, if we are simply trying to better our
   actions, important as these are. By this saying the centre of gravity
   is shifted, and in one aspect, the deeds are made less important. The
   condition of the hidden man of the heart is the all-important thing.
   Christ's word comes to each of us as the briefest statement of all that
   it is our highest duty and truest wisdom to aim at in life--Make the
   tree good.'

   If you have ever tried it honestly, and have not been contented with
   the superficial cleaning up of outsides, which consists in shifting the
   dirt into another place only, not in getting rid of it, I know what met
   you almost as soon as you began, like some great black rock that rises
   in a mountain-pass, and forbids all farther advance--the consciousness
   that you were not good met you. I am not going to talk theological
   technicalities. Never mind about phrases--they have been the ruin of a
   great deal of earnest preaching--call it what you like, here is a fact,
   that whenever a man sets himself, with anything like resolute
   determination and rigid self-examination, to the task of getting
   himself right, he finds that he is wrong. That being the case, each of
   us has to deal with a tremendous problem; and the more earnestly and
   honestly we try to deal with it, the more we shall feel how grave it
   is. You can cure a great deal, I know. God forbid that I should say one
   word that seems to deny a man's power to do much in the direction of
   self-improvement, but after all that is done, again you are brought
   short up on this fact, the testimony of conscience. And so I see men
   labouring at a task as vain as that of those who would twist the sands
   into ropes, according to the old fable. I see men seeking after higher
   perfection of purity than they will ever attain. That is the condition
   of us all, of course, for our ideal must always outrun our realisation,
   else we may as well lie down and die. But there is a difference between
   the imperfect approximation, which we feel to be imperfect, and yet
   feel to be approximation, and the despairing consciousness, that I am
   sure a great many of my audience have had, more or less, that I have a
   task set for me that is far beyond my strength. Talk about making the
   tree good! I cannot do it.' So men fold their hands, and the foiled
   endeavour begets despair. Or, as is the case with some of you, it
   begets indifference, and you do not care to try any more, because you
   have tried so often, and have made nothing of it.

   There is the problem, how make the tree good,' the tree being bad, or,
   at all events, if you do not like that broad statement, the tree having
   an element of badness, if I may so say, in and amongst any goodness
   that it has. I do not care which of the two forms of statement you
   take, the fact remains the same.

   II. Note the universal failure to solve the problem.

   Make the tree good.'

   Yes. And there are a whole set of would-be arboriculturists who tell
   you they will do it if you will trust to them. Let us look at them.
   First comes one venerable personage. He says, I am Law, and I prescribe
   this, and I forbid that, and I show reward and punishment, and I tell
   you--be a good man.' Well! what then? It is not for want of telling
   that men are bad. The worst man in the world knows his duty a great
   deal more than the best man in the world does it. And whether it is the
   law of the land, or whether it is the law of society, or the law
   written in Scripture, or the law written in a man's own heart, they all
   come under the same fatal disability. They tell us what to do, and they
   do not put out a finger to help us to do it. A lame man does not get to
   the city because he sees a guide-post at the turning which tells him
   which road to take. The people who do not believe in certain modern
   agitations about the restrictions of the liquor traffic say, You cannot
   make people sober by Act of Parliament,' which is absolutely true,
   although it does not bear, I think, the inference that they would draw
   from it, and it just puts into a rough form the fatal weakness of this
   would-be gardener and improver of the nature of the trees. He tells us
   our duty, and there an end.

   Do you remember how the Apostle put the weakness of law in words, the
   antique theological terminology of which should not prevent us from
   seeing the large truth in them? If there had been a law given which
   could have given life, then righteousness should have been by the law,'
   which being translated into modern English is just this, If Law could
   impart a power to obey its behests, then it is all that we want to make
   us right. But until it can do that it fails in two points. It deals
   with conduct, and we need to have character dealt with; and it does not
   lift the burden that it lays on me with one of its fingers. So we may
   rule Law out of court.

   And then comes another, and he says, I am Culture, and intellectual
   acquirement; or my name is Education, and I am going to make the tree
   good in the most scientific fashion, because what makes men bad is that
   they do not know, and if they only knew they would do the right.' Now,
   I thoroughly believe that education diminishes crime. I believe it
   weans from certain forms of evil. I believe that, other things being
   equal, an educated man, with his larger interests and his cultivated
   tastes, has a certain fastidiousness developed which keeps him from
   being so much tempted by the grosser forms of transgression. I believe
   that very largely you will empty your gaols in proportion as you fill
   your schools. And let no man say that I am an obscurantist, or that I
   am indifferent to the value of education and the benefits of
   intellectual culture, when I declare that all these may be attained,
   and the nature of the tree remain exactly what it was. You may prune,
   you may train along the wall, you may get bigger fruit, you will not
   get better fruit. Did you ever hear the exaggerated line that describes
   one of the pundits of science as the greatest, wisest, meanest of
   mankind'? The plain fact is that the cultivation of the understanding
   has little to do with the purifying of the depths of the heart.

   And then comes another, and says, I am the genius of Beauty and Art.
   And my recipe is pictures and statues, and all that will refine the
   mind, and lift the taste.' That is the popular gospel of this day, in a
   great many quarters. Yes, and have we never heard of a period in
   European history which was, as they call it, the Renaissance' of art
   and the death of morality? Do we not know that side by side there have
   been cultivated in all ages, and are being cultivated to-day, the most
   exclusive devotion to the beauty that can be expressed by art, and the
   most intense indifference to the beauty of holiness? Ah! brethren, it
   wants something far deeper-going than pictures to purge the souls of
   men. And whilst, as before, I thankfully acknowledge the refining
   influence of this new cult, I would protest against the absurdity of
   putting it upon a pedestal as the guide and elevator of corrupted
   humanity.

   And then come others, and they say, Environment is the thing that is to
   blame for it all. How can you get decent lives in the slums?' No, I
   know you cannot; and God bless every effort made to get the people out
   of the slums, I say. Only do not let us exaggerate. You cannot change a
   man, as deeply as we need to be changed, by any change of his
   circumstances. Take the bitter tree,' as I remember an old Jewish
   saying has it, take the bitter tree and plant it in Eden, and water it
   with the rivers there; and let the angel Gabriel be the gardener, and
   the tree will still bear bitter fruit.' Are all the people who live in
   good houses good? Will a living wage'--eight shillings a day and eight
   hours' play--will these change a man's character? Will these go deep
   enough down to touch the springs of evil? You cannot alter the nature
   of a set of objects by arranging them in different shapes,
   parallelograms, or squares, or circles, or any others. As long as you
   have the elements that are in human nature to deal with, you may do as
   you like about the distribution of wealth, and the relation of Capital
   to Labour, and the various cognate questions which are all included in
   the vague word Socialism; and human nature will be too strong for you,
   and you will have the old mischiefs cropping out again. Brethren, you
   cannot put out Vesuvius by bringing to bear on it the squirts of all
   the fire engines in creation. The water will go up in steam, and do
   little or nothing to extinguish the fire. And whilst I would thankfully
   help in all these other movements, and look for certain limited results
   of good from them, I, for my part, believe, and therefore I am bound to
   declare, that neither singly, nor all of them in combination, will they
   ever effect the change on human nature which Jesus Christ regarded as
   the only possible means for securing that human nature should bear good
   fruit.

   For, if there were no other reason, there are two plain ones which I
   only touch. God is the source of all good, of all creatural purity as
   well as all creatural blessedness. And if a life has a blank wall
   turned to Him, and has cut itself off from Him, I do not care how you
   educate it, fill it full of science, plunge it into an atmosphere of
   art, make the most perfect arrangements for social and economical and
   political circumstances, that soul is cut off from the possibility of
   good, because it is cut off from the fontal source of all good. And
   there is another reason which is closely connected with this, and that
   is that the true bitter tang in us all is self-centring regard. That is
   the mother-tincture that, variously coloured and compounded, makes in
   all the poisonous element that we call sin, and until you get something
   that will cast that evil out of a man's heart, you may teach and refine
   and raise him and arrange things for him as you like, and you will not
   master the source of all wrong and corrupt fruit.

   III. Lastly, let me say a word about the triumphant solution.

   Law says, Make the tree good,' and does not try to do it. Christ said,
   Make the tree good,' and proceeds to do it. And how does He do it?

   He does it by coming to us; to every soul of man on the earth, and
   offering, first, forgiveness for all the past. I do not know that
   amongst all the bonds by which evil holds a poor soul that struggles to
   get away from it, there is one more adamantine and unyielding than the
   consciousness that the past is irrevocable, and that what I have
   written I have written,' and never can blot out. But Jesus Christ deals
   with that consciousness. It is true that whatsoever a man soweth that
   shall he also reap,' and the Christian doctrine of forgiveness does not
   contradict that solemn truth, but it assures us that God's heart is not
   turned away from us, notwithstanding the past, and that we can write
   the future better, and break altogether the fatal bond that decrees,
   apart from Him, that to-morrow shall be as this day, and much more
   abundant,' and that past sin shall beget a progeny of future sins. That
   fruitfulness of sin is at an end, if we take Christ for our Saviour.

   He makes the tree good in another fashion still; for the very centre,
   as it seems to me, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that into our
   spirits He will breathe a new life kindred with His own, a new nature
   which is free from the law and bonds of past sin, and of present and
   future death. The tree is made good because He makes those who believe
   in Him new creatures in Christ Jesus.' Now, do not turn away and say
   that that is mysticism. Be it mysticism or not, it is God's truth. It
   is the truth of the Christian Revelation, that faith in Jesus Christ
   puts a new nature into any man, however sinful he may have been, and
   however deep the marks of the fetters may have been upon his limbs.

   Christ makes the tree good in yet another fashion, because He brings to
   the reinforcement of the new life which He imparts the mightiest
   motives, and sways by love, which leads to the imitation of the
   Beloved, which leads to obedience to the Beloved, which leads to
   shunning as the worst of evils anything that would break the communion
   with the Beloved, and which is in itself the decentralising of the
   sinful soul from its old centre, and the making of Christ the Beloved
   the centre round which it moves, and from which it draws radiance and
   light and motion. By all these methods, and many more that I cannot
   dwell upon now, the problem is triumphantly solved by Christianity. The
   tree is made good, and instead of the briar shall come up the myrtle
   tree.'

   You may say, That is all very well in theory. What about the practice?
   I do not see such a mighty difference between you Christians and us.'
   Well, for myself and my brethren, I accept the rebuke. There is not
   such a difference as there ought to be. But do you know why? Not
   because our great Gardener cannot change the nature of the plant, but
   because we do not submit ourselves to His power as we ought to do.
   Debit us with as many imperfections and inconsistencies as you like, do
   not lay them to the charge of Christ.

   And yet we are willing to accept the test of Christianity which lies in
   its power to change men. I point to the persecutor on the road to
   Damascus. I point to the Bedfordshire tinker, to him that wrote
   Pilgrim's Progress. I point to the history of the Christian Church all
   down through the ages. I point to our mission fields to-day. I point to
   every mission hall, where earnest, honest men are working, and where,
   if you go and ask them, they will let you see people lifted from the
   very depths of degradation and sin, and made honest, sober,
   respectable, hard-working, though not very intelligent or refined,
   Christian people. I suppose that there is no man in an official
   position like mine who cannot look back over his ministry and remember,
   some of them dozens, some of them scores, some of them hundreds, of
   cases in which the change was made on the most hopeless people, by the
   simple acceptance of the simple gospel, Christ died for me, and Christ
   lives in me.' I know that I can recall such, and I am sure that my
   brethren can.

   People who are not Christians talk glibly about the failure of
   Christianity to transform men. They have never seen the transformations
   because they have never put themselves in the way of seeing them. They
   are being worked to-day; they might be worked here and now.

   Try the power of the Gospel for yourselves. You cannot make the tree
   good, but you can let Jesus Christ do it. The Ethiopian cannot change
   his skin, nor the leopard his spots, but Jesus can do both. The lion
   shall eat straw like the ox.' It is weary work to be tinkering at your
   acts. Take the comprehensive way, and let Him change your character. I
   believe that in some processes of dyeing, a piece of cloth, prepared
   with a certain liquid, is plunged into a vat full of dye-stuffs of one
   colour, and is taken out tinged of another. The soul, wet with the
   waters of repentance, and plunged into the Fountain opened for sin and
   for uncleanness,' the crimson fountain of the blood of Christ, emerges
   whiter than snow.' Let Him make the tree good and fruit will be good,'
   for if not we shall be hewn down and cast into the fire,' because we
   cannot bear any fruit unto holiness, nor can the end be everlasting
   life.
     __________________________________________________________________

A GREATER THAN JONAS'

   A greater than Jonas is here.'--MATT. xii. 41.

   There never was any man in his right mind, still more of influence on
   his fellows, who made such claims as to himself in such unmistakable
   language as Jesus Christ does. To say such things of oneself as come
   from His lips is a sign of a weak, foolish nature. It is fatal to all
   influence, to all beauty of character. It is not only that He claims
   official attributes as a fanatical or dishonest pretender to
   inspiration may do. He does that, but He does more--He declares Himself
   possessed of virtues which, if a man said he had them, it would be the
   best proof that he did not possess them and did not know himself. I am
   the way and the truth and the life.' I am the light of the world'--a
   greater than the temple,' a greater than Jonah, a greater than
   Solomon,' and then withal I am meek and lowly of heart.' And the world
   believes Him, and says, Yes! it is true.

   These three comparisons of Jesus with Temple, Jonas, and Solomon, carry
   great claims and great lessons. By the first Jesus asserts that He is
   in reality all that the Temple was in shadowy symbol, and sets Himself
   above ritual, sacrifices, and priests. By the second he asserts His
   superiority not only to one prophet but to them all. By the third He
   asserts His superiority to Solomon, whom the Jews reverenced as the
   bright, consummate flower of kinghood.

   Now we may take this comparison as giving us positive thoughts about
   our Lord. The points of comparison may be taken to be three, with Jonah
   as one of an order, with Jonah in his personal character as a servant
   of God, with Jonah as a prophet charged with a special work.

   I. The prophets and the Son.

   The whole prophetic order may fairly be taken as included here. And
   over against all these august and venerable names, the teachers of
   wisdom, the speakers of the oracles of God, this Nazarene peasant
   stands there before Pharisees and Scribes, and asserts His superiority.
   It is either the most insane arrogance of self-assertion, or it is a
   sober truth. If it be true that self-consciousness is ever the disease
   of the soul, and that the religious teacher who begins to think of
   himself is lost, how marvellous is this assertion!

   Compare it with Paul's, Unto me who am less than the least of all
   saints'--I am not a whit behind the chief of the Apostles'--though I be
   nothing'--Not I, but Christ in me.' And yet this is meekness, for it is
   infinite condescension in Him to compare Himself with any son of man.

   (a) The contrast is suggested between the prophets and the theme of the
   prophets.

   The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.' Though undoubtedly
   the prophet order had other work than prediction to do, yet the soul of
   their whole work was the announcement of the Messiah.

   In testimony whereof, Elijah, who was traditionally the chief of the
   prophets, stood beside Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, and
   passed away as lost in His light.

   (b) The contrast is suggested between the recipients of the word of God
   and the Word of God.

   The relation of the prophets to their message is contrasted with His
   who was the Truth, who not merely received, but was, the Word of God.

   There is nothing in Christ's teaching to show that He was conscious of
   standing in a human relation to the truths which He spoke. His own
   personality is ever present in His teaching instead of being
   suppressed--as in all the prophets. His own personality is His
   teaching, for His revelation is by being as much as by saying.
   Similarly, His miracles are done by His own power.

   (c) The contrast is suggested between the partial teacher of God's Name
   and the complete revealer of it.

   The foundation was laid by the prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the
   chief corner stone (Hebrews i. 1).

   II. The disobedient prophet and the perfect Son.

   Jonah stands as the great example of human weakness in the chosen
   instruments of God's hand.

   Take the story--his shrinking from the message given him. We know not
   why; but perhaps from faint-hearted fear, or from a sense of his
   unworthiness and unfitness for the task. His own words about God as
   long-suffering seem to suggest another reason, that he feared to go
   with a message of judgment which seemed to him so unlikely to be
   executed by the long-suffering God. If so, then what made him recreant
   was not so much fear from personal motives as intellectual perplexity
   and imperfect comprehension of the ways of God. Then we hear of his
   pitiable flight with its absurdity and its wickedness. Then comes the
   prayer which shows him to have been right and true at bottom, and
   teaches us that what makes a good man is not the absence of faults, but
   the presence of love and longing after God. Then we see the boldness of
   his mission. Then follows the reaction from that lofty height, the
   petulance or whatever else it was with which he sees the city spared.
   Even the mildest interpretation cannot acquit him of much disregard for
   the poor souls whom he had brought to repentance, and of dreadful
   carelessness for the life and happiness of his fellows.

   Now Jonah's behaviour is but a specimen of the vacillations, the
   alternations of feeling which beset every man; the loftiest, the
   truest, the best. Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, John the Baptist,
   Peter, Luther, Cranmer. And it is full of instruction for us.

   Then we turn to the contrast in Christ's perfect obedience and
   faithfulness in His prophetic office. In Him is no trace of shrinking
   even when the grimness of the Cross weighed most on His heart. No
   confusion of mind as to the Father's will, or as to the union in Him of
   perfect righteousness and infinite mercy, ever darkened His clear
   utterances or cast a shadow over his own soul. He was never weakened by
   the collapse that follows on great effort or strong emotion. He never
   failed in his mission through lack of pity.

   But there is no need to draw out the comparison. We look on all God's
   instruments, and see them all full of faults and flaws. Here is one
   stainless name, one life in which is no blot, one heart in which are no
   envy, no failings--one obedience which never varied. He says of
   Himself, I do always those things which please Him,' and we, thinking
   of all the noblest examples of virtue that the world has ever seen, and
   seeing in them all some speck, turn to this whole and perfect
   chrysolite and say, Yes! a greater than they!'

   III. The bearer of a transitory message of repentance to one Gentile
   people, and the bearer of an eternal message of grace and love to the
   whole earth.

   Jonah is remarkable as having had the sphere of his activity wholly
   outside Israel.

   The nature of his message; a preaching of punishment; a call to
   repentance.

   The sphere of it--one Gentile city. The effect of it--transitory. We
   know what Nineveh became.

   Jesus is greater than Jonah or any prophet in this respect, that His
   message is to the world, and in this, that what He preaches and brings
   far transcends even the loftiest and most spiritual words of any of
   them.

   His voice is sweetest, tenderest, clearest and fullest of all that have
   ever sounded in men's ears. And just because it is so, the hearing of
   it brings the most solemn responsibility that was ever laid on men, and
   to us still more gravely and truly may it be said than to those who
   heard Jesus speak on earth, The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment
   with this generation and condemn it.'
     __________________________________________________________________

A GREATER THAN SOLOMON'

   A greater than Solomon is here.'--MATT. xii. 42.

   It is condescension in Him to compare Himself with any; yet if any
   might have been selected, it is that great name. To the Jews Solomon is
   an ideal figure, who appealed so strongly to popular imagination as to
   become the centre of endless legends; whose dominion was the very apex
   of national glory, in recounting whose splendours the historical books
   seem to be scarce able to restrain their triumph and pride.

   I. The Man. The story gives us a richly endowed and many-sided
   character. It begins with lovely, youthful enthusiasm, with a profound
   sense of his own weakness, with earnest longings after wisdom and
   guidance. He lived a pure and beautiful youth, and all his earlier and
   middle life was adorned with various graces. There is a certain
   splendid largeness about the character. He had a rich variety of gifts:
   he was statesman, merchant, sage, physicist, builder, one of the
   many-sided men whom the old world produced. And on this we may build a
   comparison and contrast.

   The completeness of Christ's Humanity transcends all other men, even
   the most various, and transcends all gathered together. Every type of
   excellence is in Him. We cannot say that His character is any one thing
   in special, it falls under no classification. It is a pure white light
   in which all rays are blended. This all-comprehensiveness and symmetry
   of character are remarkably shown in four brief records.

   But we have to take into account the dark shadows that fell on
   Solomon's later years. He clearly fell away from his early consecration
   and noble ideals, and let his sensuous appetites gain power. He
   countenanced, if he did not himself practise, idolatry. As a king he
   became an arbitrary tyrant, and his love of building led him to oppress
   his subjects, and so laid the foundation for the revolt under Jeroboam
   which rent the kingdom. So his history is another illustration of the
   possible shipwreck of a great character. It is one more instance of the
   fall of a son of the morning.' We need not elaborate the contrast with
   Christ's character. In Him is no falling from a high ideal, no fading
   of morning glory into a cloudy noon or a lurid evening. There is no
   black streak in that flawless white marble. Jesus draws the perfect
   circle, like Giotto's O, while all other lives show some faltering of
   hand, and consequent irregularity of outline. Greater than Solomon,
   with his over-clouded glories and his character worsened by
   self-indulgence, is Jesus, the Sun of righteousness,' the perfect round
   of whose lustrous light is broken by no spots on the surface, no
   indentations in the circumference, nor obscured by any clouds over its
   face.

   II. The Teacher.

   Solomon was traditionally regarded as the author of much of the Book of
   Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes was written as by him. Possibly the
   attribution to him of some share in the former book may be correct, but
   at any rate, his wisdom was said to have drawn the Queen of Sheba to
   hear him, and that is the point of the comparison of our text.

   If we take these two books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes into account,
   as popularly attributed to him, they suggest points of comparison and
   contrast with Jesus as a teacher, which we may briefly point out. Now,
   Proverbs falls into two very distinct portions, the former part being a
   connected fatherly admonition to the pursuit of wisdom, and the latter
   a collection of prudential maxims, in which it is rare for any two
   contiguous verses to have anything to do with each other. In the former
   part Wisdom is set forth as man's chief good, and the Wisdom which is
   so set forth is mainly moral wisdom, the right disposition of will and
   heart, and almost identical with what the Old Testament elsewhere calls
   righteousness. But it is invested, as the writer proceeds, with more
   and more august and queenly attributes, and at last stands forth as
   being, if not a divine person, at least a personification of a divine
   attribute.

   Bring that ancient teaching and set it side by side with Jesus, and
   what can we say but that He is what the old writer, be he Solomon or
   another, dimly saw? He is the wisdom' which was traditionally called
   the wisdom of Solomon,' and which the Queen came from far to hear.
   Jesus is greater, as the light is more than the eye, or as the theme is
   more than the speaker. The power of God and the wisdom of God' is
   greater than the sage or seer who celebrates it. What is true of
   Solomon or whoever wrote that praise of Wisdom, is true of all teachers
   and wise men, they are not that light,' they are sent to bear witness
   of that light.' Jesus is Wisdom, other men are wise. Jesus is the
   greatest teacher, for He teaches us Himself. He is lesson as well as
   teacher. Unless He was a great deal more than Teacher, He could not be
   the perfect Teacher for whom the world groans.

   The second half of Proverbs is, as I have said, mostly a collection of
   prudential and moral maxims, with very little reference to God or high
   ideals of duty in them. They may represent to us the impotence of wise
   saws to get themselves practised. A guide-post is not a guide. It
   stretches out its gaunt wooden arms towards the city, but it cannot
   bend them to help a lame man lying at its foot. Men do not go wrong for
   lack of knowing the road, nearly so often as for lack of inclination to
   walk in it. We have abundant voices to tell us what we ought to do. But
   what we want is the swaying of inclination to do it, and the gift of
   power to do it. And it is precisely because Jesus gives us both these
   that He is what no collection of the wisest sayings can ever be, the
   efficient teacher of all righteousness, and of the true wisdom which is
   the principal thing.'

   As for Ecclesiastes, though not his, it represents not untruly the tone
   which we may suppose to have characterised his later days in its
   dwelling on the vanity of life. The sadness of it may be contrasted
   with the light thrown by the Gospel on the darkest problems. Solomon
   cries, All is vanity'--Jesus teaches His scholars to sing, All things
   work together for good.'

   III. The Temple builder.

   In this respect a greater than Solomon is here,' inasmuch as Jesus is
   Himself the true Temple, being for all men, which Solomon's structure
   only shadowed, the meeting-place of God and man, in whom God dwells and
   through whom we can draw near to Him, the place where the true
   Sacrifice is once for all offered, by which Sacrifice sin is truly put
   away. And, further, Jesus is greater than Solomon in that He is,
   through the ages, building up the great Temple of His Church of
   redeemed men, the eternal temple of which not one stone shall ever be
   taken down.

   IV. The peaceful King.

   There were no wars in Solomon's reign. But a dark shadow brooded over
   it in its later years, which were darkened by oppression, luxury, and
   incipient revolt.

   Contrast with that merely external and sadly imperfect peacefulness,
   the deep, inward peace of spirit which Jesus breathes into every man
   who trusts and obeys Him, and with the peace among men which the
   acceptance of His rule brings, and will one day bring perfectly, to a
   regenerated humanity dwelling on a renewed earth. He is King of
   righteousness, and after that also King of peace.

   Surely from all these contrasts it is plain that a greater than Solomon
   is here.'
     __________________________________________________________________

FOUR SOWINGS AND ONE RIPENING

   The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by the sea side. 2.
   And great multitudes were gathered together unto Him, so that He went
   into a ship, and sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. 8.
   And He spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower
   went forth to sow; 4. And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way
   side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: 6. Some fell upon stony
   places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up,
   because they had no deepness of earth: 6. And when the sun was up, they
   were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. 7. And
   some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: 8.
   But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an
   hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. 9. Who hath ears to hear,
   let him hear.'--MATT. xiii. 1-9.

   The seven parables of the kingdom, in this chapter, are not to be
   regarded as grouped together by Matthew. They were spoken
   consecutively, as is obvious from the notes of time in verses 36 and
   53. They are a great whole, setting forth the mystery of the kingdom'
   in its method of establishment, its corruption, its outward and inward
   growth, the conditions of entrance into it, and its final purification.
   The sacred number seven, impressed upon them, is the token of
   completeness. They fall into two parts: four of them being spoken to
   the multitudes from the boat, and presenting the more obvious aspects
   of the development of the kingdom; three being addressed to the
   disciples in the house, and setting forth truths about it more fitted
   for them.

   The first parable, which concerns us now, has been generally called the
   Parable of the Sower, but he is not the prominent figure. The subject
   is much rather the soils; and the intention is, not so much to declare
   anything about him, as to explain to the people, who were looking for
   the kingdom to be set up by outward means, irrespective of men's
   dispositions, that the way of establishing it was by teaching which
   needed receptive spirits. The parable is both history and prophecy. It
   tells Christ's own experience, and it foretells His servants'. He is
   the great Sower, who has come forth' from the Father. His present
   errand is not to burn up thorns or to punish the husbandmen, but to
   scatter on all hearts the living seed, which is here interpreted, in
   accordance with the dominant idea of this Gospel, as being the word of
   the kingdom' (ver. 19). All who follow Him, and make His truth known,
   are sowers in their turn, and have to look for the same issue of their
   work. The figure is common to all languages. Truth, whether
   intellectual, moral, or spiritual, is seminal, and, deposited in the
   heart, understanding, or conscience, grows. It has a mysterious
   vitality, and its issue is not a manufacture, but a fruit. If all
   teachers, especially religious teachers, would remember that, perhaps
   there would be fewer failures, and a good deal of their work would be
   modified. We have here four sowings and one ripening--a sad proportion!
   We are not told that the quantity of seed was in each case the same.
   Rather we may suppose that much less fell on the wayside, and on the
   rocky soil, and among the thorns, than on the good ground. So we cannot
   say that seventy-five per cent, of it was wasted; but, in any case, the
   proportion of failure is tragically large. This Sower was under no
   illusion as to the result of His work.

   It is folly to sow on the hard footpath, or the rocky ground, or among
   thorns; but Christ and His servants have to do that, in endless hope
   that these unreceptive hearts may become good soil. One lesson of the
   parable is, Scatter the seed everywhere, on the most unlikely places.

   I. Our Lord begins with the case in which the seed remains quite
   outside the soil, or, without metaphor, in which the word finds
   absolutely no entrance into the heart or mind. A beaten path runs by
   the end, or perhaps through the middle, of the cornfield. It is of
   exactly the same soil as the rest, but many passengers have trodden it
   hard, and the very foot of the sower, as he comes and goes in his work,
   has helped. Some of the seed, sown broadcast, of course falls there,
   and lies where it falls, having no power to penetrate the hard surface.
   As in our own English cornfields, a flock of bold, hungry birds watch
   the sower; and, as soon as his back is turned, they are down with a
   swift-winged swoop, and away goes the exposed grain. So there is an end
   of it; and the path is as bare as ever, five minutes after it has been
   strewed with seeds.

   The explanation is too plain to be mistaken, but we may briefly touch
   its main features. Notice, then, that our Lord begins with the case in
   which there is least contact between His word and the soul, and that,
   as the contact is least in degree, so it is shortest in duration. A
   minute or two finishes it. Notice especially that the path has been
   made hard by external pressure. It is not rock, but soil like the other
   parts of the field. It represents the case of men whose insensibility
   to the word is caused by outward things having made a thoroughfare of
   their natures, and trodden them into incapacity to receive the message
   of Christ's love. The heavy baggage-wagons of commerce, the light cars
   of pleasure, merry dancers, and sad funeral processions, have all used
   that way, and each footfall has beaten the once loose soil a little
   firmer. We are made insensitive to the gospel by the effect of innocent
   and necessary things, unless we take care to plough up the path along
   which they travel, and to keep our spirits susceptible by a distinct
   effort. How many hearers of every teacher are there, who never take in
   his words at all, simply because they are so completely preoccupied!

   Notice what becomes of the seed that lies thus bare. Immediately,' says
   Mark, Satan cometh.' His agents are these light-winged thoughts that
   flutter round the hearer as soon as the sermon or the lesson is over.
   Talk of the weather, criticism of the congregation, or of the sower's
   attitude as he flung the seed, or politics, or business, drive away the
   remembrance of even the text, before many of our hearers are out of
   sight of the church. Then the whirl of traffic begins again, and the
   path is soon beaten a little harder. If the seed had got ever so little
   way into the ground, the sharp beaks of the thieves would not have
   carried it off so easily. Impressions so slight as Christ's word makes
   on busy men are quickly rubbed out. But if the seed sown vanishes thus
   swiftly, the fault is not in it, but in ourselves. Satan may seek to
   snatch it away, but we can hinder him.

   Our Lord uses a singular expression, This is he that was sown by the
   way side,' which appears to identify the man with the seed rather than
   with the soil. It has been suggested by some commentators that this
   expression is to be regarded as conveying the truth that the seed sown
   in the heart and growing up there becomes the life-spring of the
   individual, and that therefore we may speak of him or of it as bearing
   the fruit. But this explanation will not avail for the case where there
   is no entrance of the word into the heart, and so no new birth by the
   word. More probably we are to regard the expression simply as a
   conversational shorthand form of speech, not strictly accurate, but
   quite intelligible.

   II. The next variety of soil differs from the preceding in having its
   hindrance deep seated. Many a hillside in Galilee--as in Scotland or
   New England--would show a thin surface of soil over rock, like skin
   stretched tightly on a bone. No roots could get through the rock nor
   find nourishment in it; while the very shallowness of earth and the
   heat of the underlying stone would accelerate growth. Such premature
   and feeble shoots perish as quickly as they spring up; the fierce
   Eastern sun makes a speedy end of them, and a few days sees their
   springing and withering. It is a case of lightly come, lightly go.'
   Quick-sprouting herbs are soon-dying herbs. A shallow pond is up in
   waves under a breeze which raises no sea on the Atlantic, and it is
   calm again in a few minutes. Readily stirred emotion is transient.
   Brushwood catches fire easily, and burns itself out quickly. Coal takes
   longer to kindle, and is harder to put out.

   The persons meant are those of excitable temperament, whose feelings
   lie on the surface, and can be got at without first passing through the
   understanding or the conscience. Such people are easily played on by
   the epidemic influence of any prevalent enthusiasm or emotion, as every
   revival of religion shows. Their very joy' in hearing the word is
   suspicious; for a true reception of it seldom begins with joy, but
   rather with the sorrow which worketh repentance not to be repented of.'
   Their immediate reception of it is suspicious, for it suggests that
   there has been no time to consult the understanding or to form a
   deliberate purpose; stable resolutions are slowly formed. It is the
   sunny side of religion which, has attracted them. They know nothing of
   its difficulties and depths. Hence, as soon as they find out the
   realities of the course which they have embraced so lightly, they
   desert, like John Mark running away as soon as home comforts at Cyprus
   were left behind. The Christian life means self-denial, toil, hard
   resistance to many fascinations. It means sweat and blood, or it means
   nothing. Whether there be persecution' or no, there will be affliction,
   because of the word,' and all the joyful emotion will ooze out at the
   man's finger-ends. The same superficial excitability which determined
   his swift reception of the word will determine his hasty casting of it
   aside, and immediately he stumbles. All his acts will be done in a
   hurry, and none of his moods will last. Feeling is in its place down in
   the engine-room, but it makes a poor pilot. Very significant is that
   phrase, No root in himself.' His roots are in the accidents of the
   moment. His religion has never really struck root in him, but only in
   the superficial layer of him. His conscience, will, understanding, are
   unpenetrated by its fibres. So it is easily pulled up, as well as soon
   withered.

   There is another profound truth in this picture. The hard, impenetrable
   rock lies right under the thin skin of soil. The nature which is
   over-emotional on its surface is utterly hard at its core. The most
   heartless people are those whose feelings are always ready to gush; the
   most unimpressible are those who are most easily brought to a certain
   degree of emotion by the sound of the word. This class is an advance on
   the former, in that there has been a real contact with the word, which
   has lain longer in their hearts, and has had some growth. We may regard
   it as either better or worse than the former, according as we consider
   that it is better to accept and feel than not to accept at all, or that
   it is worse to have in some measure possessed and felt than not to have
   received the word of the kingdom.

   III. In one part of the field was a patch where the soil was neither
   rammed solid, as on the footpath, nor thin, as where the rock cropped
   out, but where there had been a tangle of thorns, which grow
   luxuriantly in Palestine. These had been cut down, but not stubbed up,
   as is plain from the very fact that the seed reached the ground, as
   also from the description of them as springing up.' The two growths
   advance together. In this case, the seed has a longer life than in the
   former. It roots and grows, and even, according to the other
   evangelist's version, fruits, though it does not mature its fruit.
   There is no question of falling away' here. Only the hardier growth,
   which had the advantage of previous possession, and which pushes up its
   shoots above ground all round the more tender plant, gets the start of
   it, and smothers its green blades, overtopping it, and keeping it from
   sun and air, as well as drawing to itself the nourishment from the
   soil. The main point here is simultaneousness of the two growths. This
   man is, as James calls him, a double-minded man.' He is trying to grow
   both corn and thorn on the same soil. He has some religion, but not
   enough to make thorough work of it. He is endeavouring to ride on two
   horses at once. Religion says either--or'; he is trying both--and.' The
   human heart has only a limited amount of love and trust to give, and
   Christ must have it all. It has enough for one--that is, for Him; but
   not enough for two,--that is, for Him and the world. This man's
   religion has not been powerful enough to grub up the roots of the
   thorns. They were cut down when the seed was sown, for a little while,
   at the beginning of his course; the new life in him seemed to conquer,
   but the roots of the old lay hid, and, in due time, showed again above
   ground. Ill weeds grow apace'; and these, as is their nature, grow
   faster than the good seed. So the only thing to do is to get them out
   of the ground to the last fibre.

   Christ specifies what He deems thorns. We can all understand care being
   so called; but riches? Yes, they too have sharp prickles, as anybody
   will find who stuffs a pillow with them. But our Lord chooses His words
   to point the lesson that not outward things, but our attitude to them,
   make the barrenness of this soil. It is not this world,' but the care
   of this world,' not riches,' but the deceitfulness of riches,' that
   choke the word. These two seem opposites, but they are really the same
   thing on two opposite sides. The man who is burdened with the cares of
   poverty, and the man who is deceived by the false promises of wealth,
   are really the same man. The one is the other turned inside out. We
   make the world our god, whether we worship it by saying, I am desolate
   without thee,' or by fancying that we are secure with it. Note that the
   issue in this case is--unfruitfulness. The man may, and I suppose
   usually does, keep up a profession of Christianity all his life. He
   very likely does not know that the seed is choked, and that he has
   become unfruitful. But he is a stunted, useless Christian, with all the
   sap and nourishment of his soul given to his worldly position, and his
   religion is a poor pining growth, with blanched leaves and abortive
   fruit. How much of Christ's field is filled with plants of that sort!

   IV. The parable tells us nothing about the comparative acreage of the
   path and the rocky and thorny soils on the one hand, and of the fertile
   soil on the other. It is not meant to teach the proportion of success
   to failure, but to exhibit the fact that the reception of the word
   depends on men's dispositions. The good soil has none of the faults of
   the rest of the field. It is loose, and thus unlike the path; deep, and
   thus unlike the rocky bit; clean, and thus unlike the thorn brake. The
   interpretation given of it by our Lord seems at first sight incomplete.
   It is all summed up in one word, understandeth.' Then, did not the
   second and third classes, at all events, understand? They received the
   word, and it had some growth in them. The distinction between them and
   the good-soil hearer is surely of a moral nature, rather than of so
   purely intellectual a kind as understanding' suggests. Hence, Luke's
   keep fast in an honest and good heart' may seem a more adequate
   statement. But Biblical usage does not regard understanding' as a
   purely intellectual process, but rather as the action of the whole
   moral and spiritual nature. It knows nothing of dividing a man up into
   water-tight compartments, one of which may be full of evil, and the
   other clean and receptive of good. According to it, we understand'
   religious truth by our hearts and moral nature in conjunction with the
   dry light of intellect. So the word here is used in a pregnant sense,
   and includes the grasp of the truth with the whole being, the complete
   reception of the word of the kingdom not merely into the intellect, but
   into the central self which is the undivided fountain from which flow
   the issues of life, whether these be called intellect, or affection, or
   conscience, or will. Only he who has thus become one with the word, and
   housed it deep in his inmost soul, understands' it, in the sense in
   which our Lord here uses that expression. Thy word have I hid in mine
   heart' exactly corresponds to the understanding' which is here given as
   the distinctive mark of the good soil.

   The result of that reception into the depths of the spirit is that he
   verily beareth fruit.' The man who receives the word is identified with
   the plant that springs from the seed which he receives. The life of a
   Christian is the result of the growth in him of a supernatural seed. He
   bears fruit, yet the fruit comes not from him, but from the seed sown.
   I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' Fruitfulness is the aim of
   the sower, and the test of the reception of the seed. If there is not
   fruit, manifestly there has been no real understanding of the word. A
   touchstone, that, which will produce surprising results in detecting
   spurious Christianity, if it be honestly applied!

   There is variety in the degree of fruitfulness, according to the
   goodness of the soil; that is to say, according to the thoroughness and
   depth of the reception of the word. The great Husbandman does not
   demand uniform fertility. He is glad when He gets an hundredfold, but
   He accepts sixty, and does not refuse thirty, only He arranges them in
   descending order, as if He would fain have the highest rate from all
   the plants, and, not without disappointment, gradually stretches His
   merciful allowance to take in even the lowest. He will accept the
   scantiest fruitage, and will lovingly purge' the branch that it may
   bring forth more fruit.'

   No parable teaches everything. Paths, rocks, and thorns cannot change.
   But men can plough up the trodden ways, and blast away the rock, and
   root out the thorns, and, with God's help, can open the door of their
   hearts, that the Sower and His seed may enter in. We are responsible
   for the nature of the soil, else His warning were vain, Take heed,
   therefore, how ye hear.'
     __________________________________________________________________

EARS AND NO EARS

   Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.--MATT. xiii. 8.

   This saying was frequently on our Lord's lips, and that in very various
   connections. He sometimes, as in the instance before us, appended it to
   teaching which, from its parabolic form, required attention to
   disentangle the spiritual truth implied. He sometimes used it to
   commend some strange, new revolutionary teaching to men's
   investigation--as, for instance, after that great declaration of the
   nullity of ceremonial worship, how that nothing could defile a man
   except what came from his heart. In other connections, which I need not
   now enumerate, we find it. Like printing a sentence in italics, or
   underscoring it, this saying calls special attention to the thing
   uttered. It is interesting to notice that our Lord, like the rest of
   us, had to use such means of riveting and sharpening the attention of
   His hearers. There is also a striking reappearance of the expression in
   the last book of Scripture. The Christ who speaks to the seven
   churches, from the heavens, repeats His old word spoken on earth, and
   at the end of each of the letters says once more, as if even the Voice
   that spoke from heaven might be listened to listlessly, He that hath an
   ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.'

   I. We all have ears.

   Now, it is a very singular instance of the superficial, indolent way in
   which people are led away by sound rather than by sense, that this
   saying of my text has often been taken to mean that there is a certain
   class that can listen, and that it is their business to listen, and
   there is another class that cannot, and so they are absorbed from all
   responsibility. The opposite conclusion is the correct one. Everybody
   has ears, therefore everybody is bound to hear. Which being translated,
   is that there is not a man or woman among us that has not the capacity
   of hearing in the sense of understanding, and of hearing in the sense
   of obeying the word that Jesus Christ speaks to us all. Every one of
   us, whatever may be our diversities of education, temperament, natural
   capacity in regard to other subjects of study and apprehension, has the
   ears that are capable of receiving the message that comes to us all in
   Jesus Christ.

   For what is it that He addresses? Universal human nature, the universal
   human wants, and mainly and primarily, as I believe, the sense of sin
   which lies dormant indeed, but capable of being awakened, in all men,
   because the fact of sin attaches to all men. There is no man but has
   the needs to which Christ addresses Himself, and no man but has the
   power of apprehending, of accepting, and of living by, the great
   Incarnate Word and His message to the world. So that instead of there
   being a restriction implied in the words before us, there is the
   broadest implication of the universality of Christ's message. And just
   as every man comes into the world with a pair of ears on his head, so
   every man comes into the world with the capacity of listening to, and
   accepting, that gracious Lord. That is the first thing that our Master
   distinctly declares here, that we all have ears.

   II. If we have ears we are bound to use them.

   Let him hear.' In all regions, as I need not remind you, capacity and
   responsibility go together; and the power that we possess is the
   measure of the obligation under which we come. All our natural
   faculties, for instance, are given to us with the implied command, See
   that you make the best use of them.' So that even these bodily organs
   of ours, much more the higher faculties and capacities of the spirit of
   which the body is partly the symbol and partly the instrument, are
   intrusted to us on terms of stewardship. And just as it is criminal for
   a man to go through life with a pair of ears on his head, and a pair of
   eyes in his forehead, neither of which he educates and cultivates, so
   is it criminal for a man having the capacity of grasping the great
   Revelation of God, who at sundry times and in divers manners hath
   spoken unto the Fathers by the prophets, but in these last days hath
   spoken unto us by the Son,' to turn away from that Voice, and pay no
   heed to it.

   It is universally true that obligation goes with capacity. It is
   especially true with regard to our relation to Jesus Christ. We are all
   bound to hear Him,' as the great Voice said on the Mount of
   Transfiguration. The upshot of all that manifestation of the divine
   glory welling up from the depths of Christ's nature, and transfiguring
   His countenance, the upshot of all that solemn and mysterious communion
   with the mighty dead, Moses and Elias, the end of all that encompassing
   glory that wrapped Him, was the Voice from Heaven which proclaimed,
   This is My beloved Son; hear ye Him.' Moses with his Law, Elijah with
   his Prophecy, faded away and were lost. But there stood forth singly
   the one Figure, relieved against the background of the glory-cloud, the
   Christ to whom we are all bound to turn with the vision of longing
   eyes, with the listening of docile ears, with the aspiration of
   yearning affection, with the submission of absolute obedience.

   Hear ye Him.' For just as truly as light is meant for the eye, so truly
   are the words of the Incarnate Word, and the life which is speech and
   revelation, meant to be the supreme objects of our attention, of our
   contemplative regard, and of our practical submission. We are bound to
   hear because we have ears; and of all the voices that are candidates
   for our attention, and of all the music that sounds through the
   universe, no voice is so sweet and weighty, no words so fundamental and
   all-powerful, no music so melodious, so deep and thunderous, so
   thrilling and gracious, as are the words of that Word who was made
   flesh and dwelt among us. We are bound to hear, and we hear to most
   profit when it is Him that we hear.

   III. We shall not hear without an effort.

   Christ says in my text, Let him hear,' as if the possession of the ear
   did not necessarily involve that there should be hearing. And so it is;
   Having ears, they hear not,' is a description verified in a great many
   other walks of life than in regard to religious matters. But it is
   verified there in the most conspicuous and in the most tragic fashion.
   I wonder how many of us there are who, though we have heard with the
   hearing of the outward ear, have not heard in the sense of attending,
   have scarcely heard in the sense of apprehending, and have not heard at
   all in the sense of obeying? Friend, what is it that keeps you from
   hearing, if you do not hear? Let me run over two or three of the things
   that thus are like wax in a man's ears, making him deaf to the message
   of life in Jesus Christ, in order to bring out how needful it is that
   these should be counteracted by an effort of will, and the vigorous
   concentration of thought and heart upon that message.

   What is it that keeps men from hearing? Being busy with other things is
   one hindrance. There is an old story of St. Bernard riding along by a
   lake on his way to a Council, and being so occupied with thoughts and
   discussions, that after the day's travel he lifted up his eyes and
   said, Where is the lake?' And so we, many of us, go along all our days
   on the banks of the great sea of divine love, and we are so busy
   thinking about other things, or doing other things, that at the end of
   the journey we do not know that we have been travelling by the side of
   the flashing waters all the day long. Everybody knows how possible it
   is to be so engrossed with one's occupations or thoughts as that when
   the clock strikes in the next steeple, we hear it and do not hear it.
   We have read of soldiers being so completely absorbed in the fury of
   the fight that a thunderstorm has rattled over their heads, and no man
   heard the roll, and no man saw the flash. Many of us are so swallowed
   up in our trade, in our profession, in our special branch of study, in
   our occupations and desires, that all the trumpets of Sinai might be
   blown into our ears, and we should hear them as though we heard them
   not; and what is worse, that the pleading voice of that great Lord who
   is ever saying to each of us, Come unto Me, all ye that labour, and are
   heavy laden, and I will give you rest,' passes us by, and produces no
   effect, any more than does the idle wind whistling through an archway.
   Brethren, you have the need, the sin, the weakness, the transiency, to
   which the Gospel appeals. You have the faculties to which it addresses
   itself. Jesus Christ is speaking to every one of us. I beseech you to
   ask yourselves, Do I hear Him?' If not, is it not because the clatter
   of the world's business, or the more refined sounds of some profession
   or study, have so taken up your attention that you have none to spare
   for that which requires and repays it most?

   Then there is another thing that makes attention, and concentration,
   and a dead lift of resolution necessary, if you are rightly to hear,
   and that is the very fact that, superficially, you have heard all your
   days. You do not know the despair that sometimes comes over men in my
   position when we face our congregations of people that are familiar to
   weariness with everything that we have to say, and because they are
   superficially so familiar with it, fancy that there is no need for them
   to give heed any more. What can a poor man like me do to get through
   that crust of familiarity with the mere surface of Christian truth and
   teaching which is round many of you? You come and listen to me, and
   say, Oh! he has nothing original to say. We have heard it all before.'
   Yes, your ears have heard it. Have you heard? Jesus Christ died for
   me,' you have been told that ever since you were a little child; and so
   the thousand-and-first, the million-and-first, repetition of it has
   little power over you. If once, just once, that truth could get through
   the crust of familiarity, and touch your heart, your bare heart, with
   its quick naked point of fire-shod love, I think there might be a wound
   made that would mean healing. But some of you will go away presently,
   just as you have gone away a thousand times before, and my words will
   rebound from you like an india-rubber ball from a wall, or run off you
   like water from the sea-bird's plumes, just because you think you have
   heard it all before--and you have never heard it all your days. He that
   hath ears to hear, let him hear.'

   Then there is another hindrance. A man may put his fingers in his ears.
   And some of you, I am afraid, are not ignorant of what it is to have
   made distinct and conscious efforts to get rid of the impressions of
   religion, and of Christ's voice to us.

   And then there are some of us who, out of sheer listlessness, do not
   hear. It is not because we are too busy. It is not because we have any
   intellectual objection to the message. It is not because we have made
   any definite effort to get away from it. It is not even because we have
   been so accustomed to hear it, that it is impossible to make an
   impression on our listless indifference. Go down into Morecambe Bay
   when the tide is making; and, as the water is beginning to percolate
   through the sand, try to make an impression with a stick upon the
   tremulous jelly. As soon as you take out the point the impression is
   lost. And there are many of us like that, who, out of sheer stolid
   listlessness, retain no fragment of the truth that is sounding in our
   ears. Dear friends, If the word spoken by angels was steadfast, how
   shall we escape if we'--what? Reject? Deny? Fight against? Angrily
   repel? No;--if we neglect so great salvation?' That is the question for
   you negligent people, for you people who think you know all about it
   and there an end, for you people who are so busy with your daily lives
   that, amidst the hubbub of earth, heaven's silent voice is inaudible to
   your ears. Neglect stops the ears and ruins the man. But you will not
   hear, though you have ears, unless you make an effort of will and
   concentration of attention.

   IV. And now the last thing that I have to say is:--If we do not hear,
   we shall become deaf.

   That is what Christ said in the context. The sentence which I have
   taken as my text was spoken at the close of the Parable of the Sower;
   and when His disciples came and asked Him why He spake in parables, His
   answer was in effect that the people to whom He spoke had not profited
   by what they had heard, hearing, they heard not,' and therefore He
   spoke in parables which veiled as well as revealed the truth. It was
   not given to them to know the mysteries of the Kingdom, because they
   had not given heed to what had been made known to them. The great law
   was taking effect which gives to him that has and takes from him that
   has not; and that law applied not only to the form of Christ's
   teaching, but also to the faculty of receiving it. That diminished
   capacity is sometimes represented as men's own act, and sometimes as
   the divinely inflicted penalty of not hearing, but in either case the
   same fact is in view--namely, the loss of susceptibility by neglect,
   the dying out of faculties by disuse.

   Just as in the bodily life capacities untrained and unexercised become
   faint and disappear; just as the Indian fakir, who holds his arm up
   above his head for years, never using the muscles, has the muscles
   atrophied, and at last cannot bring his arm down to his side;--so the
   people who neglect to use the ears that God has given them by degrees
   will lose the capacity of hearing at all. Which, being put into plain
   English, just comes to this: that if we do not listen to Jesus Christ
   when He calls to us in His love, we shall gradually have the capacity
   of hearing diminished until--I do not know if it ever reaches that
   point here--until its ultimate extinction.

   Dear friends, this word of the love and pity and pardon and purifying
   power of God manifest in Jesus Christ for us all, which I am trying to
   preach to you now, is not without an effect even on the men by whom it
   is most superficially and perfunctorily heard. It either softens or
   hardens. As the old mystics used to say, the same heat that melts wax
   hardens clay into brick. The same light that brings blessing to one eye
   brings pain to another. You have heard, and hearing you have not heard;
   and you will cease to be able to hear at all; and then the thunders may
   rattle over your heads, and be inaudible to you; and that Voice which
   is as loud as the sound of many waters, and sweet as harpers harping on
   their harps, and which says to each of us, Come to Me, and I will be
   thy peace and thy rest and thy strength,' will no more be audible in
   your atrophied ears. Dear friends! I do not know, as I have said,
   whether that ultimate tragic result is ever wholly reached in this
   world. I am sure that it is not reached with some of you as yet. And I
   beseech you to obey that voice which says, This is My beloved Son; hear
   Him,' and to let there not be only outward hearing, but to let there be
   inward acceptance, attention, apprehension, and obedience. And then we
   shall be able to say, Blessed are our ears, for they hear; blessed are
   our eyes, for they see.' Many prophets and righteous men desired to
   hear the things that ye hear, and heard them not, take care that, since
   you are thus advanced in the outward possession of the perfect word of
   God, there be also the yielding to, and reception of it.
     __________________________________________________________________

TO HIM THAT HATH SHALL BE GIVEN'

   Whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more
   abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even
   that he hath.'-- MATT. xiii. 12.

   There are several instances in the Gospels of our Lord's repetition of
   sayings which seem to have been, if we may use the expression,
   favourites with Him; as, for instance, There are first which shall be
   last, and there are last which shall be first'; or, again, The servant
   is not greater than his master, nor the disciple than his lord.' My
   text is one of these. It is here said as part of the explanation why He
   chose to speak in parables, in order that the truth, revealed to the
   diligent and attentive, might be hidden from the careless. Again, we
   find it in two other Gospels, in a somewhat similar connection, though
   with a different application, where Jesus enunciates it as the basis of
   His warning, Take heed how'--or, in another version, what'--ye hear.'
   Again He employs it in this Gospel in the parable of the talents, as
   explaining the principle on which the retribution to the slothful
   servant was meted out. And we find it yet once more in the parable of
   the pounds in Luke's Gospel, which, though entirely different in
   conception and purpose from that of the talents, is identical in the
   portion connected with the slothful servant.

   So there are two very distinct directions in which this saying looks,
   as it was used by our Lord--one in reference to the attitude of men
   towards the Revelation of God, and one in reference to the solemn
   subject of future retribution. I wish, now, mainly to try and
   illustrate the great law which is set forth here, and to follow out the
   various spheres of its operation, and estimate the force of its
   influence. For I think that large and very needful lessons for us all
   may be drawn therefrom. The principle of my text shapes all life. It is
   a paradox, but it is a deep truth. It sounds harsh and unjust, but it
   contains the very essence of righteous retribution. The paradox is
   meant to spur attention, curiosity, and inquiry. The key to it lies
   here--to use is to have. There is a possession which is no possession.
   That I have rights of property in a thing, as contradistinguished to
   your rights, does not make it in any deep and real sense mine. What I
   use I have; and all else is, as one of the other evangelists has it,
   but seeming' to have.

   So much, then, by way of explanation of our text. Now, let me ask you
   to look with me into two or three of the regions where we shall find
   illustrations of its working.

   I. Take the application of this principle to common life.

   The lowest instance is in regard to material possessions. It is a
   complaint that is made against the present social arrangements and
   distribution of wealth, that money makes money; that wealth has a
   tendency to clot; the rich man to get richer, and the poor man to get
   poorer. Just as in a basin of water when the plug is out, and circular
   motion is set up, the little bits of foreign matter that may be there
   all tend to get together, so it is in regard to these external
   possessions. To him that hath shall be given'; and people grumble about
   that and say, It never rains but it pours, and the man that needs more
   money least gets it most easily.' Of course. Treasure used grows;
   treasure hoarded rusts and dwindles. The millionaire will double his
   fortune by a successful speculation. The man with half a dozen large
   shops drives the poor little tradesman out of the field. So it is all
   round: To him that hath shall be given; but from him that hath not
   shall be taken even that he hath.'

   Next, go a step higher. Look at how this law works in regard to powers
   of body. That is a threadbare old illustration. The blacksmith's arm we
   have all heard about; the sailor's eye, the pianist's wrist, the
   juggler's fingers, the surgeon's deft hand--all these come by use. To
   him that hath shall be given.' And the same man who has cultivated one
   set of organs to an almost miraculous fineness or delicacy or strength
   will, by the operation of the other half of the same principle, have
   all but atrophied another set. So with the blacksmith's arm, which has
   grown muscular at the expense of his legs. Part of the physical frame
   has monopolised what might have been distributed throughout the whole.
   Use is strength; use makes growth. We have what we employ. And even in
   regard to our bodily frame the organs that we do not use we carry about
   with us rather as a weight attached to us than as a possession.

   Again, come a little higher. This great principle largely goes to
   determine our position in the world and our work. The man that can do a
   thing gets it to do. In the long run the tools come to the hand that
   can use them. So here is one medical man's consulting-room crammed full
   of patients, and his neighbour next door has scarcely one. The whole
   world runs to read A's, B's, or C's books. The briefless barrister
   complains that there is no middle course between having nothing to do
   and being overwhelmed with briefs. To him that hath shall be
   given'--the man can do a thing, and he gets it to do--and from him that
   hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath,' That law largely
   settles every man's place in the world.

   Let us come still higher. The same law has much--not all, but much--to
   do in making men's characters. For it operates in its most intense
   fashion, and with results most blessed or most disastrous, in the inner
   life. The great example that I would adduce is conscience. Use it, obey
   it, listen for its voice, never thwart it, and it grows and grows and
   grows, and becomes more and more sensitive, more and more educated,
   more and more sovereign in its decisions. Neglect it, still more, go in
   its teeth, and it dwindles and dwindles and dwindles; and I suppose it
   is possible--though one would fain hope that it is a very exceptional
   case--for a man, by long-continued indifference to the voice within
   that says Thou shalt' or Thou shalt not,' to come at last to never
   hearing it at all, or to its never speaking at all. It is seared as
   with a hot iron,' says one of the Apostles; and in seared flesh there
   is no feeling any more. Are any of you, dear friends, bringing about
   such a state? Are you doing what you know you ought not to do? Then you
   will be less and less troubled as the days go on; and, by neglecting
   the voice, you will come at last to be like the profligate woman in the
   book of Proverbs, who, after her sin, wipes her mouth and says, I have
   done no harm.' Do you think that is a desirable state--to put out the
   eyes of your soul, to stifle what is the truest echo of God's voice
   that you will ever hear? Do you not think that it would be wiser to get
   the blessed half of this law on your side, instead of the dreadful one?
   Listen to that voice. Never, as you value yourselves, neglect it.
   Cultivate the habit of waiting for its monitions, its counsels
   prohibitory or commendatory, and then you will have done much to secure
   that your spirit shall be enriched by the operations of this
   wide-spread law.

   Take another illustration. People who, by circumstances, are placed in
   some position of dependence and subordination, where they have seldom
   to exercise the initiative of choice, but just to do what they are bid,
   by degrees all but lose the power of making up their minds about
   anything. And so a slave set free is proverbially a helpless creature,
   like a bit of driftwood; and children who have been too long kept in a
   position of pupilage and subordination, when they are sent into the
   world are apt to turn out very feeble men, for want of a good, strong
   backbone of will in them. So, many a woman that has been accustomed to
   leave everything in her husband's hands, when the clods fall on his
   coffin finds herself utterly helpless and bewildered, just because in
   the long, happy years she never found it necessary to exercise her own
   judgment or her own will about practical matters.

   So do not get into the habit of letting circumstances settle what you
   are to do, or you will lose the power of dominating them, before very
   long. And if a man for years leaves himself, as it were, to be guided
   by the stream of circumstances, like long green weeds in a river, he
   will lose the power of determining his own fate, and the Will will die
   clean out of him. Cultivate it, and it will grow.

   Again, this same principle largely settles our knowledge, our
   convictions, the operations and the furniture of our understandings. If
   a man holds any truth slackly, or in the case of truths that are meant
   to influence life and conduct, does not let it influence these, then
   that is a kind of having truth that is sure to end in losing it. If you
   want to lose your convictions grasp them loosely--do not act upon them,
   do not take them for guides of your life--and they will soon relieve
   you of their unwelcome presence. If you wish mind and knowledge to
   grow, grip with a grip of iron what you do know, and let it dominate
   you, as it ought. He that truly has his learning will learn more and
   pile by slow degrees stone upon stone, until the building is complete.

   So, dear friends, here, in these illustrations, which might have been
   indefinitely enlarged, we see the working of a principle which has much
   to do in making men what they are. What you use you increase, what you
   leave unused you lose. There are grey heads in my present audience who,
   when they were young men, had dreams and aspirations that they bitterly
   smile at now. There are men here who began life with possibilities that
   have never blossomed or fruited, but have died on the stem. Why?
   Because they were so much occupied with the vulpine craft of making
   their position and their pile' that generous emotions and noble
   sympathies and lofty aspirations, intellectual or otherwise, were all
   neglected, and so they are dead; and the men are the poorer
   incalculably, because of what has thus been shed away from them. You
   make your characters by the parts of yourselves that you choose to
   cultivate and employ. Do you think that God gave us whatever of an
   intellectual and emotional and moral kind is in us, in order that it
   might be all used up in our daily business? A very much scantier outfit
   would have done for all that is wanted for that. But there are abortive
   and dormant organs in your spiritual nature, as there are in the
   corporeal, which tell you what you were meant for, and which it is your
   sin to leave undeveloped. Brethren, the law of my text shapes us in the
   two ways, that whatever we cultivate, be it noble or be it bestial,
   will grow, and whatever we repress or neglect will die. Choose which of
   the two halves of yourselves you will foster, and on which you will
   frown.

   So much, then, for the first general application of these words. Now
   let me turn for a moment to another.

   II. I would note, secondly, the application of this two-fold law in
   regard to God's revelation of Himself.

   That is the bearing of it in the immediate context from which our text
   is taken. Our Lord explains that teaching by parable--a transparent
   veil over a truth--was adopted in order that the veiled truth might be
   a test as well as a revelation. And although I do not believe that the
   Christian revelation has been made in any degree less plain and obvious
   than it could have been made, I cannot but recognise the fact that the
   necessities of the case demand that, when God speaks to us, He should
   speak in such a fashion as that it is possible to say, Tush! It is not
   God that is speaking; it is only Eli!' and so to turn about the young
   Samuel's mistake the other way. I do not believe that God has
   diminished the evidence of His Revelation in order to try us; but I do
   maintain that the Revelation which He has made does come to us, and
   must come to us, in such a form as that, not by mathematical
   demonstration but by moral affinity, we shall be led to recognise and
   to bow to it. He that will be ignorant, let him be ignorant, and he
   that will come asking for truth, it will flood his eyeballs with a
   blessed illumination. The veil will but make more attractive to some
   eyes the outlines of the fair form beneath it, whilst others are
   offended at it and say, Unless we see the truth undraped, we will not
   believe that it is truth at all.'

   So, brethren, let me remind you--what is really but a repetition in
   reference to another subject of what I have already said,--that in
   regard to God's speech to men, and especially in regard to what I, for
   my part, believe to be the complete and ultimate and perfect speech of
   God to men, in Jesus Christ our Saviour, the principle of my text holds
   good.

   To him that hath shall be given.' If you will make that truth your own
   by loyal faith and honest obedience, if you will grapple it to your
   heart, then you will learn more and more. Whatever tiny corner of the
   great whole you have grasped, hold on by that and draw it into
   yourselves, and you will by degrees get the entire, glorious, golden
   web to wrap round you. If any man wills to do His will he shall know.'
   That is Christ's promise; and it will be fulfilled to us all. To him
   that hath shall be given.'

   If, on the other hand, you have' Christian truth and Christ, who is the
   Truth, in the fashion in which so many of us have it and Him, as a
   form, as a mere intellectual possession, so that we can, when we go to
   church, repeat the creed without feeling that we are telling a lie, but
   that when we go to market we do not carry the Commandments with us--if
   that is our Christianity, then it will dribble away into nothing. We
   shall not be much the poorer for the loss of such a sham possession,
   but it will go. It drops out of the hands that are not clasped to hold
   it. It is just that a thing so neglected shall some day be a thing
   withdrawn. So in regard to Revelation and a man's perception and
   reception of it, my text holds good in both its halves.

   III. Lastly, look at the application of these words in the future.

   That is our Lord's own application of them, twice out of the five times
   in which the saying appears in the three Gospels: in the parable of the
   talents and in the parallel portion of the parable of the pounds. I do
   not venture into the regions of speculation about that future, but from
   the words before us there come clearly enough two aspects of it. The
   man with the ten talents received more; the man that had hid the talent
   or the pound in the ground was deprived of that which he had not used.

   Now, with regard to the former there is no difficulty in translating
   the representations of the parables, sustained as they are by distinct
   statements of other portions of Scripture. They come to this, that, for
   the life beyond, indefinite progress in all that is noble and blessed
   and Godlike in heart and character, in intellect and power, are
   certain; that faith, hope, love, here cultivated but putting forth few
   blossoms and small fruitage, there, in that higher house where these be
   planted, will flourish in the courts of the Lord, and will bear fruit
   abundantly; that here the few things faithfully administered will be
   succeeded yonder by the many things royally ruled over; that here one
   small coin, as it were, is put into our palm--namely the present
   blessedness and peace and strength and purity of a Christian life; and
   that yonder we possess the inheritance of which what we have here is
   but the earnest. It used to be the custom when a servant was hired for
   the next term-day to give him one of the smallest coins of the realm as
   what was called arles'--wages in advance, to seal the bargain.
   Similarly, in buying an estate a bit of turf was passed over to the
   purchaser. We get the earnest here of the broad acres of the
   inheritance above. To him that hath shall be given.'

   And the other side of the same principle works in some terrible ways
   that we cannot speak about. From him that hath not shall be taken away
   even that which he hath.' I have spoken of the terrible analogy to this
   solemn prospect which is presented us by the imperfect experiences of
   earth. And when we see in others, or discover in ourselves, how it is
   possible for unused faculties to die entirely out, I think we shall
   feel that there is a solemn background of very awful truth, in the
   representation of what befell the unfaithful servant. Hopes unnourished
   are gone; opportunities unimproved are gone, capacities undeveloped are
   gone; fold after fold, as it were, is peeled off the soul, until there
   is nothing left but the naked self, pauperised and empty-handed for
   evermore. Take it from him'; he never was the better for it; he never
   used it; he shall have it no longer.

   Brethren, cultivate the highest part of yourselves, and see to it that,
   by faith and obedience, you truly have the Saviour, whom you have by
   the hearing of the ear and by outward profession. And then death will
   come to you, as a nurse might to a child that came in from the fields
   with its hands full of worthless weeds and grasses, to empty them in
   order to fill them with the flowers that never fade. You can choose
   whether Death--and Life too, for that matter--shall be the porter that
   will open to you the door of the treasure-house of God, or the robber
   that will strip you of misused opportunities and unused talents.
     __________________________________________________________________

SEEING AND BLIND

   They seeing, see not.'--MATT. xiii. 13.

   This is true about all the senses of the word seeing'; there is not one
   man in ten thousand who sees the things before his eyes. Is not this
   the distinction, for instance, of the poet or painter, and man of
   science--just that they do see? How true is this about the eye of the
   mind, what a small number really understand what they know! But these
   illustrations are of less moment than the saddest example--religious
   indifference. I wish to speak about this now, and to ask you to
   consider-- I. The extent to which it prevails. II. The causes from
   which it springs. III. The fearful contrasts it suggests. IV. The end
   to which it conducts.

   I. The extent to which it prevails.

   I have no hesitation in saying that it is the condition of by far the
   largest proportion of our nation. It is the true enemy of souls. I do
   not believe that any large proportion of Englishmen are actual
   disbelievers, who reject Christianity as unworthy of credence, or
   attach themselves to any of the innumerable varieties of deistical and
   pantheistical schools. I am not saying at present whether it would be a
   more or less hopeful state if it were so, but only that it is not so,
   and that a complacent taking for granted of religious truth, a torpor
   of soul, an entire carelessness about God and Christ, and the whole
   mighty scheme of the Gospel, is the characteristic of many in all
   classes of English society. We have it here in our churches and chapels
   as the first foe we have to fight with. Disbelief slays its thousands,
   and dissipation its tens of thousands, but this sleek, well-to-do
   carelessness, its millions. As some one says, it is as if an opium sky
   had rained down soporifics.

   II. The causes from which it springs.

   Of course, the great cause of this condition is man's evil heart of
   alienation, the spirit of slumber--but we may find proximate and
   special causes.

   There is the indifference springing from the absorbing interests of the
   present. A man has only a certain quantity of interest to put forth. If
   he expends it all on small things, he has none for great. This
   overmastering, overshadowing present draws us all to itself, and we
   have no power of attention or interest to spare for anything else, or
   for reflection upon Christian truth in connection with our own conduct.

   Then there is the indifference caused by fear of what the results of
   attention might be. It is sometimes broken in upon, and men are in
   danger of having their eyes opened, then with an effort they fling
   themselves into some distraction, and sleep again. As the text says,
   Their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes.'

   Then there is the indifference fed by an indolent acquiescence in the
   truth. That is a favourite way of breaking the force of all unwelcome
   moral truth, and especially of the Gospel. A man says, Oh yes, it is
   true,' and because it is, therefore he thinks he has done enough when
   he has acknowledged it. Many do not seem to dream that the Word has any
   personal application to them at all.

   Then there is the indifference which comes from long familiarity with
   the truth. It is this which haunts our congregations and makes it so
   impossible to get at many who know all our message already. You can
   tell them nothing they do not know. As with men who live by a forge,
   the sound of the blow of the hammer only lulls them to sleep. The
   Gospel is so familiar to them that there is no longer any power about
   it. The vulgar emotion of wonder is not excited, and the other of love
   and admiration has not taken its place.

   Men who live in mountain scenery do not know its beauties, and as with
   all other operations of the listless eye so with this, the old is
   deemed to be uninteresting, and the common is the commonplace. As even
   in the piece of earth that you have trodden on longest, you would find
   marvels that you do not dream of if you would look, so here. You have
   heard too much and reflected too little. Oh, brethren, it oppresses a
   man who has to speak to you when he reflects how often you have heard
   it all, how the flow of the river only seems to have worn your souls
   smooth enough to let it glide past without one stoppage.

   III. The contrasts it suggests.

   Contrast the indolence here with the earnestness in life. The same men
   who sit with faces stolid and expressionless over a sermon--meet them
   on Monday morning! They go to sleep at prayer or over a Bible, but see
   them in a bargain or over a ledger. Think of what powers of intense
   love, yea, of almost fearful devotion and energy, lie in us, ay and
   come out of us, and then think how poor, how cold we are here, and we
   may well be ashamed. It is as if a burning mountain with its cataract
   of fire were suddenly quenched and locked in everlasting frost, and all
   the flaming glory running down its heaving sides turned into a slow
   glacier. There comes ice instead of fire, frost instead of flame, snow
   instead of sparks. It is as if some magician waved a wand and stiffened
   men into a paralysis. Religion seems to numb men instead of inspiring
   them. It is an awful thought of how they serve themselves and the
   world, how they can love one another, how they can be stirred to noble
   enthusiasm, and how little of all this ever comes to God.

   Contrast the indifference of the men and the awfulness of the things
   they are indifferent about. God--Christ--their souls--heaven--hell. The
   grandest things men can think about, the mightiest realities in the
   universe, the eternal, the most powerful, these it is which some of
   you, seeing, see not.

   Contrast men's indifference and the earnestness of the rest of the
   creation. God rose early and sent His prophets. He so loved the world
   that He gave His Son. Christ died, lives, works, rules, expects,
   beseeches. Angels desire to look into the wonders that you seeing, see
   not'. What makes heaven fill with rapture, and flash through all her
   golden glories with light, what makes hell look on with the lurid scowl
   of baffled malignity, that is what you are careless about. My friend,
   you and other men like you are the only beings in the universe careless
   about the salvation of your souls.

   IV. The end to which it conducts.

   That end is certain ruin. Ah, dear friends, you do not need to do much
   to ruin your own souls. You have only to continue indifferent and you
   will do it effectually. Negligence is quite enough. Ruin is what it
   will certainly end in.

   And remember that when the possibility of salvation ends, your
   indifference will end too. The poor toad that is fascinated by the
   serpent, and drops powerless into the cruel jaws, wakes from the stupor
   when it feels the pang. And the lifelong torpor will be dissolved for
   you when you pass into another world. What an awful awaking that will
   be when men look back and see by the light of eternity what they were
   doing here! Oh! friends, would to God that any poor word of mine could
   rouse you from this drugged and opiate sleep! Believe me, it is
   merciful violence which would rouse you. Anything rather than that the
   poison should work on till the heavy slumber darkens into death. Let me
   implore you, as you value your own souls, as you would not fling away
   your most precious jewel to awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from
   the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.' Beware of the treacherous
   indifference which creeps on, till, like men in the Arctic regions, the
   sleepers die.
     __________________________________________________________________

MINGLED IN GROWTH, SEPARATED IN MATURITY

   Another parable put He forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven
   is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: 25. But while
   men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his
   way. 26. But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit,
   then appeared the tares also. 27. So the servants of the householder
   came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field?
   from whence then hath it tares? 28. He said unto them, An enemy hath
   done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and
   gather them up? 29. But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the
   tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. 80. Let both grow together
   until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the
   reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles
   to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.' --MATT. xiii. 24-30.

   The first four parables contained in this chapter were spoken to a
   miscellaneous crowd on the beach, the last three to the disciples in
   the house. The difference of audience is accompanied with a diversity
   of subject. The former group deals with the growth of the kingdom, as
   it might be observed by outsiders, and especially with aspects of the
   growth on which the multitude needed instruction; the latter, with
   topics more suited to the inner circle of followers. Of these four, the
   first three are parables of vegetation; the last, of assimilation. The
   first two are still more closely connected, inasmuch as the person of
   the sower is prominent in both, while he is not seen in the others. The
   general scenery is the same in both, but with a difference. The
   identification of the seed sown with the persons receiving it, which
   was hinted at in the first, is predominant in the second. But while the
   former described the various results of the seed, the latter drops out
   of sight the three failures, and follows its fortunes in honest and
   good hearts, showing the growth of the kingdom in the midst of
   antagonistic surroundings. It may conveniently be considered in three
   sections: the first teaching how the work of the sower is
   counter-worked by his enemy; the second, the patience of the sower with
   the thick-springing tares; and the third, the separation at the
   harvest.

   I. The work of the sower counter-worked by his enemy, and the mingled
   crops.

   The peculiar turn of the first sentence, The kingdom of heaven is
   likened unto a man that sowed,' etc., suggests that the main purpose of
   the parable is to teach the conduct of the king in view of the growth
   of the tares. The kingdom is concentrated in Him, and the likening' is
   not effected by the parable, but, as the tenses of both verbs show, by
   the already accomplished fact of His sowing. Our Lord veils His claims
   by speaking of the sower in the third person; but the hearing ear
   cannot fail to catch the implication throughout that He Himself is the
   sower and the Lord of the harvest. The field is his field,' and His own
   interpretation tells us that it means the world.' Whatever view we take
   of the bearing of this parable on purity of communion in the visible
   Church, we should not slur over Christ's own explanation of the field,'
   lest we miss the lesson that He claims the whole world as His, and
   contemplates the sowing of the seed broadcast over it all. The Kingdom
   of Heaven is to be developed on, and to spread through, the whole
   earth. The world belongs to Christ not only when it is filled with the
   kingdom, but before the sowing. The explanation of the good seed takes
   the same point of view as in the former parable. What is sown is the
   word'; what springs from the seed is the new life of the receiver. Men
   become children of the kingdom by taking the Gospel into their hearts,
   and thereby receive a new principle of growth, which in truth becomes
   themselves.

   Side by side with the sower's beneficent work the counter-working of
   his enemy' goes on. As the one, by depositing holy truth in the heart,
   makes men children of the kingdom,' the other, by putting evil
   principles therein, makes men children of evil.' Honest exposition
   cannot eliminate the teaching of a personal antagonist of Christ, nor
   of his continuous agency in the corruption of mankind. It is a glimpse
   into a mysterious region, none the less reliable because so momentary.
   The sulphurous clouds that hide the fire in the crater are blown aside
   for an instant, and we see. Who would doubt the truth and worth of the
   unveiling because it was short and partial? The devil is God's ape.'
   His work is a parody of Christ's. Where the good seed is sown, there
   the evil is scattered thickest. False Christs and false apostles dog
   the true like their shadows. Every truth has its counterfeit. Neither
   institutions, nor principles, nor movements, nor individuals, bear
   unmingled crops of good. Not merely creatural imperfection, but hostile
   adulteration, marks them all. The purest metal oxidises, scum gathers
   on the most limpid water, every ship's bottom gets foul with weeds. The
   history of every reformation is the same: radiant hopes darkened,
   progress retarded, a second generation of dwarfs who are careless or
   unfaithful guardians of their heritage.

   There are, then, two classes of men represented in the parable, and
   these two are distinguishable without doubt by their conduct. Tares are
   said to be quite like wheat until the heads show, and then there is a
   plain difference. So our Lord here teaches that the children of the
   kingdom and those of evil are to be discriminated by their actions. We
   need not do more than point in a sentence to His distinct separation of
   men (where the seed of the kingdom has been sown) into two sets. Jesus
   Christ holds the unfashionable, narrow' opinion that, at bottom, a man
   must either be His friend or His enemy. We are too much inclined to
   weaken the strong line of demarcation, and to think that most men are
   neither black nor white, but grey.

   The question has been eagerly debated whether the tares are bad men in
   the Church, and whether, consequently, the mingled crop is a
   description of the Church only. The following considerations may help
   to an answer. The parable was spoken, not to the disciples, but to the
   crowd. An instruction to them as to Church discipline would have been
   signally out of place; but they needed to be taught that the kingdom
   was to be a rose amidst thorns,' and to grow up among antagonisms which
   it would slowly conquer, by the methods which the next two parables set
   forth. This general conception, and not directions about ecclesiastical
   order, was suited to them. Again, the designation of the tares as the
   children of evil' seems much too wide, if only a particular class of
   evil men--namely, those who are within the Church--are meant by it.
   Surely the expression includes all, both in and outside the Church, who
   do iniquity.' Further, the representation of the children of the
   kingdom, as growing among tares in the field of the world, does not
   seem to contemplate them as constituting a distinct society, whether
   pure or impure; but rather as an indefinite number of individuals,
   intermingled in a common soil with the other class. The kingdom of
   heaven' is not a synonym for the Church. Is it not an anachronism to
   find the Church in the parable at all? No doubt, tares are in the
   Church, and the parable has a bearing on it; but its primary lesson
   seems to me to be much wider, and to reveal rather the conditions of
   the growth of the kingdom in human society.

   II. We have the patience of the husbandman with the quick-springing
   tares.

   The servants of the householder receive no interpretation from our
   Lord. Their question is silently passed by in His explanation. Clearly
   then, for some reason, He did not think it necessary to say any more
   about them; and the most probable reason is, that they and their words
   have no corresponding facts, and are only introduced to lead up to the
   Master's explanation of the mystery of the growth of the tares, and to
   His patience with it. The servants cannot be supposed to represent
   officials in the Church, without hopelessly destroying the consistency
   of the parable; for surely all the children of the kingdom, whatever
   their office, are represented in the crop. Many guesses have been
   made,--apostles, angels, and so on. It is better to say The Lord hath
   not showed it me.'

   The servant's first question expresses, in vivid form, the sad, strange
   fact that, where good was sown, evil springs. The deepest of all
   mysteries is the origin of evil. Explain sin, and you explain
   everything. The question of the servants is the despair of thinkers in
   all ages. Heaven sows only good; where do the misery and the wickedness
   come from? That is a wider and sadder question than, How are churches
   not free from bad members? Perhaps Christ's answer may go as far
   towards the bottom of the bottomless as those of non-Christian
   thinkers, and, if it do not solve the metaphysical puzzles, at any rate
   gives the historical fact, which is all the explanation of which the
   question is susceptible.

   The second question reminds us of Wilt Thou that we command fire. . .
   from heaven, and consume them?' It is cast in such a form as to put
   emphasis on the householder's will. His answer forbidding the gathering
   up of the tares is based, not upon any chance of mistaking wheat for
   them, nor upon any hope that, by forbearance, tares may change into
   wheat, but simply on what is best for the good crop. There was a danger
   of destroying some of it, not because of its likeness to the other, but
   because the roots of both were so interlaced that one could not be
   pulled up without dragging the other after it.

   Is this prohibition, then, meant to forbid the attempt to keep the
   Church pure from un-Christian members? The considerations already
   adduced are valid in answering this question, and others may be added.
   The crowd of listeners had, no doubt, many of them, been influenced by
   John the Baptist's fiery prophecies of the King who should come, fan in
   hand, to purge His floor,' and were looking for a kingdom which was to
   be inaugurated by sharp separation and swift destruction. Was not the
   teaching needed then, as it is now, that that is not the way in which
   the kingdom of heaven is to be founded and grow? Is not the parable
   best understood when set in connection with the expectations of its
   first hearers, which are ever floating anew before the eyes of each
   generation of Christians? Is it not Christ's apologia for His delay in
   filling the r? which John had drawn out for him? And does that
   conception of its meaning make it meaningless for us? Observe, too,
   that the rooting up which is forbidden is, by the proprieties of the
   emblem, and by the parallel which it must necessarily afford to the
   final burning, something very solemn and destructive. We may well ask
   whether excommunication is a sufficiently weighty idea to be taken as
   its equivalent. Again, how does the interpretation which sees
   ecclesiastical discipline here comport with the reason given for
   letting the tares grow on? By the hypothesis in the parable, there is
   no danger of mistake; but is there any danger of casting out good men
   from the Church along with the bad, except through mistake? Further, if
   this parable forbids casting manifestly evil men out of the Church, it
   contradicts the divinely appointed law of the Church as administered by
   the apostles. If it is to be applied to Church action at all, it
   absolutely forbids the separation from the Church of any man, however
   notoriously un-Christian, and that, as even the strongest advocates of
   comprehension admit, would destroy the very idea of the Church. Surely
   an interpretation which lands us in such a conclusion cannot be right.
   We conclude, then, that the intermingling which the parable means is
   that of good men and bad in human society, where all are so interwoven
   that separation is impossible without destroying its whole texture;
   that the rooting up, which is declared to be inconsistent with the
   growth of the crop, means removal from the field, namely, the world;
   that the main point of the second part of the parable is to set forth
   the patience of the Lord of the harvest, and to emphasise this as the
   law of the growth of His kingdom, that it advances amidst antagonism;
   and that its members are interlaced by a thousand rootlets with those
   who are not subjects of their King. What the interlacing is for, and
   whether tares may become wheat, are no parts of its teaching. But the
   lesson of the householder's forbearance is meant to be learned by us.
   While we believe that the scope of the parable is wider than
   instruction in Church discipline, we do not forget that a fair
   inference from it is that, in actual churches, there will ever be a
   mingling of good and evil; and, though that fact is no reason for
   giving up the attempt to make a church a congregation of faithful men,
   and of such only, it is a reason for copying the divine patience of the
   sower in ecclesiastical dealings with errors of opinion and faults of
   conduct.

   III. The final separation at the harvest.

   The period of development is necessarily a time of intermingling, in
   which, side by side, the antagonistic principles embodied in their
   representatives work themselves out, and beneficially affect each
   other. But each grows towards an end, and, when it has been reached,
   the blending gives place to separation. John's prophecy is plainly
   quoted in the parable, which verbally repeats his gather the wheat into
   his barn,' and alludes to his words in the other clause about burning
   the tares. He was right in his anticipations; his error was in
   expecting the King to wield His fan at the beginning, instead of at the
   end of the earthly form of His kingdom. At the consummation of the
   allotted era, the bands of human society are to be dissolved, and a new
   principle of association is to determine men's place. Their moral and
   religious affinities will bind them together or separate them, and all
   other ties will snap. This marshalling according to religious character
   is the main thought of the solemn closing words of the parable and of
   its interpretation, in which our Lord presents Himself as directing the
   whole process of judgment by means of the angels' who execute His
   commands. They are His angels,' and whatever may be the unknown
   activity put forth by them in the parting of men, it is all done in
   obedience to Him. What stupendous claims Jesus makes here! What becomes
   of the tares is told first in words awful in their plainness, and still
   more awful in their obscurity. They speak unmistakably of the absolute
   separation of evil men from all society but that of evil men; of a
   close association, compelled, and perhaps unwelcome. The tares are
   gathered out of His kingdom,'--for the field of the world has then all
   become the kingdom of Christ. There are two classes among the tares:
   men whose evil has been a snare to others (for the things that offend'
   must, in accordance with the context, be taken to be persons), and the
   less guilty, who are simply called them that do iniquity.'

   Perhaps the bundles' may imply assortment according to sin, as in
   Dante's circles. What a bond of fellowship that would be! The furnace,'
   as it is emphatically called by eminence, burns up the bundles. We may
   freely admit that the fire is part of the parable, but yet let us not
   forget that it occurs not only in the parable, but in the
   interpretation; and let us learn that the prose reality of everlasting
   destruction,' which Christ here solemnly announces, is awful and
   complete. For a moment He passes beyond the limits of that parable, to
   add that terrible clause about weeping and gnashing of teeth,' the
   tokens of despair and rage. So spoke the most loving and truthful lips.
   Do we believe His warnings as well as His promises?

   The same law of association according to character operates in the
   other region. The children of the kingdom are gathered together in what
   is now the kingdom of My Father,' the perfect form of the kingdom of
   Christ, which is still His kingdom, for the throne of God and of the
   Lamb,' the one throne on which both sit to reign, is in it.' Freed from
   association with evil, they are touched with a new splendour, caught
   from Him, and blaze out like the sun; for so close is their
   association, that their myriad glories melt as into a single great
   light. Now, amid gloom and cloud, they gleam like tiny tapers far
   apart; then, gathered into one, they flame in the forehead of the
   morning sky, a glorious church, not having spot, nor wrinkle, nor any
   such thing.'
     __________________________________________________________________

LEAVEN

   The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and bid
   to three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.'--MATT. xiii.
   33.

   How lovingly and meditatively Jesus looked upon homely life, knowing
   nothing of the differences, the vulgar differences, between the small
   and great! A poor woman, with her morsel of barm, kneading it up among
   three measures of meal, in some coarse earthenware pan, stands to Him
   as representing the whole process of His work in the world. Matthew
   brings together in this chapter a series of seven parables of the
   kingdom, possibly spoken at different times, and gathered here into a
   sequence and series, just as he has done with the great procession of
   miracles that follows the Sermon on the Mount, and just as, perhaps, he
   has done with that sermon itself. The two first of the seven deal with
   the progress of the Gospel in individual minds and the hindrances
   thereto. Then there follows a pair, of which my text is the second,
   which deal with the geographical expansion of the kingdom throughout
   the world, in the parable of the grain of mustard-seed growing into the
   great herb, and with the inward, penetrating, diffusive influence of
   the kingdom, working as an assimilating and transforming force in the
   midst of society.

   I do not purpose to enter now upon the wide and difficult question of
   the relation of the kingdom to the Church. Suffice it to say that the
   two terms are by no means synonymous, but that, at the same time,
   inasmuch as a kingdom implies a community of subjects, the churches, in
   the proportion in which they have assimilated the leaven, and are
   holding fast by the powers which Christ has lodged within them, are
   approximate embodiments of the kingdom. The parable, then, suggests to
   us, in a very striking and impressive form, the function and the
   obligations of Christian people in the world.

   Let me deal, in a purely expository fashion, with the emblem before us.

   The kingdom of heaven is like leaven.' Now of course, leaven is
   generally in Scripture taken as a symbol of evil or corruption. For
   example, the preliminary to the Passover Feast was the purging of the
   houses of the Israelites of every scrap of evil ferment, and the bread
   which was eaten on that Feast was prescribed to be unleavened. But
   fermentation works ennobling as well as corruption, and our Lord lays
   hold upon the other possible use of the metaphor. The parable teaches
   that the effect of the Gospel, as ministered by, and residing in, the
   society of men, in whom the will of God is supreme, is to change the
   heavy lump of dough into light, nutritious bread. There are three or
   four points suggested by the parable which I could touch upon; and the
   first of them is that significant disproportion between the apparent
   magnitude of the dead mass that is to be leavened, and the tiny piece
   of active energy which is to diffuse itself throughout it.

   We get there a glimpse into our Lord's attitude, measuring Himself
   against the world and the forces that were in it. He knows that in Him,
   the sole Representative, at the moment, of the kingdom of heaven upon
   earth--because in Him, and in Him alone, the divine will was,
   absolutely and always, supreme--there lie, for the time confined to
   Him, but never dormant, powers which are adequate to the transformation
   of humanity from a dead, lumpish mass into an aggregate all-penetrated
   by a quickening influence, and, if I might so say, fermented with a new
   life that He will bring. A tremendous conception, and the strange thing
   about it is that it looks as if the Nazarene peasant's dream was going
   to come true! But He was speaking to the men whom He was charging with
   a delegated task, and to them He says, There are but twelve of you, and
   you are poor, ignorant men, and you have no resources at your back, but
   you have Me, and that is enough, and you may be sure that the tiny
   morsel of yeast will penetrate the whole mass.' Small beginnings
   characterise the causes which are destined to great endings; the things
   that are ushered into the world large, generally grow very little
   further, and speedily collapse. An inheritance may be gotten hastily at
   the beginning, but the end shall not be blessed.' The force which is
   destined to be worldwide, began with the one Man in Nazareth, and
   although the measures of meal are three, and the ferment is a scrap, it
   is sure to permeate and transform the mass.

   Therefore, brethren, let us take the encouragement that our Lord here
   offers. If we are adherents of unpopular causes, if we have to stand
   alone with two or three,' do not let us count heads, but measure
   forces. What everybody says must be true,' is a cowardly proverb. It
   may be a correct statement that an absolutely universal opinion is a
   true opinion, but what most people say is usually false, and what the
   few say is most generally true. So if we have to front--and if we are
   true men we shall sometimes have to front--an embattled mass of
   antagonism, and we be in a miserable minority, never mind! We can say,
   They that be with us are more than they that be with them.' If we have
   anything of the leaven in us, we are mightier than the lump of dough.

   But there is another point here, and that is the contact that is
   necessary between the leaven and the dough. We have passed from the old
   monastic idea of Religion being seclusion from life. But that mistake
   dies hard, and there are many very Evangelical and very Protestant--and
   in their own notions superlatively good--people, who hold a modern
   analogue of the old monastic idea; and who think that Christian men and
   women should be very tepidly interested in anything except what they
   call the preaching of the Gospel, and the saving of men's souls. Now
   nobody that knows me, and the trend of my preaching, will charge me
   with undervaluing either of these things, but these do not exhaust the
   function of the Church in the world, nor the duty of the Church to
   society. We have to learn from the metaphor in the parable. The dough
   is not kept on one shelf and the leaven on another; the bit of leaven
   is plunged into the heart of the mass, and then the woman kneads the
   whole up in her pan, and so the influence is spread. We Christians are
   not doing our duty, nor are we using our capacities, unless we fling
   ourselves frankly and energetically into all the currents of the
   national life, commercial, political, municipal, intellectual, and make
   our influence felt in them all. The salt of the earth' is to be rubbed
   into the meat in order to keep it from putrefaction; the leaven is to
   be kneaded up into the dough in order to raise it. Christian people are
   to remember that they are here, not for the purpose of isolating
   themselves, but in order that they may touch life at all points, and at
   all points bring into contact with earthly life the better life and the
   principles of Christian morality.

   But in this contact with all phases of life and forms of activity,
   Christian men are to be sure that they take the leaven with them. There
   are professing Christians that say: Oh! I am not strait-laced and
   pharisaical. I do not keep myself apart from any movements of humanity.
   I count nothing that belongs to men alien to a Christian.' All right!
   but when you go into these movements, when you go into Parliament, when
   you become a city Councillor, when you mingle with other men in
   commerce, when you meet other students in the walks of intellect, do
   you take your Christianity there, or do you leave it behind? The two
   things are equally necessary, that Christians should be in all these
   various spheres of activity, and that they should be there, distinctly,
   manifestly, and, when need be, avowedly, as Christian men.

   Further, there is another thought here, on which I just say one word,
   and that is the effect of the leaven on the dough.

   It is to assimilate, to set up a ferment. And that is what Christianity
   did when it came into the world, and


     Cast the kingdoms old

     Into another mould.'

   And that is what it ought to do to-day, and will do, if Christian men
   are true to themselves and to their Lord. Do you not think that there
   would be a ferment if Christian principles were applied, say, for
   instance, to national politics? Do you not think there would be a
   ferment if Christian principles were brought to bear upon all the
   transactions on the Exchange? Is there any region of life into which
   the introduction of the plain precepts of Christianity as the supreme
   law would not revolutionise it? We talk about England as a Christian
   country. Is it? A Christian country is a country of Christians, and
   Christians are not people that only say I have faith in Jesus Christ.'
   but people that do His will. That is the leaven that is to change, and
   yet not to change, the whole mass; to change it by lightening it, by
   putting a new spirit into it, leaving the substance apparently
   unaffected except in so far as the substance has been corrupted by the
   evil spirit that rules. Brethren, if we as Christians were doing our
   duty, it would be true of us as it was of the early preachers of the
   Cross, that we are men who turn the world upside down.

   But there is one more point on which I touch. I have already
   anticipated some of what I would say upon it, but I must dwell upon it
   for a little longer; and that is, the manner in which the leaven is to
   work.

   Here is a morsel of barm in the middle of a lump of dough. It works by
   contact, touches the particles nearest it, and transforms them into
   vehicles for the further transmission of influence. Each particle
   touched by the ferment becomes itself a ferment, and so the process
   goes on, outwards and ever outwards, till it permeates the whole mass.
   That is to say, the individual is to become the transmitter of the
   influence to him who is next him. The individuality of the influence,
   and the track in which it is to work, viz. upon those in immediate
   contiguity to the transformed particle which is turned from dough into
   leaven, are taught us here in this wonderful simile.

   Now that carries a very serious and solemn lesson for us all. If you
   have received, you are able, and you are bound, to transmit this
   quickening, assimilating, transforming, lightening influence, and you
   need never complain of a want of objects upon which to exercise it, for
   the man or woman that is next you is the person that you ought to
   affect.

   Now I have already said, in an earlier portion of these remarks, that
   some good people, taking an erroneous view of the function and
   obligations of the Church in the world, would fain keep its work to
   purely evangelistic effort upon individual souls in presenting to them
   the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Saviour. But whilst I vehemently protest
   against the notion that that is the whole function of the Christian
   Church, I would as vehemently protest against the notion that the
   so-called social work of the Church can ever be efficiently done except
   upon the foundation laid of this evangelistic work. First and foremost
   amongst the ways in which this great obligation of leavening humanity
   is to be discharged, must ever stand, as I believe, the appeal to the
   individual conscience and heart, and the presentation to single souls
   of the great Name in which are stored all the regenerative and
   quickening impulses that can ever alleviate and bless humanity. So
   that, first and foremost, I put the preaching of the Gospel, the Gospel
   of our salvation, by the death and in the life of the Incarnate Son of
   God.

   But then, besides that, let me remind you there are other ways,
   subsidiary but indispensable ways, in which the Church has to discharge
   its function; and I put foremost amongst these, what I have already
   touched upon, and therefore need not dilate on now, the duty of
   Christians as Christians to take their full share in all the various
   forms of national life. I need not dwell upon the evils rampant amongst
   us, which have to be dealt with, and, as I believe, may best if not
   only, be dealt with, upon Christian principles. Think of drink, lust,
   gambling, to name but three of them, the hydra-headed serpent that is
   poisoning the English nation. Now it seems to me to be a deplorable,
   but a certainly true thing, that not only are these evils not attacked
   by the Churches as they ought to be, but that to a very large extent
   the task of attacking them has fallen into the hands of people who have
   little sympathy with the Church and its doctrines. They are fighting
   the evils on principles drawn from Jesus Christ, but they are not
   fighting the evils to the extent that they ought to do, with the
   Churches alongside. I beseech you, in your various spheres, to see to
   it that, as far as you can make it so, Christian people take the place
   that Christ meant them to take in the conflict with the miseries, the
   sorrows, the sins that honeycomb England to-day, and not to let it be
   said that the Churches shut themselves up and preach to people, but do
   not lift a finger to deal with the social evils of the nation.
     __________________________________________________________________

TREASURE AND PEARL

   The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which
   when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth
   all that he hath, and buyeth that field. 45. Again, the kingdom of
   heaven is like unto a merchantman, seeking goodly pearls: 46. Who, when
   he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had,
   and bought it.'--MATT. xiii. 44-46.

   In this couple of parables, which are twins, and must be taken
   together, our Lord utilises two very familiar facts of old-world life,
   both of them arising from a similar cause. In the days when there were
   no banks and no limited liability companies, it was difficult for a man
   to know what to do with his little savings. In old times government
   meant oppression, and it was dangerous to seem to have any riches. In
   old days war stalked over the land, and men's property must be portable
   or else concealed. So, on the one hand we find the practice of hiding
   away little hoards in some suitable place, beneath a rock, in the cleft
   of a tree, or a hole dug in the ground, and then, perhaps, the man died
   before he came back for his wealth. Or, again, another man might prefer
   to carry his wealth about with him. So he went and got jewels, easily
   carried, not easily noticed, easily convertible into what he might
   require.

   And, says our Lord, these two practices, with which all the people to
   whom He was speaking were very much more familiar than we are, teach us
   something about the kingdom of God. Now, I am not going to be tempted
   to discuss what our Lord means by that phrase, so frequent upon His
   lips, the kingdom of God' or of heaven.' Suffice it to say that it
   means, in the most general terms, a state or order of things in which
   God is King, and His will supreme and sovereign. Christ came, as He
   tells us, to found and to extend that kingdom upon earth. A man can go
   into it, and it can come into a man, and the conditions on which he
   enters into it, and it into him, are laid down in this pair of
   parables. So I ask you to notice their similarities and their
   divergences. They begin alike and they run on alike for a little way,
   and then they diverge. There is a fork in the road, and they reunite at
   the end again. They agree in their representation of the treasure; they
   diverge in their explanation of the process of discovering it, and they
   unite at last in the final issue. So, then, we have to look at these
   three points.

   I. Let me ask you to think that the true treasure for a man lies in the
   kingdom of God.

   It is not exactly said that the treasure is the kingdom, but the
   treasure is found in the kingdom, and nowhere else. Let us put away the
   metaphor; it means that the only thing that will make us rich is loving
   submission to the supreme law of the God whom we love because we know
   that He loves us. You may put that thought into half a dozen different
   forms. You may say that the treasure is the blessing that comes from
   Christianity, or the inward wealth of a submissive heart, or may use
   various modes of expression, but below them all lies this one great
   thought, that it is laid on my heart, dear brethren, to try and lay on
   yours now, that, when all is said and done, the only possession that
   makes us rich is--is what? God Himself. For that is the deepest meaning
   of the treasure. And whatever other forms of expression we may use to
   designate it, they all come back at last to this, that the wealth of
   the human soul is to have God for its very own.

   Let me run over two or three points that show us that. That treasure is
   the only one that meets our deepest poverty. We do not all know what
   that is, but whether you know it or not, dear friend, the thing that
   you want most is to have your sins dealt with, in the double way of
   having them forgiven as guilt, and in having them taken away from you
   as tyrants and dominators over your wills. And it is only God who can
   do that, God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing
   their trespasses unto them,' and giving them, by a new life which He
   breathes into dead souls, emancipation from the tyrants that rule over
   them, and thus bringing them into the liberty of the glory of the sons
   of God.' Thou sayest that Thou art rich and increased with goods . . .
   and knowest not that thou art poor . . . and naked.' Brother, until you
   have found out that it is only God who will save you from being
   bankrupt, and enable you to pay your debts, which are your duties, you
   do not know where your true riches are. And if you have all that men
   can acquire of the lower things of life, whether of what is generally
   called wealth or of other material benefits, and have that great
   indebtedness standing against you, you are but an insolvent after all.
   Here is the treasure that will make you rich, because it will pay your
   debts, and endow you with capacity enough to meet all future
   expenditure--viz. the possession of the forgiving and cleansing grace
   of God which is in Jesus Christ. If you have that, you are rich; if you
   do not possess it, you are poor. Now you believe that, as much as I do,
   most of you. Well, what do you do in consequence?

   Further, the possession of God, who belongs to all those that are the
   subjects of the kingdom of God, is our true treasure, because that
   wealth, and that alone, meets at once all the diverse wants of the
   human soul. There is nothing else of which that can be said. There are
   a great many other precious things in this world--human loves, earthly
   ambitions of noble and legitimate kinds. No one but a fool will deny
   the convenience and the good of having a competency of this world's
   possessions. But all these have this miserable defect, or rather
   limitation, that they each satisfy some little corner of a man's
   nature, and leave all the rest, if I may so say, like the beasts in a
   menagerie whose turn has not yet come to be fed, yelping and growling
   while the keeper is at the den of another one. There is only one thing
   that, being applied, as it were, at the very centre, will diffuse
   itself, like some fragrant perfume, through the whole sphere, and fill
   the else scentless air with its rich and refreshing fragrance. There is
   but one wealth which meets the whole of human nature. You, however
   small you are, however insignificant people may think you, however
   humbly you may think of yourselves, you are so great that the whole
   created Universe, if it were yours, would be all too little for you.
   You cannot fill a bottomless bog with any number of cartloads of earth.
   And you know as well as I can tell you that he that loveth silver shall
   not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with
   increase,' and that none of the good things here below, rich and
   precious as many of them are, are large enough to fill, much less to
   expand, the limitless desires of one human heart. As the ancient Latin
   father said, Lord, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is
   unquiet till it attains to Thee.'

   Closely connected with that thought, but capable of being dealt with
   for a moment apart, is the other, that this is our true treasure,
   because we have it all in one.

   You remember the beautiful emphasis of one of the parables in our text
   about the man that dissipated himself in seeking for many goodly
   pearls? He had secured a whole casket full of little ones. They were
   pearls, they were many; but then he saw one Orient pearl, and he said,
   The one is more than the many. Let me have unity, for there is rest;
   whereas in multiplicity there is restlessness and change.' The sky
   to-night may be filled with galaxies of stars. Better one sun than a
   million twinkling tininesses that fill the heavens, and yet do not
   scatter the darkness. Oh, brethren, to have one aim, one love, one
   treasure, one Christ, one God--there is the secret of blessedness.
   Unite my heart to fear Thy name'; and then all the miseries of
   multiplicity, and of drawing our supplies from a multitude of separate
   lakes, will be at an end, when our souls are flooded from the one
   fountain of life that can never fail or be turbid. Thus, the unity of
   the treasure is the supreme excellence of the treasure.

   Nor need I remind you in more than a word of how this is our true
   treasure, because it is our permanent one. Nothing that can be taken
   from me is truly mine. Those of you who have lived in a great
   commercial community as long as I have done, know that it is not for
   nothing that sovereigns are made circular, for they roll very rapidly,
   and riches take to themselves wings and fly away.' We can all go back
   to instances of men who set their hearts upon wealth, and flaunted
   their little hour before us as kings of the Exchange, and were objects
   of adoration and of envy, and at last were left stranded in poverty.
   Nothing that can be stripped from you by the accidents of life, or by
   inevitable death, is worth calling your good.' You must have something
   that is intertwined with the very fibres of your being. And I, unworthy
   as I am, come to you, dear friends, now, with this proffer of the great
   gift of wealth from which neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor
   principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
   height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate
   us.' And I beseech you to ask yourselves, Is there anything worth
   calling wealth, except that wealth which meets my deepest need, which
   satisfies my whole nature, which I may have all in one, and which, if I
   have, I may have for ever? That wealth is the God who may be the
   strength of your hearts and your heritage for ever.'

   II. Now notice, secondly, the concealment of the treasure.

   According to the first of our parables, the treasure was hid in a
   field. That is very largely local colouring, which gives veracity and
   vraisemblance to the fact of the story. And there has been a great deal
   of very unnecessary and misplaced ingenuity spent in trying to force
   interpretations upon every feature of the parable, which I do not
   intend to imitate, but I just wish to suggest one thing. Here was this
   man in the story, who had plodded across that field a thousand times,
   and knew every clod of it, and had never seen the wealth that was lying
   six inches below the surface. Now, that is very like some of my present
   hearers. God's treasure comes to the world in a form which to a great
   many people veils, if it does not altogether hide, its preciousness.
   You have heard sermons till you are sick of sermons, and I do not
   wonder at it, if you have heard them and never thought of acting on
   them. You know all that I can tell you, most of you, about Jesus
   Christ, and what He has done for you, and what you should do towards
   Him, and your familiarity with the Word has blinded you to its spirit
   and its power. You have gone over the field so often that you have made
   a path across it, and it seems incredible to you that there should be
   anything worth your picking up there. Ah! dear friends, Jesus Christ,
   when He was here, in whom were hid all the treasures of wisdom and
   knowledge,' had to the men that looked upon Him neither form nor
   comeliness that they should desire Him,' and He was to them a
   stumbling-block and foolishness. And Christ's Gospel comes among busy
   men, worldly men, men who are under the dominion of their passions and
   desires, men who are pursuing science and knowledge, and it looks to
   them very homely, very insignificant; they do not know what treasure is
   lying in it. You do not know what treasure is lying--may I venture to
   say it?--in these poor words of mine, in so far as they truly represent
   the mind and will of God. Dear brethren, the treasure is hid, but that
   is not because God did not wish you to see it; it is because you have
   made yourselves blind to its flashing brightness. If our Gospel be hid,
   it is hid to them . . . in whom the god of this world hath blinded
   their eyes.' If your whole desires are passionately set on that which
   Manchester recognises as the summum bonum, or, if you are living
   without a thought beyond this present, how can you expect to see the
   treasure, though it is lying there before your eyes? You have buried
   it, or, rather, you have made that which is its necessary envelope to
   be its obscuration. I pray you, look through the forms, look beneath
   the words of Scripture, and try and clear your eyesight from the
   hallucinations of the dazzling present, and you will see the treasure
   that is hid in the field.

   III. Again, let me ask you to notice, further, the two ways of finding.

   The rustic in the first story, who, as I said, had plodded across the
   field a hundred times, was doing it for the hundred and first, or
   perhaps was at work there with his mattock or his homely plough. And,
   perchance, some stroke of the spade, or push of the coulter, went a
   little deeper than usual, and there flashed the gold, or some shower of
   rain came on, and washed away a little of the superincumbent soil, and
   laid bare the bag. Now, that is what often happens, for you have to
   remember that though you are not seeking God, God is always seeking
   you, and so the great saying comes to be true, I am found of them that
   sought Me not.' There have been many cases like the one of the man who,
   breathing out threatenings and slaughter, with no thought in his mind
   except to bind the disciples and bring them captive to Jerusalem, saw
   suddenly a light from heaven flashing down upon him, and a Voice that
   pulled him up in the midst of his career. Ah! it would be an awful
   thing if no one found Christ except those who set out to seek for Him.
   Like the dew on the grass that waiteth not for men, nor tarrieth for
   the sons of men,' He often comes to hearts that are thinking about
   nothing less than about Him.

   There are men and women listening to me now who did not come here with
   any expectation of being confronted with this message to their souls;
   they may have been drawn by curiosity or by a hundred other motives. If
   there is one such, to whom I am speaking, who has had no desires after
   the treasure, who has never thought that God was his only Good, who has
   been swallowed up in worldly things and the common affairs of life, and
   who now feels as if a sudden flash had laid bare the hidden wealth in
   the familiar Gospel, I beseech such a one not to turn away from the
   discovered treasure, but to make it his own. Dear friend, you may not
   be looking for the wealth, but Christ is looking for His lost coin.
   And, though it has rolled away into some dusty corner, and is lying
   there all unaware, I venture to say that He is seeking you by my poor
   words to-night, and is saying to you: I counsel thee to buy of Me gold
   tried in the fire.'

   But then another class is described in the other parable of the
   merchantman who was seeking many goodly pearls. I suppose he may stand
   as a representative of a class of whom I have no doubt there are some
   other representatives hearing me now, namely, persons who, without
   yielding themselves to the claims of Christ, have been searching,
   honestly and earnestly, for whatsoever things are lovely and of good
   report.' Dear brethren, if you have been smitten by the desire to live
   noble lives, if you have been roused


     To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,

     Beyond the furthest bounds of human thought,'

   or if in any way you are going through the world with your eyes looking
   for something else than the world's gross good, and are seeking for the
   many pearls, I beseech you to lay this truth to heart, that you will
   never find what you seek, until you understand that the many have not
   it to give you, and that the One has. And when Christ draws near to you
   and says, Whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, whatsoever
   things are true, whatsoever things are venerable, if thou seekest them,
   take Me, and thou wilt find them all,' I beseech you, accept Him. There
   are two ways of finding the treasure. It is flashed on unexpectant
   eyes, and it is disclosed to seeking souls.

   III. And now, lastly, let us look at the point where the parables
   converge.

   There are two ways of finding; there is only one way of getting. The
   one man went and sold all that he had and bought the field. Never mind
   about the morality of the transaction: that has nothing to do with our
   Lord's purpose. Perhaps it was not quite honest of this man to bury the
   treasure again, and then to go and buy the field for less than it was
   worth, but the point is that, however a soul is brought to see that God
   in Christ is all that he needs, there is only one way of getting Him,
   and that is, sell all that thou hast.'

   Then it is barter, is it? Then it is salvation by works after all?' No!
   To sell all that thou hast' is first, to abandon all hope of acquiring
   the treasure by anything that thou hast. We buy it when we acknowledge
   that we have nothing of our own to buy it with. Buy it without money
   and without price'; buy it by yielding your hearts; buy it by ceasing
   to cling to earth and creatures, as if they were your good. That trust
   in Jesus Christ, which is the condition of salvation is selling all
   that thou hast.' Self is all that thou hast.' Abandon self and clutch
   Him, and the treasure is thine. But the initial act of faith has to be
   carried on through a life of self-denial and self-sacrifice, and the
   subjection of self-will, which is the hardest of all, and the
   submission of one's self altogether to the kingdom of God and to its
   King. If we do thus we shall have the treasure, and if we do not thus
   we shall not.

   Surely it is reasonable to fling away paste pearls for real ones.
   Surely it is reasonable to fling away brass counters for gold coins.
   Surely, in all regions of life, we willingly sacrifice the second best
   in order to get the very best. Surely if the wealth which is in God is
   more precious than all besides, you have the best of the bargain, if
   you part with the world and yourselves and get Him. And if, on the
   other hand, you stick to the second best and cleave to yourselves and
   to this poor diurnal sphere and what it contains, then I will tell you
   what your epitaph will be. It is written in one of the Psalms, He shall
   leave them in the midst of his days, and at his latter end shall be a
   fool.'

   And there is a more foolish fool still--the man who, when he has seen
   the treasure, flings another shovelful of earth upon it, and goes away
   and does not buy it, nor think anything more about it. Dear brother, do
   not do that, but if, by God's help, any poor words of mine have stirred
   anything in your hearts of recognition of what your true wealth is, do
   not rest until you have done what is needful to possess it, given away
   yourselves, and in exchange received Christ, and in Him wealth for
   evermore.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE MARTYRDOM OF JOHN

   At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the fame of Jesus, 2. And said
   unto his servants, This is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead;
   and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him. 3. For
   Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him in prison for
   Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife. 4. For John said unto him,
   It is not lawful for thee to have her. 5. And when he would have put
   him to death, he feared the multitude, because they counted him as a
   prophet. 6. But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of
   Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod. 7. Whereupon he
   promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask. 8. And she,
   being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John
   Baptist's head in a charger. 9. And the king was sorry: nevertheless
   for the oath's sake, and them which sat with him at meat, he commanded
   it to be given her. 10. And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.
   11. And his head was brought in a charger, and given to the damsel: and
   she brought it to her mother. 12. And his disciples came, and took up
   the body, and buried it, and went and told Jesus.'--MATT. xiv. 1-12.

   The singular indifference of the Bible to the fate of even its greatest
   men is exemplified in the fact that the martyrdom of John is only told
   incidentally, in explanation of Herod's alarm. But for that he would
   apparently have dropped out of the narrative, as a man sinks in the
   sea, without a bubble or a ripple. Christ is the sole theme of the
   Gospels, and all others are visible only as His light falls on them.

   It took a long time for news of Christ to reach the ears of Herod.
   Peasants hear of Him before princes, whose thick palace walls and
   crowds of courtiers shut out truth. The first thing to note is the
   alarm of the conscience-stricken king. We learn from the other
   evangelists that there was a difference of opinion among the attendants
   of Herod--not very good judges of a religious teacher--as to who this
   new miracle-working Rabbi might be, but the tetrarch has no hesitation.
   There is no proof that Herod was a Sadducee; but he probably thought as
   little about a resurrection as if he had been, and, in any case, did
   not expect dead men to be starting up again, one by one, and mingling
   with the living. His conscience made a coward of him, and his fear made
   that terrible which would else have been thought impossible. In his
   terror he makes confidants of his slaves, overleaping the barriers of
   position, in his need of some ears to pour his fears into. He was right
   in believing that he had not finished with John, and in expecting to
   meet him again with mightier power to accuse and condemn. If twere done
   when tis done,' says Macbeth; but it is not done. There is a
   resurrection of deeds as well as of bodies, and all our buried
   badnesses will front us again, shaking their gory locks at us, and
   saying that we did them.

   Instead of following closely the narrative, we may best gather up its
   lessons by considering the actors in the tragedy.

   I. We see in Herod the depths of evil possible to a weak character. The
   singular double which he, Herodias and John present to Ahab, Jezebel
   and Elijah, has been often noticed. In both cases a weak king is drawn
   in opposite directions by the stronger-willed temptress at his side,
   and by the stern ascetic from the desert. How John had found his way
   into kings' houses' we do not know; but, as he carried thither his
   undaunted boldness of plain-spoken preaching of morality and
   repentance, it was inevitable that he should soon find his way from the
   palace to the dungeon. There must have been some intercourse between
   Herod and him before his imprisonment, or he could not have shaken the
   king's conscience with his blunt denunciations. From the account in
   Mark, it would appear that, after his imprisonment, he gained great
   influence over the tetrarch, and led him some steps on the way of
   goodness. But Herod was infirm of purpose,' and a beautiful fiend was
   at his side, and she had an iron will sharpened to an edge by hatred,
   and knew her own mind, which was murder. Between them, the weaker
   nature was much perplexed, and like a badly steered boat, yawed in its
   course, now yielding to the impulse from John, now to that from
   Herodias. Matthew attributes his hesitation as to killing John to his
   fear of the popular voice, which, no doubt, also operated. Thus he let
   I dare not wait upon I would,' and had not strength of mind enough to
   hold to the one and despise the other of his discordant counsellors. He
   was evidently a sensual, luxurious, feeble-willed, easily frightened,
   superstitious and cunning despot; and, as is always the case with such,
   he was driven farther in evil than he meant or wished. He was entrapped
   into an oath, and then, instead of saying, Promises which should not
   have been made should not be kept,' he weakly consents, from fantastic
   fear of what his guests will say of him, and unwillingly, out of pure
   imbecility, stains his soul for ever with blood. In this wicked world,
   weak men will always be wicked men; for it is less trouble to consent
   than to resist, and there are more sirens to whisper Come' than
   prophets to thunder, It is not lawful.' Strength of will is needful for
   all noble life.

   We may learn from Herod, also, how far we may go on the road of
   obedience to God's will, and yet leave it at last. What became of all
   his eager listening, of his partial obedience, of his care to keep John
   safe from Herodias's malice? All vanished like early dew. What became
   of his conscience-stricken alarms on hearing of Christ? Did they lead
   to any deep convictions? They faded away, and left him harder than
   before. Convictions not followed out ossify the heart. If he had sent
   for Christ, and told Him his fears, all might have been well. But he
   let them pass, and, so far as we know, they never returned. He did meet
   Jesus at last, when Pilate sent him the Prisoner, as a piece of
   politeness, and in what mood?--childish pleasure at the chance of
   seeing a miracle. How did Jesus answer his torrent of frivolous
   questions? He answered him nothing.' That sad silence speaks Christ's
   knowledge that now even His words would be vain to create one ripple of
   interest on the Dead Sea of Herod's soul. By frivolity, lust, and
   neglect he had killed the germ of a better life, and silence was the
   kindest answer which perfect love could give him.

   He shows us, too, the intimate connection of all sins. The common root
   of every sin is selfishness, and the shapes which it takes are protean
   and interchangeable. Lust dwells hard by hate. Sensual crimes and
   cruelty are closely akin. The one vice which Herod would not surrender,
   dragged after it a whole tangle of other sins. No sin dwells alone.
   There is none barren among them.' They are gregarious, and a solitary
   sin is more seldom seen than a single swallow. Herod is an
   illustration, too, of a conscience fantastically sensitive while it is
   dead to real crimes. He has no twinges for his sin with Herodias, and
   no effective ones at killing John, but he thinks it would be wrong to
   break his oath. The two things often go together; and many a brigand in
   Calabria, who would cut a throat without hesitation, would not miss
   mass, or rob without a little image of the Virgin in his hat. We often
   make compensation for easy indulgence in great sins by fussy
   scrupulosity about little faults, and, like Herod, had rather commit
   murder than not be polite to visitors.

   II. The next actors in the tragedy are Herodias and her daughter. What
   a miserable destiny to be gibbeted for ever by half a dozen sentences!
   One deed, after which she no doubt wiped her mouth, and said, I have
   done no harm,' has won for the mother an immortality of ignominy. Her
   portrait is drawn in few strokes, but they are enough. In strength of
   will and unscrupulous carelessness of human life, she is the sister of
   Jezebel, and curiously like Shakespeare's awful creation, Lady Macbeth;
   but she adds a stain of sensuous passion to their vices, which
   heightens the horror. Her first marriage was with her full uncle; and
   her second, if marriage it can be called when her husband and Herod's
   wife were both living, was with her step-uncle, and thus triply
   unlawful. John's remonstrance awoke no sense of shame in her, but only
   malignant and murderous hate. Once resolved, no failures made her
   swerve from her purpose. Hers was no passing fury, but cold-blooded,
   deliberate determination. Her iron will and unalterable persistence
   were accompanied by flexibility of resource. When one weapon failed,
   she drew another from a full quiver. And the means which were finally
   successful show not only her thorough knowledge of the weak man she had
   to deal with, but her readiness to stoop to any degradation for herself
   and her child to carry her point. A thousand claims to' abhorrence meet
   in her, as mother, wife, and queen.' Many a shameless woman would have
   shrunk from sullying a daughter's childhood, by sending her to play the
   part of a shameless dancing-girl before a crew of half-tipsy revellers,
   and from teaching her young lips to ask for murder. But Herodias sticks
   at nothing, and is as insensible to the duty of a mother as to that of
   a wife. If we put together these features in her character, her hot
   animal passions, her cool inflexible revenge, her cynical disregard of
   all decency, her deadness to natural affection for her child, her
   ferocity and her cunning, we have a hideous picture of corrupted
   womanhood. We cannot but wonder whether, in after days, remorse ever
   did its merciful work upon Herodias. She urged Herod to his ruin at
   last by her ambition, which sought for him the title of king, and, with
   one redeeming touch of faithfulness, went with him into dreary exile in
   Gaul. Perhaps there, among strangers, and surrounded by the wreck of
   her projects, and when the hot fire of passion had died down, she may
   have remembered and repented her crime.

   The criminality of the daughter largely depends upon her age, of which
   we have no knowledge. Perhaps she was too mere a child to understand
   the degradation of the dance, or the infamy of the request which her,
   we hope, innocent and panting lips were tutored to prefer. But, more
   probably, she was old enough to be her mother's fellow-conspirator,
   rather than her tool, and had learned only too well her lessons of
   impurity and cruelty. What chance had a young life in such a sty of
   filth? When the mother becomes the devil's deputy, what can the
   daughter grow up to be, but a worse edition of her? This poor girl, so
   sinning, and so sinned against, followed in Herodias's footsteps, and
   afterwards married, according to the custom of the Herods, her uncle,
   Philip the tetrarch. She inherited and was taught evil; that was her
   misfortune. She made it her own; that was her crime. As she stands
   there, shameless and flushed, in that hideous banqueting-hall, with her
   grim gift dripping red blood on the golden platter, and wicked triumph
   gleaming in her dark eyes, she suggests grave questions as to parents'
   responsibility for children's sins, and is a living symbol of the
   degradation of art to the service of vice, and of the power of an evil
   soul to make hideous all the grace of budding womanhood.

   III. There is something dramatically appropriate in the silent death in
   the dungeon of the lonely forerunner. The faint noise of revelry may
   have reached his ears, as he brooded there, and wondered if the coming
   King would never come for his enlargement. Suddenly a gleam of light
   from the opened door enters his cell, and falls on the blade of the
   headsman's sword. Little time can be wasted, for Herodias waits. With
   short preface the blow falls. The King has come, and set His forerunner
   free, sending him to prepare His way before Him in the dim regions
   beyond. A world where Herod sits in the festal chamber, and John lies
   headless in the dungeon, needs some one to set it right. When the need
   is sorest, the help is nearest. Truth succeeds by the apparent failure
   of its apostle. Herodias may stab the dead tongue, as the legend tells
   that she did, but it speaks louder after death than ever. Herod kept
   his birthday with drunken and bloody mirth; but it was a better
   birthday for his victim.

   IV. It needed some courage for John's disciples to come to that gloomy,
   blood-stained fortress, and bear away the headless trunk which scornful
   cruelty had flung out to rot unburied. When reverent love and sorrow
   had finished their task, what was the little flock without a shepherd
   to do? The possibility of their continued existence as a company of
   disciples was at an end. They show by their action that their master
   had profited from his last message to Jesus. At once they turn to Him,
   and, no doubt, the bulk of them were absorbed in the body of His
   followers. Sorrowful and bereaved souls betake themselves naturally to
   His sweet sympathy for soothing, and to His gentle wisdom for
   direction. The wisest thing that any of us can do is to go and tell
   Jesus' our loneliness, and let it bind us more closely to Him.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE GRAVE OF THE DEAD JOHN AND THE GRAVE OF THE LIVING JESUS

   And John's disciples came, and took up the body, and buried it, and
   went and told Jesus.'--MATT. xiv. 12.

   And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great
   joy.'--MATT. xxviii. 8.

   There is a remarkable parallel and still more remarkable contrast
   between these two groups of disciples at the graves of their respective
   masters. John the Baptist's followers venture into the very jaws of the
   lion to rescue the headless corpse of their martyred teacher from a
   prison grave. They bear it away and lay it reverently in its unknown
   sepulchre, and when they have done these last offices of love they feel
   that all is over. They have no longer a centre, and they disintegrate.
   There was nothing to hold them together any more. The shepherd had been
   smitten, and the flock were scattered. As a school' or a distinct
   community they cease to be, and are mostly absorbed into the ranks of
   Christ's followers. That sorrowful little company that turned from
   John's grave, perhaps amidst the grim rocks of Moab, perhaps in his
   native city amongst the hills of Judah, parted then, to meet no more,
   and to bear away only a common sorrow that time would comfort, and a
   common memory that time would dim.

   The other group laid their martyred Master in His grave with as tender
   hands and as little hope as did John's disciples. The bond that held
   them together was gone too, and the disintegrating process began at
   once. We see them breaking up into little knots, and soon they, too,
   will be scattered. The women come to the grave to perform the woman's
   office of anointing, and they are left to go alone. Other slight hints
   are given which show how much the ties of companionship had been
   relaxed, even in a day, and how certainly and quickly they would have
   fallen asunder. But all at once a new element comes in, all is changed.
   The earliest visitors to the sepulchre leave it, not with the lingering
   sorrow of those who have no more that they can do, but with the quick,
   buoyant step of people charged with great and glad tidings. They come
   to it wrapped in grief--they leave it with great joy. They come to it,
   feeling that all was over, and that their union with the rest who had
   loved Him was little more than a remembrance. They go away, feeling
   that they are all bound together more closely than ever.

   The grave of John was the end of a school.' The grave of Jesus was the
   beginning of a Church. Why? The only answer is the message which the
   women brought back from the empty sepulchre on that Easter day: The
   Lord is risen.' The whole history of the Christian Church, and even its
   very existence, is unintelligible, except on the supposition of the
   resurrection. But for that, the fate of John's disciples would have
   been the fate of Christ's--they would have melted away into the mass of
   the nation, and at most there would have been one more petty Galilean
   sect that would have lived on for a generation and died out when the
   last of His companions died. So from these two contrasted groups we may
   fairly gather some thoughts as to the Resurrection of Christ, as
   attested by the very existence of a Christian Church, and as to the joy
   of that resurrection.

   I. Now the first point to be considered is, that the conduct of
   Christ's disciples after His death was exactly the opposite of what
   might have been expected.

   They held together. The natural thing for them to do would have been to
   disband; for their one bond was gone; and if they had acted according
   to the ordinary laws of human conduct, they would have said to
   themselves, Let us go back to our fishing-boats and our tax-gathering,
   and seek safety in separation, and nurse our sorrow apart. A few
   lingering days might have been given to weep together at His grave, and
   to assuage the first bitterness of grief and disappointment; but when
   these were over, nothing could have prevented Christianity and the
   Church from being buried in the same sepulchre as Jesus. As certainly
   as the stopping up of the fountain would empty the river's bed, so
   surely would Christ's death have scattered His disciples. And that
   strange fact, that it did not scatter them, needs to be looked well
   into and fairly accounted for in some plausible manner. The end of
   John's school gives a parallel which brings the singularity of the fact
   into stronger relief; and looking at these two groups as they stand
   before us in these two texts, the question is irresistibly suggested,
   Why did not the one fall away into its separate elements, as the other
   did? The keystone of the arch was in both cases withdrawn--why did the
   one structure topple into ruin while the other stood firm?

   Not only did the disciples of Christ keep united, but their conceptions
   of Jesus underwent a remarkable change, after His death. We might have
   expected, indeed, that, when memory began to work, and the disturbing
   influence of daily association was withdrawn, the same idealising
   process would have begun on their image of Him, which reveals and
   ennobles the characters of our dear ones who have gone away from us.
   Most men have to die before their true worth is discerned. But no
   process of that sort will suffice to account for the change and
   heightening of the disciples' thoughts about their dead Lord. It was
   not merely that, when they remembered, they said, Did not our hearts
   burn within us by the way while He talked with us?--but that His death
   wrought exactly the opposite effect from what it might have been
   expected to do. It ought to have ended their hope that He was the
   Messiah, and we know that within forty-eight hours it was beginning to
   do so, as we learn from the plaintive words of disappointed and fading
   hope: We trusted that it had been He which should have redeemed
   Israel.' If, so early, the cold conviction was stealing over their
   hearts that their dearest expectation was proved by His death to have
   been a dream, what could have prevented its entire dominion over them,
   as the days grew into months and years? But somehow or other that
   process was arrested, and the opposite one set in. The death that
   should have shattered Messianic dreams confirmed them. The death that
   should have cast a deeper shadow of incomprehensibleness over His
   strange and lofty claims poured a new light upon them, which made them
   all plain and clear. The very parts of His teaching which His death
   would have made those who loved Him wish to forget, became the centre
   of His followers' faith. His cross became His throne. Whilst He lived
   with them they knew not what He said in His deepest words, but, by a
   strange paradox, His death convinced them that He was the Son of God,
   and that that which they had seen with their eyes, and their hands had
   handled, was the Eternal Life. The cross alone could never have done
   that. Something else there must have been, if the men were sane, to
   account for this paradox.

   Nor is this all. Another equally unlikely sequel of the death of Jesus
   is the unmistakable moral transformation effected on the disciples.
   Timorous and tremulous before, something or other touched them into
   altogether new boldness and self-possession. Dependent on His presence
   before, and helpless when He was away from them for an hour, they
   become all at once strong and calm; they stand before the fury of a
   Jewish mob and the threatenings of the Sanhedrim, unmoved and
   victorious. And these brave confessors and saintly heroes are the men
   who, a few weeks before, had been petulant, self-willed, jealous,
   cowardly. What had lifted them suddenly so far above themselves? Their
   Master's death? That would more naturally have taken any heart or
   courage out of them, and left them indeed as sheep in the midst of
   wolves. Why, then, do they thus strangely blaze up into grandeur and
   heroism? Can any reasonable account be given of these paradoxes? Surely
   it is not too much to ask of people who profess to explain Christianity
   on naturalistic principles, that they shall make the process clear to
   us by which, Christ being dead and buried, His disciples were kept
   together, learned to think more loftily of Him, and sprang at once to a
   new grandeur of character. Why did not they do as John's disciples did,
   and disappear? Why was not the stream lost in the sand, when the
   head-waters were cut off?

   II. Notice then, next, that the disciples' immediate belief in the
   Resurrection furnishes a reasonable, and the only reasonable,
   explanation of the facts.

   There is no better historical evidence of a fact than the existence of
   an institution built upon it, and coeval with it. The Christian Church
   is such evidence for the fact of the Resurrection; or, to put the
   conclusion in the most moderate fashion, for the belief in the
   Resurrection. For, as we have shown, the natural effect of our Lord's
   death would have been to shatter the whole fabric: and if that effect
   were not produced, the only reasonable account of the force that
   hindered it is, that His followers believed that He rose again. Since
   that was their faith, one can understand how they were banded more
   closely together than ever. One can understand how their eyes were
   opened to know Him who was declared to be the Son of God with power by
   the resurrection from the dead.' One can understand how, in the
   enthusiasm of these new thoughts of their Lord, and in the strength of
   His victory over death, they put aside their old fears and littlenesses
   and clothed themselves in armour of light. The Lord is risen indeed'
   was the belief which made the continuous existence of the Church
   possible. Any other explanation of that great outstanding fact is lame
   and hopelessly insufficient.

   We know that that belief was the belief of the early Church. Even if
   one waived all reference to the Gospels, we have the means of
   demonstrating that in Paul's undisputed epistles. Nobody has questioned
   that he wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians. The date most
   generally assumed to that letter brings it within about five-and-twenty
   years of the crucifixion. In that letter, in addition to a multitude of
   incidental references to the Lord as risen, we have the great passage
   in the fifteenth chapter, where the apostle not only declares that the
   Resurrection was one of the two facts which made his gospel,' but
   solemnly enumerates the witnesses of the risen Lord, and alleges that
   this gospel of the Resurrection was common to him and to all the
   Church. He tells us of Christ's appearance to himself at his
   conversion, which must have taken place within six or seven years of
   the crucifixion, and assures us that at that early period he found the
   whole Church believing and preaching Christ's resurrection. Their
   belief rested on their alleged intercourse with Him a few days after
   His death, and it is inconceivable that within so short a period such a
   belief should have sprung up and been universally received, if it had
   not begun when and as they said that it did.

   But we are not left even to inferences of this kind to show that, from
   the beginning, the Church witnessed to the Resurrection of Jesus. Its
   own existence is the great witness to its faith. And it is important to
   observe that, even if we had not the documentary evidence of the
   Pauline epistles as the earliest records, of the Gospels, and of the
   Acts of the Apostles, we should still have sufficient proof that the
   belief in the Resurrection is as old as the Church. For the continuance
   of the Church cannot be explained without it. If that faith had not
   dawned on their slow, sad hearts on that Easter morning, a few weeks
   would have seen them scattered; and if once they had been scattered, as
   they inevitably would have been, no power could have reunited them, any
   more than a diamond once shattered can be pieced together again. There
   would have been no motive and no actors to frame a story of
   resurrection, when once the little company had melted away. The
   existence of the Church depended on their belief that the Lord was
   risen. In the nature of the case that belief must have followed
   immediately on His death. It, and it only, reasonably accounts for the
   facts. And so, over and above Apostles, and Gospels, and Epistles, the
   Church is the great witness, by its very being, to its own immediate
   and continuous belief in the Resurrection of our Lord.

   III. Again, we may remark that such a belief could not have originated
   or maintained itself unless it had been true.

   Our previous remarks have gone no farther than to establish the belief
   in the Resurrection of Christ, as the basis of primitive Christianity.
   It is vehemently alleged, and we may freely admit that the step is a
   long one from subjective belief to objective reality. But still it is
   surely perfectly fair to argue that a given belief is of such a nature
   that it cannot be supposed to rest on anything less solid than a fact;
   and this is eminently the case in regard to the belief in Christ's
   Resurrection. There have been many attempts on the part of those who
   reject that belief to account for its existence, and each of them in
   succession has had its day, and ceased to be.' Unbelief devours its own
   children remorselessly, and the succession to the throne of
   antichristian scepticism is won, as in some barbarous tribes, by
   slaying the reigning sovereign. The armies of the aliens turn their
   weapons against one another, and each new assailant of the historical
   veracity of the Gospels commences operations by showing that all
   previous assailants have been wrong, and that none of their
   explanations will hold water.

   For instance, we hear nothing now of the coarse old explanation that
   the story of the Resurrection was a lie, and became current through the
   conscious imposture of the leaders of the Church. And it was high time
   that such a solution should be laid aside. Who, with half an eye for
   character, could study the deeds and the writings of the apostles, and
   not feel that, whatever else they were, they were profoundly honest,
   and as convinced as of their own existence, that they had seen Christ
   alive after His passion, by many infallible proofs'? If Paul and Peter
   and John were conspirators in a trick, then their lives and their words
   were the most astounding anomaly. Who, either, that had the faintest
   perception of the forces that sway opinion and frame systems, could
   believe that the fair fabric of Christian morality was built on the
   sand of a lie, and cemented by the slime of deceit bubbling up from the
   very pit of hell? Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
   That insolent hypothesis has had its day.

   Then when it was discredited, we were told that the mythical tendency
   would explain everything. It showed us how good men could tell lies
   without knowing it, and how the religious value of an alleged fact in
   an alleged historical revelation did not in the least depend on its
   being a fact. And that great discovery, which first converted solid
   historical Christianity into a gaseous condition, and then caught the
   fumes in some kind of retort, and professed to hand us them back again
   improved by the sublimation, has pretty well gone the way of all
   hypotheses. Myths are not made in three days, or in three years, and no
   more time can be allowed for the formation of the myth of the
   Resurrection. What was the Church to feed on while the myth was
   growing? It would have been starved to death long before.

   Then, the last new explanation which is gravely put forward, and is the
   prevailing one now, sustains itself by reference to undeniable facts in
   the history of religious movements, and of such abnormal attitudes of
   the mind as modern spiritualism. On the strength of which analogy we
   are invited to see in the faith of the early Christians in the
   Resurrection of the Lord a gigantic instance of hallucination.' No
   doubt there have been, and still are, extraordinary instances of its
   power, especially in minds excited by religious ideas. But we have only
   to consider the details of the facts in hand to feel that they cannot
   be accounted for on such a ground. Do hallucinations lay hold on five
   hundred people at once? Does a hallucination last for a long country
   walk, and give rise to protracted conversation? Does hallucination
   explain the story of Christ eating and drinking before His disciples?
   The uncertain twilight of the garden might have begotten such an airy
   phantom in the brain of a single sobbing woman; but the appearances to
   be explained are so numerous, so varied in character, embrace so many
   details, appeal to so many of the senses--to the ear and hand as well
   as to the eye--were spread over so long a period, and were
   simultaneously shared by so large a number, that no theory of such a
   sort can account for them, unless by impugning the veracity of the
   records. And then we are back again on the old abandoned ground of
   deceit and imposture. It sounds plausible to say, Hallucination is a
   proved cause of many a supposed supernatural event--why not of this?
   But the plausibility of the solution ceases as soon as you try it on
   the actual facts in their variety and completeness. It has to be eked
   out with a length of the fox's skin of deceit before it covers them;
   and we may confidently assert that such a belief as the belief of the
   early Church in the Resurrection of the Lord was never the product
   either of deceit or of illusion, or of any amalgam of the two.

   What new solutions the fertility of unbelief may yet bring forth, and
   the credulity of unbelief may yet accept, we know not; but we may
   firmly hold by the faith which breathed new hope and strange joy into
   that sad band on the first Easter morning, and rejoice with them in the
   glad, wonderful fact that He is risen from the dead.

   IV. For that message is a message to us as truly as to the
   heavy-hearted unbelieving men that first received it. We may think for
   a moment of the joy with which we ought to return from the empty
   sepulchre of the risen Saviour.

   How little these women knew that, as they went back from the grave in
   the morning twilight, they were the bearers of great joy which should
   be to all people'! To them and to the first hearers of their message
   there would be little clear in the rush of glad surprise, beyond the
   blessed thought, Then He is not gone from us altogether. Sweet visions
   of the resumption of happy companionship would fill their minds, and it
   would not be until calmer moments that the stupendous significance of
   the fact would reveal itself.

   Mary's rapturous gesture to clasp Him by the feet, when the certainty
   that it was in very deed He flooded her soul with dazzling light,
   reveals her first emotion, which no doubt was also the first with them
   all, Then we shall have Him with us again, and all the old joy of
   companionship will be ours once more.' Nor were they wrong in thinking
   so, however little they as yet understood the future manner of their
   fellowship, or anticipated His leaving them again so soon. Nor are we
   without a share even in that phase of their joy; for the Resurrection
   of Jesus Christ gives us a living Lord for our love, an ever present
   Companion and Brother for our hearts to hold, even if our hands cannot
   clasp Him by the feet. A dead Christ might have been the object of
   faint historical admiration, and the fair statue might have stood
   amidst others in the galleries of history; but the risen, living Christ
   can love and be loved, and we too may be glad with the joy of those who
   have found a heart to rest their hearts upon, and a companionship that
   can never fail.

   As the early disciples learned to reflect upon the fact of Christ's
   Resurrection, its riches unfolded themselves by degrees, and the
   earliest aspect of its power' was the light it shed on His person and
   work. Taught by it, as we have seen, they recognised Him for the
   Messiah whom they had long expected, and for something more--the
   Incarnate Son of God. That phase of their joy belongs to us too. If
   Christ, who made such avowals of His nature as we know that He did, and
   hazarded such assertions of His claims, His personality and His office,
   as fill the Gospels, were really laid in the grave and saw corruption,
   then the assertions are disproved, the claims unwarranted, the office a
   figment of His imagination. He may still remain a great teacher, with a
   tremendous deduction to be made from the worth of His teaching, but all
   that is deepest in His own words about Himself and His relation to men
   must be sorrowfully put on one side. But if He, after such assertions
   and claims, rose from the dead, and rising, dieth no more, then for the
   last time, and in the mightiest tones, the voice that rent the heavens
   at His baptism and His transfiguration proclaims: This is My beloved
   Son; hear ye Him.' Our joy in His Resurrection is the joy of those to
   whom He is therein declared to be the Son of God, and who see in Christ
   risen their accepted Sacrifice, and their ever-living Redeemer.

   Such was the earliest effect of the Resurrection of Jesus, if we trust
   the records of apostolic preaching. Then by degrees the joyful thought
   took shape in the Church's consciousness that their Shepherd had gone
   before them into the dark pen where Death pastured his flocks, and had
   taken it for His own, for the quiet resting-place where He would make
   them lie down by still waters, and whence He would lead them out to the
   lofty mountains where His fold should be. The power of Christ's
   Resurrection as the pattern and pledge of ours is the final source of
   the joy which may fill our hearts as we turn away from that empty
   sepulchre.

   The world has guessed and feared, or guessed and hoped, but always
   guessed and doubted the life beyond. Analogies, poetic adumbrations,
   probabilities drawn from consciousness and from conscience, from
   intuition and from anticipation, are but poor foundations on which to
   build a solid faith. But to those to whom the Resurrection of Christ is
   a fact their own future life is a fact. Here we have a solid certainty,
   and here alone. The heart says as we lay our dear ones in the grave,
   'Surely we part not for ever.' The conscience says, as it points us to
   our own evil deeds, After death the judgment.' A deep indestructible
   instinct prophesies in every breast of a future. But all is vague and
   doubtful. The one proof of a life beyond the grave is the Resurrection
   of Jesus Christ. Therefore let us be glad with the gladness of men
   plucked from a dark abyss of doubt and planted on the rock of solid
   certainty; and let us rejoice with joy unspeakable, and laden with a
   prophetic weight of glory, as we ring out the ancient Easter morning's
   greeting, The Lord is risen indeed!'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE FOOD OF THE WORLD

   He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples to the
   multitude. 20. And they did all eat, and were filled; and they took up
   of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.'--MATT. xiv. 19,
   20.

   The miracles of Scripture are not merely wonders, but signs. It is one
   of their most striking characteristics that they are not, like the
   pretended portents of false faiths, mere mighty deeds standing in no
   sort of intellectual relation to the message of which they claim to be
   the attestation, but that they have themselves a doctrinal
   significance. Our Lord's miracles have been called the great bell
   before the sermon,' but they are more than that. They are themselves no
   unimportant part of the sermon. In fact, it would not be difficult to
   construct from them a revelation of His nature, person, and work,
   scarcely less full and explicit than that contained in His words, or
   even than that more systematic and developed one which we receive in
   the writings of His apostles.

   This miracle, for instance, of the feeding of the five thousand with
   five barley loaves and two small fishes, is one of the few which the
   Apostle John relates in his Gospel, and his reason for selecting it
   seems to be the commentary with which our Lord followed it, and which
   John alone has preserved. That commentary is all the wonderful
   discourse about Christ as the bread of life, and eating His flesh as
   our means of receiving His life into ourselves. We are warranted, then,
   in regarding this miracle as a symbolic revelation of Christ as
   supplying all the wants of this hungry world. If so, we may perhaps
   venture to take one more step, and regard the manner in which He
   dispenses His gifts as also significant. His agents are His disciples,
   or as would appear probable from the twelve baskets full of fragments,
   the twelve apostles, the nucleus and representatives of His Church.
   Thus we come to the point from which we wish to regard this narrative
   now. There are three stages in the words of our text--the distribution,
   the meal, and the gathering up of the abundance that was left. These
   three stages may guide us to some thoughts regarding the work to which
   Christ calls His Church, the success which attends it, and the results
   to the distributors themselves.

   I. Christ feeds the famishing world by means of His Church.

   He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples to the
   multitude.' One very striking feature in all our Lord's miracles is
   economy of power. The miraculous element being admitted for some good
   and sufficient reason, it is kept down to the lowest possible point.
   Precisely so much of it as is needed is permitted, and not one
   hairsbreadth more. It does not begin to make its appearance at any
   point in the process where ordinary human agency can be used. It does
   not produce a result beyond the actual necessity. It does not last one
   instant longer than is required. It inosculates closely with the
   natural order of things.

   Take an illustration from the beginning of miracles where Jesus
   manifested forth His glory, at the marriage in Cana of Galilee--that
   great miracle in which our Lord hallowed the ties of human affection,
   and consecrated the joy of united hearts. The necessity is felt before
   He supplies it. The servants fill the waterpots. The water is used as
   the material on which the miraculous power operates. Only so much as is
   drawn for present use becomes wine. The servants are used as the agents
   for the distribution, and all is done so unostentatiously, though it be
   the manifesting of His glory, that no man knows but they.

   Take another illustration from the other great contrasted miracle at
   the grave of Lazarus, where our Lord hallowed the breaking of earthly
   bonds by death, and sanctified the sorrows of parted love. He does not
   work His wonder from the other side Jordan, but comes. He does not
   avert the death which He will conquer, nor prevent the grief which He
   shares. He goes to the side of the grave--true human tears are wet upon
   His cheek. They have to roll away the stone. Then, there is flung into
   the darkness of the tomb the mighty word, Lazarus! come forth.' The
   inconceivable miraculous act is done, and life stirs in the sheeted
   dead. But there the miraculous ceases. The man with his restored life
   has himself to come out of the grave, and human hands have tremblingly
   to lift the napkin from the veiled face (how they must have thrilled as
   they did it, wondering what nameless horror they might see in the eyes
   that had looked on the inner chamber of death), and human help has to
   unfold the grave-clothes from the tightly swathed and stumbling limbs,
   Loose him, and let him go.'

   This marked characteristic of all our Lord's miracles is full of
   instruction, which it would lead us too far from our present purpose to
   indicate at any length. But we may just observe in passing, that it
   brings these into striking parallel with the divine creative act, where
   there is ever the same precise adaptation of power employed to result
   contemplated, the same background of veiled omnipotence, the same
   emergence of proportioned, adequate, but not superfluous force, so
   that, in fact, economy of power may be said to be the very signature
   and broad arrow of divinity stamped on all His works. Again, it
   presents a broad contrast to the wild, reckless miracle-mongering of
   false faiths, and is at once a test of the genuineness of all lying
   signs and wonders,' and an indication of the self-restraint of the
   Worker, and of the fine sanity and truthfulness of the narrators, of
   these Gospel miracles. And yet, again, it is one phase of the
   disciplinary character of the whole revelation of God in Christ--not
   obtrusive, though obvious, capable of being overlooked if men will.
   There was the hiding of His power. If any man wills to be ignorant, let
   him be ignorant.'

   But coming more immediately to the narrative before us, we find this
   same characteristic in full prominence in it. The people are allowed to
   hunger. The disciples are permitted to feel themselves at their wits'
   end. They are bid to bring their poor resources to Christ. The lad who
   had come with his little store, perhaps a fisherman's boy from some of
   the lake villages who hoped to sell his loaves and fishes in the crowd,
   supplies the material on which Christ wills to exercise His miraculous
   power. The disciples' agency is pressed into the service. Each man
   separately receives his portion, and when all are supplied, the
   fragments are carefully preserved for the use of those who had been fed
   by miracle, and of Him who had fed them!

   Besides the general lessons already referred to, as naturally arising
   from this feature of the miracle, there is that one which belongs to it
   especially, namely, that Christ feeds the famishing world by means of
   His Church.

   Precisely as in the miracles in general, so in the work of Christ as a
   whole, the field of supernatural intervention is rigidly confined, and
   fits in with the established order of things. The Incarnation and
   Sacrifice of our Lord are the purely supernatural work of the divine
   Power and Mercy. He comes, enters into our human conditions, assumes
   our humanity, dies the death for us all. I have trodden the wine-press
   alone.' There is no question of any human agency co-operating there,
   any more than there is in the word Lazarus, come forth,' or in the
   multiplication of the loaves. There, by Christ alone, is brought to us
   and is finished for us an eternal redemption, with which the whole race
   of man have nothing to do but to receive it, to eat and be filled. But
   this having been done by the solitary work of Jesus Christ, this new
   power having been introduced into the world, human agency is henceforth
   called into operation to diffuse it, just as the servants at Cana had
   to draw the wine which He had made, just as the disciples at the Sea of
   Tiberias have to give to the multitude the bread which was blessed and
   broken by His hands.

   The supernaturally given Bread of Life is to be carried over the world
   in accordance with the ordinary laws by which all other truth is
   diffused and all other gifts that belong to one man are held by him in
   stewardship for all his fellows. True, there is ever in and with that
   word of life a divine Spirit, which is the real cause of its progress,
   which guards it from destruction though all men were faithless, and
   keeps it alive though all Israel bowed the knee to Baal. But, however
   easy it may be for us to confuse ourselves with metaphysical puzzles
   about the relation between the natural and the supernatural
   elements--the human agency and the divine energiser--in the successful
   discharge of the Church's work, practically the matter is very plain.

   The truth that it behoves us all to lay to heart is just this--that
   Christian people are Christ's instruments for effecting the realisation
   of the purposes of His death. Not without them shall He see of the
   travail of His soul. Not without them shall the preaching be fully
   known. Not without the people willing in the day of His power, and
   clothed in priestly beauty, shall the Priest King set His feet upon His
   enemies. Not without the armies of heaven following Him, shall the Word
   of God' ride forth to victory. Neither the divine decree, nor the
   expansive power of the Truth, nor the crowned expectancy of the waiting
   Lord, nor the mighty working of the Comforter, are the complete means
   for the accomplishment of the divine promise that all nations shall be
   blessed in Him. Could all these be conceived of as existing without the
   service and energies of God's Church proclaiming the name of Christ,
   they were not enough. He has willed that to us, less than the least of
   all saints, should this grace be given, that we should make known the
   unsearchable riches of Christ. God reveals His truth, that men who
   believe it may impart it. God gives the word, that, caught up by those
   who receive it into an honest and good heart, it may be poured forth,
   in mighty chorus from the lips of the great company of them that
   publish it.' He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples to
   the multitude.'

   Christian men! learn your high vocation, and your solemn
   responsibilities. What! came the word of God out from you, or came it
   unto you only?' For what did you receive it? For the same reason for
   which you have received everything else which you possess--that you
   might share it with your brethren. How did you receive it? As a gift,
   unmerited, the result of a miracle of divine mercy, that you might feel
   bound to give as ye have received, and spread the free divine gift by
   cheerful human work of distribution. From whom did you receive it? From
   Christ, who in the very act of giving binds you to live for Him and not
   for yourselves, and to mould your lives after the pattern of His. What
   a multitude of motives converge on the solemn duty of work for Christ,
   if we read in the light of this deeper meaning the simple words of our
   text, He gave the loaves to the disciples!' What manner of servant is
   he who can bear to have no part in the blessed work that follows--and
   the disciples to the multitude'?

   It is further noticeable how these apostles were prepared for the work
   which they had to do. The first lesson which they had to learn was the
   almost ludicrous disproportion between the resources at their command
   and the necessities of the crowd. How many loaves have ye? go and see.'
   And this is the first lesson that we have to learn in all our work for
   Christ and for our brethren, that in ourselves we have nothing fit for
   the task before us. Think of what that task is as measured by the
   necessities and sorrows of men. Think of all the sighs that go up at
   every moment from burdened hearts, of the tears that run down so many
   blanched and anxious cheeks. Think of all the misery that is done under
   the sun!' If it could be made visible, what a dark pall would swathe
   the world, an atmosphere of sorrow rolling ever with it through space.
   The sight is too sad to be seen by any but by Him who cures it all, and
   it wrung from His heart the sigh with which ere He cured one poor
   sufferer--a drop in the ocean--He looked up to heaven, as in mute
   appeal against all these heaped miseries of suffering man.

   And we, what can we do in ourselves? On what comparison of our
   resources do we not feel utterly inadequate to the work? If we think of
   the proportion in numbers, we have to say, like the narrator of the
   wars in Israel, The children of Israel pitched before them like two
   little flocks of kids, but the Syrians filled the country.' If we think
   of the strength that we ourselves possess and look at our own tremulous
   faith, at our own feeble love, at the uncertain hold which we ourselves
   have on the Gospel that we profess, at the mists and darkness which
   cover so much of God's revelation from our own understandings, at the
   sins and faults of our own lives, must we not cry out, Send whom Thou
   wilt send, O Lord, but take not me, so sinful, so little influenced by
   Thy grace, to be the messenger of Thy grace? Who is sufficient for
   these things?' And such contemplations, when they drive home to our
   hearts the wholesome lesson of our own weakness, are the beginning, and
   the only possible beginning, of divine strength. The only temper in
   which we can serve God and bless man is that of lowliest
   self-abasement. God works with bruised reeds, and out of them makes
   polished shafts, pillars in His house. Only when we are low on our
   faces before God, crying out,' Unclean, unclean,' does the purifying
   coal touch our lips and the prophet strength flow into our souls.

   Be humble and self-distrustful, and then learn the further lesson of
   this narrative, and carry your poor inadequate resources to Christ.
   Bring them hither to Me.' In His hands they become sufficient. He
   multiplies them. He gives wisdom, strength, and all that fits for the
   task to which He calls us. Bring your little faith to Him and He will
   increase it. Bring your feeble love to Him, and ask Him to kindle it
   from the pure flame of His own, and He will make your heart burn within
   you. Bring your partial understanding of His will and way to Him, and
   He will be to you wisdom. Bring all the poverty of your natures, all
   the insufficiency of your religious character, all the inadequacy of
   your poor work, to your Lord. Feel it all. Let the conviction of your
   nothingness sink into your soul. Then wait before Him in simple faith,
   in lowly obedience, and power will come to you equal to your desire and
   to your duties, and He will put His spirit upon you, and will anoint
   you to proclaim liberty to the captives and to give bread to all the
   hungry. Who is sufficient for these things?' must ever precede, and
   will ever be followed by, our sufficiency is of God.'

   Mark again that the disciples seem themselves to have partaken of the
   bread before they parted it among the multitudes. That is our true
   preparation for the work of feeding the hungry. The Church which feeds
   the world is able to do so, only because, and in proportion as, it has
   found in Christ its own sustenance and life. It is only they who can
   say we have tasted and felt and handled of the word of life' who can
   declare it to others. Personal participation in the bread of life makes
   any man able to offer it to some fainting spirit. Nothing else makes
   him able. Ability involves responsibility. Power to its last particle
   is duty.' You, dear friends, who have tasted that the Lord is
   gracious,' have thereby come under weighty obligations. Your own
   personal experience of that precious bread has fitted you to do
   something in offering it to others. The manner in which you do so must
   be determined by your character and circumstances. Every one has his
   proper walk; but something you can do. To some lips you can commend the
   food for all the world. Somewhere your word is a power. See that you do
   what you can do. Remember that Christ feeds the world by His Church,
   and that every man who has himself eaten of the bread of life is
   thereby consecrated to carry it to those who yet are perishing in the
   far-off hunger-ridden land, and trying to fill their bellies with the
   husks that the swine eat.

   II. The Bread is enough for all the world.

   They did all eat and were filled.' One can fancy how doubtingly and
   grudgingly the apostles doled out the supplies at first, and how the
   portion of each was increased, as group after group was provided, and
   no diminution appeared in Christ's full hands, until, at last, all the
   five thousand, of all ages, of both sexes, of every sort, were fed, and
   the fragments lying uncared for proved how sufficient had been the
   share of each.

   May we not see in that scene a picture of the full supply for all the
   wants of the whole world which there is in that Bread of Life which
   came down from heaven? The Gospel proclaims a full feast, which is
   enough for all mankind, which is intended for all mankind, which shall
   one day satisfy all mankind.

   This universal adaptation of the message of the Gospel to the whole
   world arises from the obvious fact that it addresses itself to
   universal wants, to the great rudimentary, universally diffused
   characteristics of human nature, and that it provides for all these, in
   the grand simplicity of its good tidings, the one sufficing word. It
   entangles itself with no local or historical peculiarities of the time
   and place of its earthly origin, which can hinder it in its universal
   diffusion. It commits itself to no transient human opinions. It
   addresses itself to no sectional characteristics of classes of men. It
   brushes aside all the surface distinctions which separate us from one
   another, and goes right down to the depths of the central identities in
   which we are all alike. However we may differ from one another, in
   training, in habits, in cast of thought, in idiosyncrasies of
   character, in circumstances, in age--all these are but the upper strata
   which vary locally. Beneath all these there lie everywhere the solid
   foundations of the primeval rocks, and beneath these, again, the
   glowing central mass, the flaming heart of the world. Christianity
   sends its shaft right down through all these upper and local beds, till
   it reaches the deepest depths which are the same in every man--the
   obstinate wilfulness of a nature averse from God, and the yet
   deeper-lying longings of a soul that flames with the consciousness of
   God, and yearns for rest and peace. To the sense of sin, to the sense
   of sorrow, to the conscience never wholly stifled, to the desires after
   good never utterly eradicated and never slaked by aught besides itself,
   does this mighty word come. Not to this or that sort of man, not to men
   in this or that phase of progress, age of the world, or stage of
   civilisation, does it address itself, but to the common humanity which
   belongs to all, to the wants and sorrows and inward consciousness which
   belong to man as man, be he philosopher or fool, king or slave, Eastern
   or Western, pagan suckled in a creed outworn,' or Englishman with the
   new lights and material science of this twentieth century.

   Hence its universal adaptation to mankind. It alone of all so-called
   faiths overleaps all geographical limits and lives in all centuries. It
   alone wins its trophies and bestows its gifts on all sorts and
   conditions of men. Other plants which the Heavenly Father hath not
   planted' have their zones of vegetation and die outside certain degrees
   of latitude, but the seed of the kingdom is like corn, an exotic
   nowhere, for wherever man lives it will grow, and yet an exotic
   everywhere, for it came down from heaven. Other food requires an
   educated palate for its appreciation, but any hungry man in any land
   will relish bread. For every soul on earth this living dying love of
   the Lord Jesus Christ addresses itself to, and satisfies, his deepest
   wants. It is the bread which gives life to the world.

   And one of the constituents of that company by the Galilean lake was
   children. It is one great glory of Christianity that its merciful
   mysteries can find their way to the hearts of the little children. Its
   mysteries, we say--for the Gospel has its mysteries no less than these
   old systems of heathenism which fenced round their deepest truths with
   solemn barriers, only to be passed by the initiated. But the difference
   lies here--that its mysteries are taught at first to the neophytes, and
   that the sum of them lies in the words which we learned at our mother's
   knees so long ago that we have forgotten that they were ever new to us:
   God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that
   whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but should have eternal
   life.' The little child who has learned his earliest lessons of what
   father and son, loving and giving, trust and life mean, by the sweet
   experiences of his own father's home and his own mother's love, can
   grasp these blessed words. They carry the deepest mysteries which will
   still gleam before us unfathomed in all their profundity,
   unappropriated in all their blessedness, when millenniums have passed
   since we stood in the inner shrine of heaven. Wonderful is the word
   which blesses the child, which transcends the angel before the throne!

   This is the bread for the world--meant for it, and one day to be
   partaken of by it. For these ordered fifties at their Christ-provided
   meal are for us a prophecy of the day that shall surely dawn, when all
   the hunger of wandering prodigals is over, and the deceived heart of
   the idol-worshipper no longer drawing him aside to feed on ashes, they
   shall come from the East and from the West, and from the North and from
   the South, and sit at the feast which the Lord hath prepared for all
   nations, and when all the earth shall be satisfied with the goodness of
   His house, even of His holy temple.

   III. The Bread which is given to the famishing is multiplied for the
   future of the Distributors.

   They took of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full.' More was
   gathered than they had possessed at first. They preserved over, for
   their own sustenance and refreshment in days to come, a far larger
   store than the five loaves and two small fishes with which they had
   begun. The fact contains a principle which is true about almost all
   except material possessions, which is often in God's providence made
   true about them, and which is emphatically true about spiritual
   blessings, about our religious emotions, our Christian beliefs, the
   joys and powers which Christ comes to give.

   For all these, the condition of increase is diffusion. To impart to
   others is to gain for oneself. Every honest effort to bring some other
   human heart into conscious possession of Christ's love deepens one's
   own sense of its preciousness. Every attempt to lead some other
   understanding to the perception of the truth, as it is in Jesus, helps
   me to understand it better myself. If you would learn, teach. That will
   clear your mind, will open hidden harmonies, will reveal unsuspected
   deficiencies and contradictions in your own conceptions, will help you
   to feel more the truths that come from your lips. It will perhaps shame
   your cold appreciation of them, when you see how others grasp at them
   from your teaching, or give you more confidence in the Gospel as the
   power of God unto salvation, when you behold it, even as ministered
   through you, mighty to pull down strongholds. At the lowest, it will
   keep your own mind in healthy contact with what you art but too apt to
   forget. If you would learn to love Christ more, try to lead some one
   else to love Him, You will catch new gleams from His gracious heart in
   the very act of commending Him to others. If you would have your own
   spiritual life strengthened and deepened, remember that not by solitary
   meditation or raptures of silent communion alone can that be
   accomplished, but by these and by honest manful work for God in the
   world. The Mount of Transfiguration must be left, although there were
   there Moses and Elias, and the cloud of the divine glory and the words
   of approval from heaven, because there were a demoniac boy and his
   weeping, despairing father needing Christ down below. Work for God if
   you would live with God. Give the bread to the hungry, if you would
   have it for the food of your own souls.

   The refusal to engage in such service is one fruitful cause of the low
   state of spiritual health in which so many Christians pass their days.
   They seem to think that they receive the bread from heaven only for
   their own use, and that they have done all that they have to do with
   it, when they eat it themselves. And so come all manner of spiritual
   diseases. A selfish, that is an inactive, religion is always more or
   less a morbid religion. For health you need exercise. In the sweat of
   thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; that law expresses not only the fact
   that work is needed to get it, but that toil must give the appetite and
   fit the frame to digest it. There is such a thing as a morbid
   Christianity brought on by want of healthy exercise.

   There is that scattereth and yet increaseth, and there is that
   withholdeth more than is meet, and it tendeth to poverty.' Good
   husbandry does not grind up all the year's wheat for loaves for one's
   own eating, but keeps some of it for seed to be scattered in the
   furrows. And if Christian men will deal with the great love of God, the
   great work of Christ, the great message of the Gospel, as if it were
   bestowed on them for their own sakes only, they will have only
   themselves to blame if holy desires die out in their hearts, and the
   consciousness of Christ's love becomes faint, and all the blessed words
   of truth come to sound far off and mythical in their ears. The standing
   water gets green scum on it. The close-shut barn breeds weevils and
   smut. Let the water run. Fling the seed broadcast. Thou shalt find it
   after many days,' bread for thy own soul--even as these ministering
   apostles were enriched whilst they gave, and the full-handed liberality
   with which they carried Christ's gifts among the crowd' had something
   to do in providing the large residue which filled their stores for days
   to come.

   Thus, then, this scene on the sweet springing grass down by the side of
   blue Gennesaret is an emblem of the whole work of the Church in this
   starving world. The multitudes famish. Tell Christ of their wants.
   Count your own small resources till you have completely learned your
   poverty, then take them to Jesus. He will accept them, and in His hands
   they will become mighty, being transfigured from human thoughts and
   forces into divine words, into spiritual powers. On that bread which He
   gives, do you yourselves live. Then carry it boldly to all the hungry.
   Rank after rank will eat. All races, all ages, from grey hairs to
   babbling childhood, will find there the food of their souls. As you
   part the blessing, it will grow beneath His eye; and the longer you
   give, the fuller-handed you will become. Nor shall the bread fail, nor
   the word become weak, till all the world has tasted of its sweetness
   and been refreshed by its potent life.

   This miracle is the lesson for the workers. There is another wondrous
   meal recorded in Scripture, which is the prophecy for the workers when
   they rest. The little ship has been tossing all the night on the waters
   of that Galilean lake. Fruitless has been the fishing. The morning
   breaks cold and grey, and lo! there stands on the shore One who first
   blesses the toilers' work, and then bids them to His table. There,
   mysteriously kindled, burns the fire with the welcome meal already laid
   upon it. They add to it the contribution of their night of toil, and
   then, hushed and blessed in His still company, they sup with Him and He
   with them. So when the weary work is over for the Church on earth, we
   shall be aware of His merciful presence on the shore, and, coming at
   the last safe to land, we shall rest from our labours,' in that we see
   the fire of coals, and fish laid thereon and bread'; and our works
   shall follow us,' in that we are bidden to bring of the fish that we
   have caught.' Then, putting off the wet fisher's coat, and leaving
   behind the tossing of the unquiet sea and the toil of the weary
   fishing, we shall sit down with Him at that meal spread by His hands,
   who blesseth the works of His servants here below, and giveth to them a
   full fruition of immortal food at His table at the last.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE KING'S HIGHWAY

   And straightway Jesus constrained His disciples to get into a ship, and
   to go before Him unto the other side, while He sent the multitudes
   away. 23. And when He had sent the multitudes away, He went up into a
   mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there
   alone. 24. But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with
   waves: for the wind was contrary. 25. And in the fourth watch of the
   night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. 26. And when the
   disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were troubled, saying, It is
   a spirit; and they cried out for fear. 27. But straightway Jesus spake
   unto them, saying, Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid. 28. And
   Peter answered Him and said, Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Thee
   on the water. 29. And He said, Come. And when Peter was come down out
   of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. 30. But when he
   saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he
   cried, saying, Lord, save me. 31. And immediately Jesus stretched forth
   His hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith,
   wherefore didst thou doubt. 32. And when they were come into the ship,
   the wind ceased. 33. Then they that were in the ship came and
   worshipped Him, saying, Of a truth Thou art the Son of God. 34. And
   when they were gone over, they came into the land of Gennesaret. 35.
   And when the men of that place had knowledge of Him, they sent out into
   all that country round about, and brought unto Him all that were
   diseased; 36. And besought Him that they might only touch the hem of
   His garment: and as many as touched were made perfectly whole.' --MATT.
   xiv. 22-36.

   The haste and urgency with which the disciples were sent away, against
   their will, after the miracle of feeding the five thousand, is
   explained in John's account. The crowd had been excited to a dangerous
   enthusiasm by a miracle so level to their tastes. A prophet who could
   feed them was something like a prophet. So they determine to make him a
   king. Our Lord, fearing the outburst, resolves to withdraw into the
   lonely hills, that the fickle blaze may die down. If the disciples had
   remained with Him, He could not have so easily stolen away, and they
   might have caught the popular fervour. To divide would distract the
   crowd, and make it easier for Him to disperse them, while many of them,
   as really happened, would be likely to set off by land for Capernaum,
   when they saw the boat had gone. The main teaching of this miracle,
   over and above its demonstration of the Messianic power of our Lord, is
   symbolical. All the miracles are parables, and this eminently so. Thus
   regarding it, we have--

   I. The struggling toilers and the absent Christ.

   They had a short row of some five or six miles in prospect, when they
   started in the early evening. An hour or so might have done it, but,
   for some unknown reason, they lingered. Perhaps instead of pulling
   across, they may have kept inshore, by the head of the lake, expecting
   Jesus to join them at some point. Thus, night finds them but a short
   way on their voyage. The paschal moon would be shining down on them,
   and perhaps in their eager talk about the miracle they had just seen,
   they did not make much speed. A sudden breeze sprang up, as is common
   at nightfall on mountain lakes; and soon a gale, against which they
   could make no headway, was blowing in their teeth. This lasted for
   eight or nine hours. Wet and weary, they tugged at the oars through the
   livelong night, the seas breaking over them, and the wind howling down
   the glens.

   They had been caught in a similar storm once before, but then He had
   been on board, and it was daylight. Now it was dark, and Jesus had not
   yet come to them,' How they would look back at the dim outline of the
   hills, where they knew He was, and wonder why He had sent them out into
   the tempest alone! Mark tells us that He saw them distressed, hours
   before He came to them, and that makes His desertion the stranger. It
   is but His method of lovingly training them to do without His personal
   presence, and a symbol of what is to be the life of His people till the
   end. He is on the mountain in prayer, and He sees the labouring boat
   and the distressed rowers. The contrast is the same as is given in the
   last verses of Mark's Gospel, where the serene composure of the Lord,
   sitting at the right hand of God, is sharply set over against the
   wandering, toiling lives of His servants, in their evangelistic
   mission. The commander-in-chief sits apart on the hill, directing the
   fight, and sending regiment after regiment to their deaths. Does that
   mean indifference? So it might seem but for the words which follow, the
   Lord working with them.' He shares in all the toil; and the lifting up
   of His holy hands sways the current of the fight, and inclines the
   balance. His love appoints effort and persistent struggle as the law of
   our lives. Nor are we to mourn or wonder; for the purpose of the
   appointment, so far as we are concerned, is to make character, and to
   give us the wrestling thews that throw the world.' Difficulties make
   men of us. Summer sailors, yachting in smooth water, have neither the
   joy of conflict nor the vigour which it gives. Better the darkness,
   when we cannot see our way, and the wind in our faces, if the good of
   things is to be estimated by their power to strengthen us with strength
   in our soul!'

   II. We have the approaching Christ.

   Not till the last watch of the night does He come, when they have long
   struggled, and the boat is out in the very middle of the lake, and the
   storm is fiercest. We may learn from this the delays of His love.
   Because He loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus, He stayed still, in
   strange inaction, for two days, after their message. Because He loved
   Peter and the praying band, He let him lie in prison till the last hour
   of the last watch of the last night before his intended execution, and
   then delivered him with a leisureliness (making him put on article
   after article of dress) which tells of conscious omnipotence. Heaven's
   clock goes at a different rate from our little timepieces. God's day is
   a thousand years, and the longest tarrying is but a little while.' When
   He has come, we find that it is right early,' though before He came He
   seemed to us to delay. He comes across the waves. Their restless and
   yielding crests are smoothed and made solid by the touch of His foot.
   He walketh on the sea as on a pavement' (Septuagint version of Job ix.
   8). It is a revelation of divine power. It is one of the very few
   miracles affecting Christ's own person, and may perhaps be regarded as
   being, like the Transfiguration, a casual gleam of latent glory
   breaking through the body of His humiliation, and so, in some sense,
   prophetic. But it is also symbolic. He ever uses tumults and unrest as
   a means of advancing His purposes. The stormy sea is the recognised Old
   Testament emblem of antagonism to the divine rule; and just as He
   walked on the billows, so does He reach His end by the very opposition
   to it, girding Himself' with the wrath of men, and making it to praise
   Him. In this sense, too, His paths are in the great waters.' In another
   aspect, we have here the symbol of Christ's using our difficulties and
   trials as the means of His loving approach to us. He comes, giving a
   deeper and more blessed sense of His presence by means of our sorrows,
   than in calm sunny weather. It is generally over a stormy sea that He
   comes to us, and golden treasures are thrown on our shores after a
   tempest.

   III. We have the terror and the recognition.

   The disciples were as yet little lifted above their fellows; they had
   no expectation of His coming, and thought just what any rude minds
   would have thought, that this mysterious Thing stalking towards them
   across the waters came from the unseen world, and probably that it was
   the herald of their drowning. Terror froze their blood, and brought out
   a shriek (as the word might be rendered) which was heard above the dash
   of waves and the raving wind. They had gallantly fought the tempest,
   but this unmanned them. We too often mistake Christ, when He comes to
   us. We do not recognise His working in the storm, nor His presence
   giving power to battle with it. We are so absorbed in the circumstances
   that we fail to see Him through them. Our tears weave a veil which
   hides Him, or the darkness obscures His face, and we see nothing but
   the threatening crests of the waves, curling high above our little
   boat. We mistake our best friend, and we are afraid of Him as we dimly
   see Him; and sometimes we think that the tokens of His presence are
   only phantasms of our own imagination.

   They who were deceived by His appearance knew Him by His voice, as Mary
   did at the sepulchre. How blessed must have been the moment when that
   astounding certitude thrilled through their souls! That low voice is
   audible through all the tumult. He speaks to us by His word, and by the
   silent speech in our spirits, which makes us conscious that He is
   there. He does speak to us in the deepest of our sorrows, in the
   darkest of our nights; and when we hear of His voice, and with wonder
   and joy cry out, It is the Lord,' our sorrow is soothed, and the
   darkness is light about us.

   The consciousness of His presence banishes all fear. Be not afraid,'
   follows It is I.' It is of no use to preach courage unless we preach
   Christ first. If we have not Him with us, we do well to fear: His
   presence is the only rational foundation for calm fearlessness. Only
   when the Lord of Hosts is with us, ought we not to fear, though the
   waters roar . . . and be troubled.' Through the dear might of Him that
   walked the waves' can we feeble creatures face all terrors, and feel no
   terror.

   IV. We have the end of the storm and of the voyage.

   The storm ceases as soon as Jesus is on board. John does not mention
   the cessation of the tempest, but tells us that they were immediately
   at the shore. It does not seem necessary to suppose another miracle,
   but only that the voyage ended very speedily. It is not always true
   that His presence is the end of dangers and difficulties, but the
   consciousness of His presence does hush the storm. The worst of trouble
   is gone when we know that He shares it; and though the long swell after
   the gale may last, it no longer threatens. Nor is it always true that
   His coming, and our consciousness that He has come, bring a speedy
   close to toils. We have to labour on, but in how different a mood these
   men would bend to their oars after they had Him on board! With Him
   beside us toil is sweet, burdens are lighter, and the road is
   shortened. Even with Him on board, life is a stormy voyage; but without
   Him, it ends in shipwreck. With Him, it may be long, but it will look
   all the shorter while it lasts, and when we land the rough weather will
   be remembered but as a transient squall. These wearied rowers, who had
   toiled all night, stepped on shore as the morning broke on the eastern
   bank. So we, if we have had Him for our shipmate, shall land on the
   eternal shore, and dry our wet garments in the sunshine, and all the
   stormy years that seemed so long shall be remembered but as a watch in
   the night.
     __________________________________________________________________

PETER ON THE WAVES

   And Peter answered Him and said, Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto
   Thee on the water.'--MATT. xiv. 28.

   We owe this account of an episode in the miracle of Christ's walking on
   the waters to Matthew alone. Singularly enough there is no reference to
   Peter's venturesomeness and failure in the Gospel which is generally
   believed to have been written under his special inspection and
   suggestion. Mark passes by that part of the narrative without a word.
   That may be because Peter was somewhat ashamed of it, or it may be from
   a natural disinclination to make himself prominent in the story at all.
   But, whatever the reason, we may be thankful that in this first Gospel
   we have the story, for it is not only interesting as illustrating the
   characteristics of the apostle in a very picturesque fashion, but also
   as carrying in it very plainly large lessons that are of use for us
   all.

   I. Note, first, Peter's venturesomeness, half faith, and half
   presumption.

   There is a singular mixture of good and bad in it. Looked at one way,
   it seems all right; like a bit of shot silk, in one light it is bright,
   and in another it is black enough. What was good in it? Well, there was
   the man's out-and-out confidence in his Master; and there was, further,
   the unconsidered, instinctive shoot of love in his heart to the
   mysterious figure standing there upon the water, so that his desire was
   to be beside Him. It was far more Bid me come to Thee!' than Bid me
   come to Thee on the water.' The incident was a kind of rehearsal, with
   a noticeable difference, and yet with nearly parallel circumstances, of
   the other incident when, after the Resurrection, he discovered the Lord
   standing on the shore, and floundered through the water anyhow; whether
   on it or in it did not matter to him, so long as he could get near his
   Master. But though the apostle's action was blended with a great deal
   that was childish and sensuous, and was perhaps quite as much the
   result of mere temperament as of conscious affection, still there was
   good in that eager longing to be beside his Lord, which it would be
   well for us if we in some measure shared, and in that indifference to
   the perils of the strange path so long as it led to Christ's side,
   which, if it were ours, would ennoble our lives, and in that perfect
   confidence that Christ could enable him to tread the unquiet sea, which
   would make us lords of all storms, if it wrought in us.

   What was bad in it? First, the characteristic pushing of himself to the
   front, and wish to be singled out from his brethren by some special
   token. Bid me come.' Why should he be bidden any more than John, who
   sits quietly and gazes, or the others, who are tugging at the oars?
   Then the impetuous rashness and signal over-estimate of his own
   capacity and courage were bad. Perhaps, too, there was a little dash of
   a boyish kind of wish to do a strange thing, and now that he sees his
   Master there, walking on the waters, he thinks he would like to try it
   too. So the request is a rash, self-confident pushing of himself before
   his brethren into circumstances of wholly unnecessary peril and trial,
   of which he had not estimated the severity till he felt the water
   beginning to yield under his feet and the wind smiting him on the face.
   So that the incident is a rehearsal and anticipation of the precisely
   similar thing that he did when, on the morning of Christ's trial, he
   shouldered himself unnecessarily into the high priest's palace, and got
   himself close up against the fire there, without a moment's reflection
   on the possible danger he was running of having his loyalty melted by a
   fiercer flame, and little dreaming that he was going to fall, and all
   his courage to ooze out at his finger-ends, before the sharp tongue of
   a maid-servant. In like manner as he says here, Bid me come to Thee,'
   without the smallest doubt that when he was bade to come he would be
   able to do it, so he said that night: Though all should forsake Thee,
   yet will not I,'--and yet he denied Him.

   Let us take the warning from this venturesomeness of a generous,
   impulsive, enthusiastic religious nature, and remember that the most
   genuine faith and religious emotion need to be sobered and steadied by
   reflection, and by searching into our own motives, before we venture
   upon the water, howsoever much we may wish to go there. Make very sure
   that your zeal for the Lord has an element of sober permanence in it,
   and that it is the result, not of a mere transitory feeling, but of a
   steady, settled purpose. And do not push yourself voluntarily into
   places of peril or of difficulty, where the fighting is hard and the
   fire heavy, unless you have reasonable grounds for believing that you
   can stand the strain. Bring quiet, sober reason into the loftiest and
   loveliest enthusiasm of your faith, and then there will be something in
   it that will live through storm, and walk the water with unwetted and
   unsinking foot. An impure alloy of selfish itching for pre-eminence and
   distinction does not seldom mingle with the fine gold of religious
   enthusiasm and desire to serve and be near our Lord. Therefore we have
   to test our motives and seek to refine our purest emotions, and the
   more scrupulously the purer they seem, lest we be yielding to the
   impulses of self while we fancy that we are being drawn by the
   magnetism of Christ.

   II. We have here the momentary triumph and swift collapse of an impure
   faith.

   One can fancy with what hushed expectation the other apostles looked at
   Peter as he let himself down over the side of the ship, and his feet
   touched the surges and did not sink. Christ's grave, single-worded
   answer Come' barely sanctions the apostle's request. It is at most a
   permission, but scarcely a command, and it is permission to try, in
   order that Peter may learn his own weakness. He did walk on the water
   to go to Jesus. What kept him up? Not Christ's hand, nor any power
   bestowed on the apostle, but simply the exercise of Christ's will. But
   if he was held up by the operation of that will, why did he begin to
   sink? The vivid narrative tells us: When he saw the wind boisterous, he
   was afraid.' That was why. It had been blowing every bit as hard before
   he stepped out of the ship. The waves were not running any higher after
   than when he said, Bid me come to Thee.' But he was down amongst them,
   and that makes a wonderful difference. For a moment he stood, and then
   the peril into which he had so heedlessly thrust himself began to tell
   on him. Presumption subsided swiftly into fright, as it usually does,
   and fear began to fulfil itself, as it usually does. He became afraid,'
   and that made him heavy and he began to sink. Not because the gale was
   any more violent, not because the uneven pavement was any more
   yielding, but because he was frightened, and his faith began to falter
   at the close sight of the danger.

   And why did the ebbing away of faith mean the withdrawal of Christ's
   will to keep him up? Why? Because it could not but be so. There is only
   one door through which Christ's upholding power gets into a man, and
   that is the door of the man's trust in the power; and if he shuts the
   door, the power stops outside. So Peter went down. The text does not
   tell us how far down he went. Depend upon it, it was further than over
   the shoes! But he went down because he began to lose his trust that
   Christ could hold him up; and when he lost his trust, Christ lost His
   power over him.

   All this is a parable, carrying very plain and important lessons. We
   are upborne by Christ's power, and that power, working on and in our
   weakness, invests us with prerogatives in some measure like His own. If
   He can stand quiet on the heaving wave, so can His servant. The works
   that I do shall ye do also'--and the depths of the sea "become" a way
   for the ransomed to pass over.' That power is exercised on condition of
   our faith. As soon as faith ceases the influx of His grace is stayed.
   Peter, though probably he was not thinking of this incident, has put
   the whole philosophy of it into plain words in his own letter, when he
   says, You who are kept by the power of God through faith unto
   salvation.' He was held up as long as he believed. His belief was a
   hand, and that which it grasped was what held him up, and that was
   Christ's will and power. So we shall be held up everywhere, and in any
   storm, as long as, and no longer than, we set our confidence upon Him.

   Our faith is sure to fail when we turn away our eyes from Christ to
   look at the tempest and the dangers. If we keep our gaze fixed upon
   Him, the consciousness and the confidence of His all-sustaining power
   will hold us up. If once we turn aside to look at the waves as they
   heave, and prick our ears to listen to the wind as it whistles, then we
   shall begin to doubt whether He is able to keep us up. Looking off'
   from all these dangers unto Jesus' is needful if we are to run the race
   set before us.

   A man walking along a narrow ledge of some Alpine height has only one
   chance of safety, and that is, not to look at his feet or at the icy
   rocks beside him, or at the gulf beneath, into which he will be dashed
   if he gazes down. He must look up and onwards, and then he will walk
   along a knife-edge, and he shall not fall. So, Peter, never mind the
   water, never mind the wind; look at Jesus and you will get to Him dry
   shod. If you turn away your eyes from Him, and take counsel of the
   difficulties and trials and antagonisms, down you will be sure to go.
   They sank to the bottom like a stone, the depths covered them.' Christ
   holds us up. He cannot hold us up unless we trust Him. Faith and fear
   contend for supremacy in our hearts. If we rightly trust, we shall not
   be afraid. If we are afraid, terror will slay trust. To look away from
   Christ, and occupy our thoughts with dangers and obstacles, is sure to
   lead to the collapse of faith and the strengthening of terror. To look
   past and above the billows to Him that stands on them is sure to cast
   out fear and to hearten faith. Peter ignored the danger at the wrong
   time, before he dropped over the side of the boat, and he was aware of
   it at the wrong time, while he was actually being held up and delivered
   from it. Rashness ignores peril in the wrong way, and thereby ensures
   its falling on the presumptuous head. Faith ignores it in the right
   way, by letting the eye travel past it, to Christ who shields from it,
   and thereby faith brings about the security it expects, and annihilates
   the peril from which it looks away to Jesus.

   III. We have here the cry of desperate faith and its immediate answer.

   The very thing which had broken Peter's faith mended it again. Fear
   sunk him by making him falter in his confidence; and, as he was
   sinking, the very desperation of his terror drove him back to his
   faith, and he cried' with a shrill, loud voice, heard above the roar of
   the boisterous wind, Lord, save me.' So difficulties and dangers, when
   they begin to tell upon us, often send us back to the trust which the
   anticipation of them had broken; and out of the very extremity of fear
   we sometimes can draw its own antidote. Just as with flint and steel
   you may strike a spark, so danger, striking against our heart, brings
   out the flash that kindles the tinder.

   This brief cry for help singularly blends faith and fear. There is
   faith in it, else Peter would not have appealed to Christ to save him.
   There is mortal terror in it, else he would not have felt that he
   needed to cry. But faith is uppermost now, and the very terror feeds
   it. So, by swift transition, our fears may pass into their own opposite
   and become courageous trust. Just as in a coal fire the thick black
   smoke sometimes gets alight and passes into ruddy flame, so our fears
   may catch fire and flash up as confidence and prayer.

   Note the merciful swiftness of Christ's answer. Immediately He caught
   him,' because another moment would have been too late. There will be
   time to teach him the lessons of his presumption, but when the water is
   all but up to the lips that shrieked for help, there is but one thing
   to do. He must be saved first and talked to afterwards. Our cries for
   deliverance in temporal matters are not always answered so quickly, for
   it is often better for us to be left to struggle with the waves and
   winds. But our appeals for Christ's helping hand in soul-peril are
   always answered without delay. No appreciable time is consumed in the
   passage of the telegram or in flashing back the answer. The apostle was
   not caught by Christ's hand before he knew his danger, for it was good
   for him that he should go down some way, but he was caught as soon as
   he called on the Master, and before he had come to any harm. The trial
   lasted long enough to wash the stiffening of self-confidence out of
   him, and then it had done its work--and Christ's strong hand held him
   up.

   The manner of the answer is noteworthy. It is determined by, and
   adapted to, his weak faith. He could not be upheld now as he had been a
   moment ago, before his fear had weighted him, by the exercise of
   Christ's will only. Then Christ could hold him up without touching him,
   but now the palpable grasp of the hand was needed to assure the
   tremulous, doubting heart. So we, too, sometimes need and get material
   and outward signs which make it easier to feel the reality of
   sustaining grace. But whether we do or no, Christ's swift help always
   takes the form best suited to our faith, and He has regard to the
   capacity of our clasping hands in the measure and manner of His gifts.

   The time and tone of Christ's gentle remonstrance are remarkable.
   Deliverance comes first, and rebuke afterwards. Having first shown him,
   by the fact of safety, that his doubts were irrational, Christ then,
   and not till then, puts His gentle question. Perhaps there was a smile
   on His face, as surely there was love in His voice, that softened the
   rebuke and went to Peter's heart.

   What does Christ rebuke him for? Getting out of the boat? No. He does
   not blame him for venturing too much, but for trusting too little. He
   does not blame him for attempting something beyond his strength, but
   for not holding fast the beginning of his confidence firm unto the end.
   And so the lesson for us is, that we cannot expect too much if we
   expect it perseveringly. We cannot set our conceptions of Christ's
   possible help to us too high if only we keep at the height to which we
   once have set them, and are assured that He will hold us up when we are
   down amongst the weltering waves, as we fancied ourselves to be when we
   were sitting in the boat wishing to be with Him. That is the question
   that He will meet us with when we get up on the shore yonder; and we
   shall not have any more to say for ourselves, in vindication of our
   tremulous trust, than Peter, silenced for once, had to say on this
   occasion.

   It will be good for us all if, like this apostle, our trials
   consolidate our characters, and out of the shifting, fluctuating,
   impetuous nature that was blown about like sand by every gust of
   emotion there be made, by the pressure of responsibility and trial, and
   experience of our own unreliableness, the Rock' of a stable character,
   steadfast and unmovable, with calm resolution and fixed faith, on which
   the Great Architect can build some portion of His great temple.
     __________________________________________________________________

CRUMBS AND THE BREAD

   Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.
   22. And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and
   cried unto Him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my
   daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. 23. But He answered her not
   a word. And His disciples came and besought Him, saying, Send her away;
   for she crieth after us. 24. But He answered and said, I am not sent
   but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 25. Then came she and
   worshipped Him, saying, Lord, help me. 26. But He answered and said, It
   is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs. 27.
   And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall
   from their masters' table. 28. Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O
   woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her
   daughter was made whole from that very hour. 29. And Jesus departed
   from thence, and came nigh unto the sea of Galilee; and went up into a
   mountain, and sat down there. 30. And great multitudes came unto Him,
   having with them those that were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many
   others, and cast them down at Jesus' feet; and He healed them: 31.
   Insomuch that the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak,
   the maimed to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see: and
   they glorified the God of Israel.'--MATT. xv. 21-31.

   The King of Israel has passed beyond the bounds of Israel, driven by
   the hostility of those who should have been His subjects. The delegates
   of the priestly party from Jerusalem, who had come down to see into
   this dangerous enthusiasm which was beginning in Galilee, have made
   Christ's withdrawal expedient, and He goes northward, if not actually
   into the territory of Tyre and Sidon, at any rate to the border land.
   The incident of the Syro-Phoenician woman becomes more striking if we
   suppose that it took place on Gentile ground. At all events, after it,
   we learn from Mark that He made a considerable circuit, first north and
   then east, and so came round to the eastern side of the sea of Galilee,
   where the last paragraph of this section finds Him. The key to its
   meaning lies in the contrast between the single cure of the woman's
   demoniac daughter, obtained after so long imploring, and the
   spontaneous abundance of the cures wrought when Jesus again had Jewish
   sufferers to do with, even though it were on the half-Gentilised
   eastern shore of the lake. The contrast is an illustration of His
   parable of the crumbs that fell from the table and the plentiful feast
   that was spread upon it for the children.

   The story of the Syro-Phoenician woman naturally falls into four parts,
   each marked by the recurrence of He answered.'

   I. There is the piteous cry, and the answer of silence. Mark tells us
   that Jesus sought concealment in this journey; but distress has quick
   eyes, and this poor woman found Him. Canaanite as she is, and thus a
   descendant of the ancient race of Israel's enemies, she has learned to
   call Him the Son of David, owning His kingship, which His born subjects
   disowned. She beseeches for that which He delights to give, identifying
   herself with her poor child's suffering, and asking as for herself His
   mercy. As Chrysostom says: It was a sight to stir pity to behold a
   woman calling aloud in such distress, and that woman a mother, and
   pleading for a daughter, and that daughter in such evil plight.' In her
   humility she does not bring her child, nor ask Him to go to her. In her
   agony, she has nothing to say but to spread her grief before Him, as
   thinking that He, of whose pity she has heard, needs but to know in
   order to alleviate, and requires no motives urged to induce Him to
   help. In her faith, she thinks that His power can heal from afar. What
   more could He have desired? All the more startling, then, is His
   demeanour. All the conditions which He usually required, were present
   in her; but He, who was wont to meet these with swift and joyful
   over-answers, has no word to say to this poor, needy, persevering,
   humble, and faithful suppliant. The fountain seems frozen, from which
   such streams of blessing were wont to flow. His mercy seems clean gone,
   and His compassion to have failed. A Christ silent to a sufferer's cry
   is a paradox which contradicts the whole gospel story, and which, we
   may be very sure, no evangelist would have painted, if he had not been
   painting from the life.

   II. There is the disciples' intercession answered by Christ's statement
   of the limitations of His mission. Their petition evidently meant,
   Dismiss her by granting her request'; they knew in what fashion He was
   wont to send away' such suppliants. They seem, then, more pitiful than
   He is. But their thoughts are more for themselves than for her. That
   us' shows the cloven foot. They did not like the noise, and they feared
   it might defeat His purpose of secrecy; and so, by their phrase, Send
   her away,' they unconsciously betray that what they wanted was not
   granting the prayer, but getting rid of the petitioner. Perhaps, too,
   they mean, Say something to her; either tell her that Thou wilt or that
   Thou wilt not; break Thy silence somehow.' No doubt, it was intensely
   disagreeable to have a shrieking woman coming after them; and they were
   only doing as most of us would have done, and as so many of us do, when
   we give help without one touch of compassion, in order to stop some
   imploring mouth.

   Their apparently compassionate but really selfish intercession was put
   aside by the answer, which explains the paradox of His silence. It puts
   emphasis on two things: His subordination to the divine will of the
   Father, and the restrictions imposed thereby on the scope of His
   beneficent working. He was obeying the divine will in confining His
   ministry to the Jewish people, as we know that He did. Clearly, that
   restriction was necessary. It was a case of concentration in order to
   diffusion. The fire must be gathered on the hearth, if it is afterward
   to warm the chamber. There must be geographical and national limits to
   His life; and the Messiah, who comes last in the long series of the
   kings and prophets, can only be authenticated as the world's Messiah,
   by being first the fulfiller to the children of the promises made to
   the fathers. The same necessity, which required that revelation should
   be made through that nation, required that the climax and fulfiller of
   all revelation should limit His earthly ministry to it. This limitation
   must be regarded as applying only to His own personal ministry. It did
   not limit His sympathies, nor interfere with His consciousness of being
   the Saviour and King of the whole world. He had already spoken the
   parables which claimed it all for the area of the development of His
   kingdom, and in many other ways had given utterance to His
   consciousness of universal dominion, and His purpose of universal
   mercy. But He knew that there was an order of development in the
   kingdom, and that at its then stage the surest way to attain the
   ultimate universality was rigid limitation of it to the chosen people.
   This conviction locked His gracious lips against even this poor woman's
   piteous cry. We may well believe that His sympathy outran His
   commission, and that it would have been hard for so much love to be
   silent in the presence of so much sorrow, if He had not felt the solemn
   pressure of that divine necessity which ruled all His life. He was
   bound by His instructions, and therefore He answered her not a word.
   Individual suffering is no reason for transcending the limits of
   God-appointed functions; and he is absolved from the charge of
   indifference who refrains from giving help, which he can only give by
   overleaping the bounds of his activity, which have been set by the
   Father.

   III. We have, next, the persistent suppliant answered by a refusal
   which sounds harsh and hopeless. Christ's former words were probably
   not heard by the woman, who seems to have been behind the group. She
   saw that something was being said to Him, and may have gathered, from
   gestures or looks, that His reply was unfavourable. Perhaps there was a
   short pause in their walk, while they spoke, during which she came
   nearer. Now she falls at His feet, and with beautiful shamelessness,'
   as Chrysostom calls it, repeats her prayer, but this time with pathetic
   brevity, uttering but the one cry, Lord, help me!' The intenser the
   feeling, the fewer the words. Heart-prayers are short prayers. She does
   not now invoke Him as the Son of David, nor tell her sorrow over again,
   but flings herself in desperation on His pity, with the artless and
   unsupported cry, wrung from her agony, as she sees the hope of help
   fading away. Like Jacob, in his mysterious struggle, she wept, and made
   supplication unto Him.'

   As it would seem, her distress touched no chord of sympathy; and from
   the lips accustomed to drop oil and wine into every wound, came words
   like swords, cold, unfeeling, keen-edged, fitted and meant to lacerate.
   We shall not understand them, or Him, if we content ourselves with the
   explanation which jealousy for His honour as compassionate and tender
   has led many to adopt, that He meant all the long delay in granting her
   request, and the words which He spoke, only as tests of her faith. His
   refusal was a real refusal, founded on the divine decree, which He was
   bound to obey. His words to her, harsh as they unquestionably sound,
   are but another way of putting the limitation on which He had just
   insisted in His answer to the disciples. The bread' is the blessing
   which He, as the sent of God, brings; the children' are the lost sheep
   of the house of Israel'; the dogs' are the Gentile world. The meaning
   of the whole is simply the necessary restriction of His personal
   activity to the chosen nation. It is not meant to wound nor to insult,
   though, no doubt, it is cast in a form which might have been offensive,
   and would have repelled a less determined or less sorrowful heart. The
   form may be partly explained by the intention of trying her
   earnestness, which, though it is not the sole, or even the principal,
   is a subordinate, reason of our Lord's action. But it is also to be
   considered in the light of the woman's quick-witted retort, which drew
   out of it an inference which we cannot suppose that Christ did not
   intend. He uses a diminutive for dogs,' which shows that He is not
   thinking of the fierce, unclean animals, masterless and starving, that
   still haunt Eastern cities, and deserve their bad character, but of
   domestic pets, who live with the household, and are near the table. In
   fact, the woman seized His intention much better than later critics who
   find national scorn' in the words; and the fair inference from them is
   just that which she drew, and which constituted the law of the
   preaching of the Gospel,--To the Jew first, and also to the Gentile.'

   IV. We have the woman's retort, which wrings hope out of apparent
   discouragement, answered by Christ's joyful granting of her request.
   Out of His very words she weaves a plea. Yes, Lord; I am one of the
   dogs; then I am not an alien, but belong to the household.' The Revised
   Version does justice to her words by reading for even' instead of yet,'
   She does not enter a caveat against the analogy, but accepts it wholly,
   and only asks Him to carry out His own metaphor. She takes the sword
   from His hand, or, as Luther says, she catches Him in His own words.'
   She does not ask a place at the table, nor anything taken from those
   who have a prior claim to a more abundant share in His mercies. A crumb
   is enough for her, which they will never miss. In other and colder
   words, she acquiesces in the divine appointment which limits His
   mission to Israel; but she recognises that all nations belong to God's
   household, and that she and her countrymen have a real, though for the
   time inferior, position in it. She pleads that her gain will not be the
   children's loss, nor the answer to her prayers an infraction of the
   spirit of His mission. Perhaps, too, there may be a reference to the
   fact of His being there on Gentile soil, in her words, Which fall from
   the children's table.' She does not want the bread to be thrown from
   the table to her. She is not asking Him to transfer His ministry to
   Gentiles; but here He is. A crumb has fallen, in His brief visit. May
   she not eat of that? In this answer faith, humility, perseverance,
   swift perception of His meaning, and hallowed ingenuity and boldness,
   are equally admirable. By admitting that she was a dog,' and pleading
   her claim on that footing, she shows that she was a child.' And
   therefore, because she has shown herself one of the true household, in
   the fixedness of her faith, in the meekness of her humility, in the
   persistence of her prayers, Christ joyfully recognises that here is a
   case in which He may pass the line of ordinary limitation, and that, in
   doing so, He does not exceed His commission. Such faith is entitled to
   the fullest share of His gift. She takes her place beside the Gentile
   centurion as the two recipients of commendation from Him for the
   greatness of their faith. It had seemed as if He would give nothing;
   but He ends with giving all, putting the key of the storehouse into her
   hand, and bidding her take, not a crumb, but as thou wilt.' Her
   daughter is healed, by His power working at a distance; but that was
   not, we may be very sure, the last nor the best of the blessings which
   she took from that great treasure of which He made her mistress. Nor
   can we doubt that He rejoiced at the removal of the barrier which
   dammed back His help, as much as she did at the abundance of the stream
   which reached her at last.

   V. The final verses of our lesson give us a striking contrast to this
   story. Jesus is again on the shores of the lake, after a tour through
   the Tyrian and Sidonian territory, and then eastwards and southwards,
   to its eastern bank. There He, as on several former occasions, seeks
   seclusion and repose in the hills, which is broken in upon by the
   crowds. The old excitement and rush of people begin again. And large
   numbers of sick, lame, blind, dumb, maimed and many others,' are
   brought. They are cast down at His feet' in hot haste, with small
   ceremony, and, as would appear, with little petitioning for His healing
   power. But the same grace, for which the Canaanitish woman had needed
   to plead so hard, now seems to flow almost unasked. She had, as it
   were, wrung a drop out; now it gushes abundantly. She had not got her
   crumb' without much pleading; these get the bread almost without
   asking. It is this contrast of scant and full supplies which the
   evangelist would have us observe. And he points his meaning plainly
   enough by that expression, they glorified the God of Israel,' which
   seems to be Matthew's own, and not his quotation of what the crowd
   said. This abundance of miracle witnesses to the pre-eminence of Israel
   over the Gentile nations, and to the special revelation of Himself
   which God made to them in His Son. The crowd may have found in it only
   fuel for narrow national pride and contempt; but it was the divine
   method for the founding of the kingdom none the less; and these two
   scenes, set thus side by side, teach the same truth, that the King of
   men is first the King of Israel.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE DIVINE CHRIST CONFESSED, THE SUFFERING CHRIST DENIED

   When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Phllippi, He asked His
   disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am? 14. And
   they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and
   others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. 15. He saith unto them, But
   whom say ye that I am? 16. And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art
   the Christ, the Son of the living God. 17. And Jesus answered and said
   unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath
   not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven. 18. And I
   say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will
   build My church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
   19. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and
   whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be hound in heaven: and
   whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. 20.
   Then charged He His disciples that they should tell no man that He was
   Jesus the Christ. 21. From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto His
   disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things
   of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be
   raised again the third day. 22. Then Peter took Him, and began to
   rebuke Him, saying, Be it far from Thee, Lord: this shall not be unto
   Thee. 23. But He turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind Me,
   Satan: thou art an offence unto Me: for thou savourest not the things
   that be of God, but those that be of men. 24. Then said Jesus unto His
   disciples, If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself, and
   take up his cross, and follow Me. 25. For whosoever will save his life
   shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find
   it. 26. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world,
   and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his
   soul? 27. For the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father with
   His angels; and then He shall reward every man according to his works.
   28. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not
   taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His
   kingdom.'--MATT. xvi. 13-28.

   This section is embarrassing from its fulness of material. We can but
   lightly touch points on which volumes might be, and indeed have been,
   written.

   I. The first section (vs. 13-20) gives us Peter's great confession in
   the name of the disciples, and Christ's answer to it. The centre of
   this section is the eager avowal of the impetuous apostle, always
   foremost for good or evil. We note the preparation for it, its
   contents, and its results. As to the preparation,--our Lord is entering
   on a new era in His work, and desires to bring clearly into His
   followers' consciousness the sum of His past self-revelation. The
   excitement, which He had checked after the first miraculous feeding,
   had died down. The fickle crowd had gone away from Him, and the shadows
   of the cross were darkening. Amid the seclusion of the woods,
   fountains, and rocks of Caesarea, far away from distracting influences,
   He puts these two momentous questions. Following the Revised Version
   reading, we have a double contrast between the first and second. Men'
   answers to ye,' and the Son of Man' to I.' The first question is as to
   the partial and conflicting opinions among the multitudes who had heard
   His name for Himself from His own lips; the second, in its use of the
   I,' hints at the fuller unveiling of the depths of His gracious
   personality, which the disciples had experienced, and implies, Surely
   you, who have been beside Me, and known Me so closely, have reached a
   deeper understanding.' It has a tone of the same wistfulness and wonder
   as that other question of His, Have I been so long time with you, and
   yet hast thou not known Me?' For their sakes, He seeks to draw out
   their partly unconscious faith, that had been smouldering, fed by their
   daily experience of His beauty and tenderness. Half-recognised
   convictions float in many a heart, which need but a pointed question to
   crystallise into master-truths, to which, henceforward, the whole being
   is subject. Great are the dangers of articulate creeds; but great is
   the power of putting our shadowy beliefs into plain words. With the
   mouth confession is made unto salvation.'

   Why should this great question have been preceded by the other?
   Probably to make the disciples feel more distinctly the chaotic
   contradictions of the popular judgment, and their own isolation by
   their possession of the clearer light. He wishes them to see the gulf
   opening between them and their fellows, and so to bind them more
   closely to Himself. This is the question the answer to which settles
   everything for a man. It has an intensely sharp point. We cannot take
   refuge from it in the general opinion. Nor does any other man's
   judgment about Him matter one whit to us. This Christ has a strange
   power, after nineteen hundred years, of coming to each of us, with the
   same persistent interrogation on His lips. And to-day, as then, all
   depends on the answer which we give. Many answer by exalted estimates
   of Him, like these varying replies which ascribed to Him prophetic
   authority, but they have not understood His own name for Himself, nor
   drunk in the meaning of His self-revelation, unless they can reply with
   the full-toned confession of the apostle, which sets Him far above and
   apart from the highest and holiest.

   As to the contents of the confession, it includes both the human and
   the divine sides of Christ's nature. He is the Messiah, but He is more
   than what a Jew meant by that name; He is the Son of the living God,'
   by which we cannot indeed suppose that Peter meant all that he
   afterwards learned it contained, or all that the Church has now been
   taught of its meaning, but which, nevertheless, is not to be watered
   down as if it did not declare His unique filial relation to the Father,
   and so His divine nature. Nathanael had burst into rapturous adoration
   of Jesus as the Son of God' at the very beginning; and the disciples'
   glad confidence, which cast out the fear of the dim form striding
   across the sea, had echoed the confession; all had heard His words, No
   man knoweth the Father but the Son.' So we need not hesitate to
   interpret this confession as in essence and germ containing the whole
   future doctrine of our Lord's divinity. True, the speaker did not know
   all which lay in His words. Do we? Do we not see here an illustration
   of the method of Christian progress in doctrine, which consists not in
   the winning of new truths, but in the penetrating further into the
   meaning of old and initial truths? The conviction which made and makes
   a Christian, is this of Peter's; and Christian growth is into, not away
   from, it.

   As to the results, they are set forth in our Lord's answer, which
   breathes of delight, and we may almost say gratitude. His manhood knew
   the thrill of satisfaction at having some hearts which understood
   though partially, and loved even better than they knew. The solemn
   address to the apostle by his ancestral name, gives emphasis to the
   contrast between his natural weakness and his divine illumination and
   consequent privilege. The name of Peter is not here bestowed, but
   interpreted. Christ does not say Thou shalt be,' but Thou art,' and so
   presupposes the former conferring of the name. Unquestionably, the
   apostle is the rock on which the Church is built. The efforts to avoid
   that conclusion would never have been heard of, but for the Roman
   Catholic controversy; but they are as unnecessary as unsuccessful. Is
   it credible that in the course of an address which is wholly occupied
   with conferring prerogatives on the apostle, a clause should come in,
   which is concerned about an altogether different subject from the thou'
   of the preceding and the thee' of the following clauses, and which yet
   should take the very name of the apostle, slightly modified, for that
   other subject? We do not interpret other books in that fashion. But it
   was not the flesh and blood' Peter, but Peter as the recipient and
   faithful utterer of the divine inspiration in his confession, who
   received these privileges. Therefore they are not his exclusive
   property, but belong to his faith, which grasped and confessed the
   divine-human Lord; and wherever that faith is, there are these gifts,
   which are its results. They are the natural' consequences of the true
   faith in Christ, in that higher region where the supernatural is the
   natural. Peter's grasp of Christ's nature wrought upon his character,
   as pressure does upon sand, and solidified his shifting impetuosity
   into rock-like firmness. So the same faith will tend to do in any man.
   It made him the chief instrument in the establishment of the early
   Church. On souls steadied and made solid by like faith, and only on
   such, can Christ build His Church. Of course, the metaphor here regards
   Jesus, not as the foundation, as the Scripture generally does, but as
   the founder. The names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb are on the
   foundations of the heavenly city; and, in historical fact, the name of
   this apostle is graven on the deepest and first laid. In like
   subordinate sense, all who share that heroic faith and proclaim it are
   used by the Master-builder in the foundations of His Church; and Peter
   himself is eager to share his name among his brethren, when he says Ye
   also, as living stones.'

   Built on men who hold by that confession, the Church is immortal; and
   the armies who pour out of the gates of the pale kingdoms of the unseen
   world shall not be able to destroy it. Peter, as confessor of his
   Lord's human-divine nature, wields the keys of the kingdom of heaven,
   like a steward of a great house; and that too was fulfilled in his
   apostolic activity in his admitting Jews at Pentecost, and Gentiles in
   the house of Cornelius. But the same power attends all who share his
   faith and avowal, for the preaching of that faith is the opening of
   heaven's door to men. He receives the power of binding and loosing, by
   which is not meant that of forgiving or retaining sins, but that of
   prohibiting or allowing actions, or, in other words, of laying down the
   law of Christian conduct. This meaning of the metaphors is made certain
   by the common Jewish use of them. Despotic legislative power is not
   here committed to the apostle, but the great principle is taught that
   the morality of Christianity flows directly from its theology, and that
   whosoever, like Peter, grasps firmly the cardinal truth of Christ's
   nature, and all which flows therefrom, will have his insight so cleared
   that his judgments on what is permitted or forbidden to a Christian man
   will correspond with the decisions of heaven, in the measure of his
   hold upon the truth which underlies all religion and all morality,
   namely, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.' These are
   gifts to Peter indeed, but only as possessor of that faith, and are
   much more truly understood as belonging to all who possess like
   precious faith' (as Peter says), than as the prerogative of any
   individual or class.

   II. The second section (vs. 21-23) contains the startling new
   revelation of the suffering Messiah, and the disciples' repugnance to
   it. The Gospel has two parts: Jesus is the Christ, and the Christ must
   suffer and enter into His glory. Our Lord has made sure that the
   disciples have learned the first before He leads to the second. The
   very conviction of His dignity and divine nature made that second truth
   the more bewildering, but still the only road to it was through the
   first. Verse 21 covers an indefinite time, during which Jesus gradually
   taught His sufferings. Ordinarily we exaggerate the suddenness, and
   therefore the depth, of Peter's fall, by supposing that it took place
   immediately after his confession; but the narrative discountenances the
   idea, and merely says that Jesus then began' His new teaching. There
   had been veiled hints of it (such as John ii. 19, and Matt. ix. 15,
   xii. 40), but henceforward it assumed prominence, and was taught
   without veil. It was no new thought to Himself, forced on Him by the
   growing enmity of the nation. The cross always cast its shadow on His
   path. He was no enthusiast, beginning with the dream of winning a world
   to His side, and slowly and heroically making up His mind to die a
   martyr, but His purpose in being born was to minister and to die, a
   ransom for the many. We have not here to do with a growing
   consciousness, but simply with an increasing clearness of utterance.
   Note the detailed accuracy of His prevision, which points to Jerusalem
   as the scene, and to the rulers of the nation as the instruments, and
   to death as the climax, and to resurrection as the issue, of His
   sufferings; the clear setting forth of the divine necessity which, as
   it ruled all His life, ruled here also, and is expressed in that solemn
   must'; and the perfectly willing acceptance by Him of that necessity,
   implied in that go,' and certified by many another word of His. The
   necessity was no external compulsion, driving Him to an unwelcome
   sacrifice, but one imposed alike by filial obedience and by brotherly
   love. He must die because He would save.

   How vividly the scene of Peter's rash rejection of the teaching is
   described! The apostle, full of eager love, still, as of old, swift to
   speak, and driven by unexamined impulse, lays his hand on Christ, and
   draws Him a little apart, while he begins' to pour out words which show
   that he has forgotten his confession. Rebuke' must not be softened down
   into anything less vehement or more respectful. He knows better than
   Jesus what will happen. Perhaps his assurance that this shall never be'
   means We will fight first.' But he is not allowed to finish what he
   began; for the Master, whom he loved unwisely but well, turns His back
   on him, as in horror, and shows by the terrible severity of His rebuke
   how deeply moved He is. He repels the hint in almost the same words as
   He had used to the tempter in the wilderness, of whom that Peter, who
   had so lately been the recipient and proclaimer of a divine
   illumination, has become the mouthpiece. So possible is it to fall from
   sunny heights to doleful depths! So little can any divine inspiration
   be permanent, if the man turn away from it to think man's thoughts, and
   set his affections on the things which men desire! So certainly does
   minding these degrade to becoming an organ of Satan! The words are full
   of restrained emotion, which reveal how real a temptation Peter had
   flung in Christ's path. The rock has become a stone of stumbling; the
   man Jesus shrank from the cross with a natural and innocent shrinking,
   which never made His will tremulous, but was none the less real; and
   such words from loving lips did affect him. Let us note, on the whole,
   that the complete truth about Jesus Christ must include these two
   parts,--His divine nature and Messiahship, and His death on the cross;
   and that neither alone is the gospel, nor is he a disciple, such as
   Christ desires, who does not cleave to both with mind and heart.

   III. In verses 24-28, the law, which ruled the Master's life, is
   extended to the servants. They recoiled from the thought of His having
   to suffer. They had to learn that they must suffer too if they would be
   His. First, the condition of discipleship is set before them as being
   the fellowship of His suffering. If any man will' gives them the option
   of withdrawal. A new epoch is beginning, and they will have to enlist
   again, and to do so with open eyes. He will have no unwilling soldiers,
   nor any who have been beguiled into the ranks. No doubt, some went
   away, and walked no more with Him. The terms of service are clear.
   Discipleship means imitation, and imitation means self-crucifixion. At
   that time they would only partially understand what taking up their
   cross was, but they would apprehend that a martyred master must needs
   have for followers men ready to be martyrs too. But the requirement
   goes much deeper than this. There is no discipleship without
   self-denial, both in the easier form of starving passions and desires,
   and in the harder of yielding up the will, and letting His will
   supplant ours. Only so can we ever come after Him, and of such
   sacrifice of self the cross is the eminent example. We cannot think too
   much of it as the instrument of our reconciliation and forgiveness, but
   we may, and too often do, think too little of it as the pattern of our
   lives. When Jesus began to teach His death, He immediately presented it
   as His servants' example. Let us not forget that fact.

   The ground of the law is next stated in verse 25. The desire to save
   life is the loss of life in the highest sense. If that desire guide us,
   then farewell to enthusiasm, courage, the martyr spirit, and all which
   makes man's life nobler than a beast's. He who is ruled mainly by the
   wish to keep a whole skin, loses the best part of what he is so anxious
   to keep. In a wider application, regard for self as a ruling motive is
   destruction, and selfishness is suicide. On the other hand, lives
   hazarded for Christ are therein truly saved, and if they be not only
   hazarded, but actually lost, such loss is gain; and the same law, by
   which the Master must' die and rise again, will work in the servant.
   Verse 26 urges the wisdom of such apparent folly, and enforces the
   requirement by the plain consideration that life' is worth more than
   anything beside, and that on the two grounds, that the world itself
   would be of no use to a dead man, and that, once lost, life' cannot be
   bought back. Therefore the dictate of the wisest prudence is that
   seemingly prodigal flinging away of the lower life' which puts us in
   possession of the higher. Note that the appeal is here made to a
   reasonable regard to personal advantage, and that in the very act of
   urging to crucify self. So little did Christ think, as some people do,
   that the desire to save one's soul is selfishness.

   Verse 27 confirms all the preceding by the solemn announcement of the
   coming of the Son of Man as Judge. Mark the dignity of the words. He is
   to come in the glory of the Father.' That ineffable and inaccessible
   light which rays forth from the Father enwraps the Son. Their glory is
   one. The waiting angels are His.' He renders to every man according to
   his doing (his actions considered as one whole). Thus He claims for
   Himself universal sway, and the power of accurately determining the
   whole moral character of every life, as well as that of awarding
   precisely graduated retribution. They surely shall then find their
   lives who have followed Him here.

   Verse 28 adds, with His solemn verily,' a confirmation of this
   announcement of His coming to judge. The question of what event is
   referred to may best be answered by noting that it must be one
   sufficiently far off from the moment of speaking to allow of the death
   of the greater number of His hearers, and sufficiently near to allow of
   the survival of some; that it must also be an event, after which these
   survivors would go the common road into the grave; that it is
   apparently distinguished from His coming in the glory of the Father,'
   and yet is of such a nature as to afford convincing proof of the
   establishment of His kingdom on earth, and to be, in some sort, a sign
   of that final act of judgment. All these requirements (and they are all
   the fair inferences from the words) meet only in the destruction of
   Jerusalem, and of the national life of the chosen people. That was a
   crash of which we faintly realise the tremendous significance. It swept
   away the last remnant of the hope that Israel was to be the kingdom of
   the Messiah; and from out of the dust and chaos of that fall the
   Christian Church emerged, manifestly destined for world-wide extension.
   It was a great and terrible day of the Lord,' and, as such, was a
   precursor and a prophecy of the day of the Lord, when He shall come in
   the glory of the Father,' and render unto every man according to his
   deeds.'
     __________________________________________________________________

CHRIST FORESEEING THE CROSS

   From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto His disciples, how that
   He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and
   chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third
   day.'--MATT. xvi. 21.

   The time' referred to in the text was probably a little more than six
   months before the Crucifixion, when Jesus was just on the point of
   finally leaving Galilee, and travelling towards Jerusalem. It was an
   epoch in His ministry. The hostility of the priestly party in the
   capital had become more pronounced, and simultaneously the fickle
   enthusiasm of the Galilean crowds, which had been cooled by His
   discouragement, had died down into apathy. He and His followers are
   about to leave familiar scenes and faces, and to plunge into perilous
   and intrude paths. He is resolved that, if they will come after Him,'
   as He bids them in a subsequent verse, it shall be with their eyes
   open, and as knowing that to come after Him now means to cut themselves
   loose from old moorings, and to put out into the storm. They shall be
   abundantly certified that their journeying to Jerusalem is not a
   triumphal procession to a crown, but a march to a cross.

   So, this new epoch in His life is attended with a new development of
   His teaching. My text sums up the result of many interviews in which,
   by slow degrees, He sought to put the disciples in possession of this
   unwelcome truth. It was prepared for, by the previous conversation in
   which His question elicited from Peter, as the mouthpiece of the
   apostles, the great confession of His Messiahship and Divinity. Settled
   in their belief of these truths, however imperfect their intellectual
   grasp of them, they might perhaps be able to receive the mournful
   mystery of His passion.

   I. We have here set forth in the first place our Lord's anticipation of
   the Cross.

   Mark the tone of the language, the minuteness of the detail, the
   absolute certainty of the prevision. That is not the language of a man
   who simply is calculating that the course which he is pursuing is
   likely to end in his martyrdom; but the thing lies there before Him, a
   definite, fixed certainty; every detail known, the scene, the
   instruments, the non-participation of these in the final act of His
   death, His resurrection, and its date,--all manifested and mapped out
   in His sight, and all absolutely certain.

   Now this was by no means the first time that the certainty of the Cross
   was plain to Christ. It was not even the first time that it had been
   announced in His teaching. Veiled hints; allusions, brief but pregnant,
   had been scattered through His earlier ministry--such, for instance, as
   the enigmatical word at its very beginning, Destroy this Temple, and in
   three days I will raise it up'; or as the profound word to the rabbi
   that sought Him by night, As Moses lifted up the serpent in the
   wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up'; or as the passing
   hint, dropped to the people, in symbolical language, about the sign of
   the prophet Jonas'; or as the grief foreshadowed dimly to the apostles,
   of the withdrawal of the Bridegroom, and their fasting in those days.'
   These hints, and no doubt others unrecorded, had cropped to the surface
   before; and what we have to do with here, is neither the dawning of an
   expectation in Christ, nor the first utterance of the certainty of the
   Cross, but simply the beginning of a continuous and unenigmatical
   teaching of it, as an element in His instructions to His disciples.

   So then, we have to recognise the fact that our Lord's prevision of the
   end--shone, I was going to say, perhaps it might be truer to say,
   darkened,--all the path along which He had to travel.

   I think that people dogmatise a great deal too glibly as to what they
   know very little about, the interaction of the divine and the human
   elements in Christ, and on the one side are far too certain in their
   affirmation that His humanity possessed in some reflected fashion the
   divine gift of omniscience; and on the other hand, that His manhood,
   passing through the process of human development, and increasing in
   wisdom, was necessarily in its earlier stages void of the consciousness
   of His Messianic mission. I dare not affirm either yes' or no' about
   that matter; but this I am sure of, that if ever there was a time in
   the development of the Manhood of Jesus Christ when He began to know
   Himself as the Messias, at that same time He began to be certain of the
   Cross. For His Messianic work required the Cross, and the divine thing
   that was in Him was born into the world for a double purpose, to
   minister and to die.

   So, dear friends, putting aside mere metaphysics, which are superficial
   after all, we have to recognise this as the fact, that all through His
   career there arose before our Lord the certainty of that death, and
   that it did not assume to Him the aspect which such a prospect might
   have assumed to others as a possible result of a mission that failed,
   but it assumed to Him the aspect of the certain result of a work that
   was accomplished. He began His career with no illusions, such as other
   teachers, reformers, philanthropists, men that have moved society, have
   always begun with. Moses might suppose his brethren would have
   understood how that God by His hand would deliver them,' but Christ had
   no such illusion. He knew from the beginning that He came to be
   rejected and to die. And so He trod life's common way,' with that grim
   certainty rising ever before Him. I suppose that He did not, as you and
   I do, forget the death that awaits us, and find the non-remembrance of
   it the condition of much of our energy, but that it was perpetually in
   His sight.

   Now I do not think that we sufficiently dwell upon that fact as an
   element in the human experience of our Lord. What beauty it gives to
   His gentleness, to the leisureliness of heart with which He was ready
   to make everybody's sorrow His own, and to lay a healing and a loving
   finger upon every wound! With this certainty before Him, there was yet
   no strain manifest upon His spirit, no self-absorption, no shutting
   Himself out from other people's burdens because He had so heavy ones of
   His own to carry; but He was ready for every joy, ready for all
   sympathy, ready for every help; and if we cannot say that, in cheerful
   godliness,' as I think we may, at least we can say that with solemn joy
   and untroubled readiness, He journeyed towards that Cross. This Isaac
   was under no illusions as to who the Lamb for the offering was, but
   knowing it, He patiently carried the wood and climbed the hill, ready
   for the Father's will.

   II. That brings me to notice the second point here, our Lord's
   recognition of the necessity of His suffering.

   Mark that He does not say that He shall suffer. Certainty is not all
   that He proclaims here, however absolute that certainty might be, but
   it is He must.' He is speaking not only of the historical fact, but of
   the need, deep in the nature of things, for His sufferings that were to
   follow.

   And though these were wrought out by His own willing submission on the
   one hand, and by the unfettered play of the evil passions of the worst
   of men on the other, yet over all that apparent chaos of unbridled
   devildom there ruled the unalterable purpose of God; and the must' was
   wrought out through the passions of evil-doers and the voluntary
   submission of the innocent sufferer; thus setting before us, in the
   central fact of the history of humanity, viz. the Cross and passion of
   Jesus Christ, the eminent example of that great mystery how the
   absolute freedom of the human will, and the responsibility of the guilt
   of human wrong-doers, are congruous with the fixed purpose of an
   all-determining and all-ruling Providence.

   But that is apart from my purpose. Mark then, that our Lord's
   recognition of this necessity for His suffering is, on the first and
   plainest aspect of it, His recognition that His suffering was necessary
   on the ground of filial obedience. All through His life we hear that
   must' echoing, and His whole spirit bowed to it. As He says Himself,
   The Son can do nothing of Himself.' As was said for Him of old: Lo, I
   come. In the volume of the book it is written of Me, I delight to do
   Thy will, and Thy law is within My heart.' So the Father's will is the
   Son's law; and the Father's Thou shalt' is answered by the Son's I
   must.'

   But yet that necessity grounded on filial obedience was no mere
   external necessity determined solely by the divine will. God so willed
   it, because it must be so; that it must be so was not because God so
   willed it. That is to say, the work to which Christ had set His hand
   was a work that demanded the Cross, nor could it be accomplished
   without it. For it was the work of redeeming the world, and required
   more than a beautiful life, more than a divine gentleness of heart,
   more than the homely and yet deep wisdom of His teachings, it required
   the sacrifice that He offered on the Cross.

   So, dear friends, Christ's must' is but this: My work is not
   accomplished except I die.' And remember that the connection between
   our Lord's work and our Lord's death is not that which subsists between
   the works and the deaths of great teachers, or heroic martyrs, or
   philanthropists and benefactors, who will gladly pay the price of life
   in order to carry out their loving or their wise designs. It is no mere
   appendage to His work, nor the price that He paid for having done it,
   but it is His very work in its vital centre.

   I pray you to consider if there is any theory of the meaning and power
   of the death of Jesus Christ which adequately explains this must,'
   except the one that He died a sacrifice for the sins of the world. On
   any other hypothesis, as it seems to me, of what His death meant, it is
   surplusage, over and above His work: not adding much, either to His
   teaching or to the beauty of His example, and having no absolute
   stringent necessity impressed upon it. There is one doctrine--that when
   He died He bare the sins of the whole world--which makes His death a
   necessity; and I ask you, Is there any other doctrine which does? Take
   care of a Christianity which would not be much impoverished if the
   Cross were struck out of it altogether.

   There is a deeper question, on which, as I believe, it does not become
   us to enter, and that is, What is the necessity for the necessity? Why
   must it be that He, who is the Redeemer of the world, must needs be the
   Sacrifice for the world? We do not know enough about the depths of the
   divine nature and the divine government to speak very wisely or
   reverently upon that subject, and I, for one, abjure the attempt, which
   seems to me to be presumptuous--the attempt to explain why there was
   needed a sacrifice for sin in order to the forgiveness of sin. If I
   knew all about God, I could tell you; and nobody, that does not, can.
   But we can see, as far as concerns us, that, as the history of all
   religions tells us, for the forgiveness and acceptance of sinful men a
   pure sacrifice is needed; and that for teaching us the love of God, the
   hideousness and wages of sin, for our emancipation from evil, for the
   quieting of our consciences, for a foothold for faith, for an adequate
   motive of self-surrender and obedience, his sacrificial death is
   needful. The life and death of Jesus Christ, regarded as God's
   sacrifice for the world's sin, does all this. The life and death of
   Jesus Christ, regarded in any other aspect, does not do this.
   Historically speaking, mutilated forms of Christianity, which have not
   known what to do with the Cross of Christ, have lost their
   constraining, purifying, and aggressive power. For us sinful men, if we
   are to be delivered from evil and become sons of God, He must suffer
   many things, and be killed, and rise again the third day.

   III. Now note further, how we have here also our Lord's willing
   acceptance of the necessity.

   It is one thing to recognise, and another thing to accept, a needs-be.
   This must' was no unwelcome obligation laid upon Him against His will,
   but one to which His whole nature responded and which He accepted. No
   doubt there was in Him the innocent instinctive physical shrinking from
   death. No doubt the Cross, in so far, was pain and suffering. No doubt
   we are to trace the reality of a temptation in Peter's rash words which
   follow, as indicated to us by the severity and almost vehemence of the
   action with which Christ puts it away. No doubt there is a profound
   meaning in that answer of His, Thou art a stumbling-block to Me.' The
   Rock' is turned into a stone of stumbling, and Peter's suggestion
   appeals to something in Him which responded to it.

   That shrinking might be a shrinking of nature, but it was not a recoil
   of will. The ship may toss in dreadful billows, but the needle points
   to the pole. The train may rock upon the line, but it never leaves the
   rails. Christ felt that the Cross was an evil, but that feeling never
   made Him falter in His determination to bear it. His willing acceptance
   of the necessity was owing to His full resolve to save the world. He
   must die because He would redeem, and He would redeem because He could
   not but love. He saved others,' and therefore Himself He cannot save.'
   So the must' was not an iron chain that fastened Him to His Cross. Like
   some of the heroic martyrs of old, who refused to be bound to the
   funeral pile, He stood there chained to it by nothing but His own will
   and loving purpose to save the world.

   And, brethren, in that loving purpose, each of us may be sure that we
   had an individual and a personal share. Whatever the interaction
   between the divinity and the humanity, this at all events is certain,
   that every soul of man has his distinct and definite place in Christ's
   knowledge and in Christ's love. Each of us all may be sure that one
   strand of the cords of love which fastened Him to the Cross was His
   love for me; and each of us may say--He must die, because He loved me,
   and gave Himself for me.'

   IV. Lastly, notice here our Lord's teaching the necessity of His death.

   This announcement was preceded, as I remarked, by that conversation
   which led to the crystallising of the half-formed convictions of the
   apostles in a definite creed, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
   living God.' But that was not all that they needed to know and believe
   and trust to. That was the first volume of their lesson-book. The
   second volume was this, that Christ must suffer.' And so let us learn
   the central place which the Cross holds in Christ's teaching. They tell
   us that the doctrine of Christ as the Sacrifice for the world is not in
   the Gospels. Where are the eyes that read the Gospels and do not see
   it? The theory of it is not there; the announcements of it are. And in
   this latest section of our Lord's ministry, they are fuller and more
   frequent than in the earlier, for the plain reason which is implied by
   the preparation through which He passed these disciples, ere He
   ventured to communicate the mournful and the bewildering fact. There
   must be, first, the grasp of His Messiahship, and some recognition that
   He is the Son of God, ere it is possible to go on to speak of the
   Cross, the full message concerning which could not be spoken until
   after the Resurrection and the Ascension.

   But note, you do not understand Christ's Cross unless you bring to it
   the faith in Christ's Messiahship and the belief in some measure that
   He is the Son of God. Neither the pathos nor the power of His death is
   intelligible if it be simply like other deaths--the dying of a man who
   is born subject to the law of mortality, and who yields to it by
   natural process. Unless you and I take upon our lips, though with far
   deeper meaning, the words with which the heathen centurion gazed upon
   the dying Christ, and say, Truly this was the Son of God!' His Cross is
   common and trivial and insignificant; but if we can thus speak, then it
   stands before us as the crown of all God's manifestations in the
   world,' the wisdom of God and the power of God.'

   And then note, still further, how, without the Cross, these other
   truths are not the whole gospel. There were disciples then, as there
   have been disciples since, and as there are to-day, who were willing to
   accept, Thou art the Christ'; and willing in some sense to say Thou art
   the Son of God,' but stumbled when He said, The Son of Man must
   suffer.' Brethren, I venture to urge that the gospel of the
   Incarnation, precious as it is, is not the whole gospel, and that the
   full-orbed truth about Jesus Christ is that He is the Christ, and that
   He died for our sins, and rose again to live for ever, our Priest and
   King.

   We need a whole Christ. For our soul's salvation, for the quieting of
   our consciences, the forgiveness of our sins, for new life, for peace,
   purity, obedience, love, joy, hope, our faith must grasp Christ, and
   Him crucified.' A half Christ is no Christ, and unless we have as
   sinful men laid hold of the one Sacrifice for sins for ever, which He
   offered, we do not understand even the preciousness of the half Christ
   whom we perceive, nor know the full beauty of His example, the depth of
   His teaching, nor the tenderness of His heart.

   I beseech you, ask yourselves, What Christ can do for me the things
   which I need to have done, except the Christ that died, yea, rather,
   that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also
   maketh intercession for us'?
     __________________________________________________________________

THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY

   And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and
   bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, 2. And was transfigured
   before them: and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was
   white as the light. 3. And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and
   Elias talking with Him. 4. Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus.
   Lord, it is good for us to be here: if Thou wilt, let us make here
   three tabernacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias.
   5. While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and
   behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in
   whom I am well pleased; hear ye Him. 6. And when the disciples heard
   it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid. 7. And Jesus came
   and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid. 8. And when they
   had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only. 9. And as
   they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying, Tell the
   vision to no man, until the Son of Man be risen again from the dead.
   10. And His disciples asked Him, saying, Why then say the scribes that
   Elias must first come? 11. And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias
   truly shall first come, and restore all things. 12. But I say unto you,
   That Elias is come already, and they knew him not, but have done unto
   him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of Man suffer
   of them. 13. Then the disciples understood that He spake unto them of
   John the Baptist.'--MATT. xvii. 1-13.

   The early guess at Tabor as the scene of the Transfiguration must be
   given up as untenable. Some one of the many peaks of Hermon rising
   right over Caesarea is a far more likely place. But the silence of all
   the accounts as to the locality surely teaches us the unimportance of
   knowledge on the point. The dangers of knowing would more than outweigh
   the advantages. A similar indefiniteness attaches to the when. Are we
   to think of it as occurring by night, or by day? Perhaps the former is
   slightly the more probable, from the fact of the descent being made the
   next day' (Luke). Our conception of the scene will be very different,
   as we think of that lustre from His face, and that bright cloud, as
   outshining the blaze of a Syrian sun, or as filling the night with
   glory. But we cannot settle which view is correct.

   There are three distinct parts in the whole incident: the
   Transfiguration proper; the appearance of Moses and Elijah; and the
   cloud with the voice from it.

   I. The Transfiguration proper.

   The general statement that Jesus was transfigured before them' is
   immediately followed out into explanatory details. These are
   twofold--the radiance of His face, and the gleaming whiteness of His
   raiment, which shone like the snow on Hermon when it is smitten by the
   sunshine. Probably we are to think of the whole body as giving forth
   the same mysterious light, which made itself visible even through the
   white robe He wore. This would give beautiful accuracy and
   appropriateness to the distinction drawn in the two metaphors,--that
   His face was as the sun,' in which the undiluted glory was seen; and
   His garments as the light,' which is sunshine diffused and weakened.
   There is no hint of any external source of the brightness. It does not
   seem to have been a reflection from the visible symbol of the divine
   presence, as was the fading radiance on the face of Moses. That symbol
   does not come into view till the last stage of the incident. We are
   then to think of the brightness as rising from within, not cast from
   without. We cannot tell whether it was voluntary or involuntary. Luke
   gives a pregnant hint, in connecting it with Christ's praying, as if
   the calm ecstasy of communion with the Father brought to the surface
   the hidden glory of the Son. Can it be that such glory always
   accompanied His prayers, and that its presence may have been one reason
   for the sedulous privacy of these, except on this one occasion, when He
   desired that His faithful three should be eye-witnesses of His
   majesty'? However that may be, we have probably to regard the
   Transfiguration as the transient making visible, in the natural,
   symbolic form of light, of the indwelling divine glory, which dwelt in
   Him as in a shrine, and then shone through the veil of His flesh. John
   explains the event, though His words go far beyond it, when he says, We
   beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.'

   What was the purpose of the Transfiguration? Matthew seems to tell us
   in that before them.' It was for their sakes, not for His, as indeed
   follows from the belief that it was the irradiation from within of the
   indwelling light. The new epoch of His life, in which they were to have
   a share of trial and cross-bearing, needed some great encouragement
   poured into their tremulous hearts; and so, for once, He deigned to let
   them look on His face shining as the sun, for a remembrance when they
   saw it covered with shame and spitting' and His brow bleeding from the
   thorns. But perhaps we may venture a step farther, and see here some
   prophecy of that body of His glory in which He now reigns. Speculations
   as to the difference between the earthly body of our Lord and ours are
   fascinating but unsubstantial. It was a true human body, susceptible of
   hunger, pain, weariness; but we are not taught that it carried in it
   the necessity of death. It may have been more pliable to the spirit's
   behests, and more transparent to its light, than ours. There may have
   been in that hour of radiance some approximation to the perfect harmony
   between the perfect spirit and the body, which is its fit organ, which
   we know is His now, and to which we also know that He will conform the
   body of our humiliation. Then His face shone as the sun'; when one of
   these three saw Him in His glory, His countenance was as the sun
   shineth in his strength'; and His own promise to us is that we too
   shall shine forth as the sun.' Then His garments were white as the
   light; His promise is that they who are worthy shall walk with Him in
   white.' The Transfiguration was a revelation and a prophecy.

   II. The appearance of Moses and Elijah.

   While the three are gazing with dazzled eyes, suddenly, as if shaped
   out of air, there stand by Jesus two mighty forms, evidently men, and
   yet, according to Luke, encompassed in the white radiance, walking with
   the Son of Man in a better furnace. What a stound of awe and wonder
   must have touched the gazers as the conviction who these were filled
   their minds, and they recognised, we know not how, the mighty
   lineaments of the lawgiver and the prophet! Did the three mortals
   understand the meaning of the words of the heavenly three? We cannot
   tell. Nor does Matthew tell us what was the theme of that wondrous
   colloquy. These two might have asked, Why hast Thou disquieted us to
   bring us up?' What is the answer? Wherefore were they there? To tell
   Jesus that He was to die? No, for that lay plain before Him. To learn
   from Him the mystery of His passion, that they might be His heralds,
   the one in Paradise, the other in the pale kingdoms of Hades? Perhaps,
   but, more probably, they came to minister to Him strength for His
   conflict, even as women did of their substance, and an angel did in
   Gethsemane. Perhaps the strength came to Jesus from seeing how they
   yearned for the fulfilment of the typified redemption; perhaps it came
   from His being able to speak to them as He could not to any on earth.
   At all events, surely Moses and Elijah were not brought there for their
   own sakes alone, nor for the sake of the witnesses, but also for His
   sake who was prepared by that converse for His cross.

   Further, their appearance set forth Christ's death, which was their
   theme, as the climax of revelation. The Law with its requirement and
   its sacrifices, and Prophecy with its forward-looking gaze, stand
   there, in their representatives, and bear witness that their converging
   lines meet in Jesus. The finger that wrote the law, and the finger that
   smote and parted Jordan, are each lifted to point to Him. The stern
   voices that spoke the commandments and that hurled threatenings at the
   unworthy occupants of David's throne, both proclaim, Behold the Lamb of
   God, the perfect Fulfiller of law, the true King of Israel.' Their
   presence and their speech were the acknowledgment that this was He whom
   they had seen from afar; their disappearance proclaims that their work
   is done when they have pointed to Him.

   Their presence also teaches us that Jesus is the life of all the living
   dead. Of course, care must be exercised in drawing dogmatic conclusions
   from a manifestly abnormal incident, but some plain truths do result
   from it. Of these two, one had died, though mystery hung round his
   death and burial; the other had passed into the heavens by another gate
   than that of death; and here they both stand with lives undiminished by
   their mysterious changes, in fulness of power and of consciousness,
   bathed in glory, which was as their native air now. They are witnesses
   of an immortal life, and proofs that His yet unpierced hands held the
   keys of life and death. He opened the gate which moves backwards to no
   hand but His, and summoned them; and they come, with no napkins about
   their heads, and no trailing grave-clothes entangling their feet, and
   own Him as the King of life.

   They speak too of the eager onward gaze which the Old Testament
   believers turned to the coming Deliverer. In silent anticipation,
   through all these centuries, good men had lain down to die, saying, I
   wait for Thy salvation,' and after death their spirits had lived
   expectant and crying, like the souls under the altar, How long, O Lord,
   how long?' Now these two are brought from their hopeful repose,
   perchance to learn how near their deliverance was; and behind them we
   seem to discern a dim crowd of holy men and women, who had died in
   faith, not having received the promises, and who throng the portals of
   the unseen world, waiting for the near advent of the better Samson to
   bear away the gates to the city on the hill, and lead thither their
   ransomed train.

   Peter's bewildered words need not long detain us. He is half dazed,
   but, true to his rash nature, thinks that he must say something, and
   that to do something will relieve the tension of his spirit. His
   proposal, so ridiculous as it is, shows that he had not really
   understood what he saw. It also expresses his feeling that it is much
   better to be there than to be travelling to a cross--and so may stand
   as an instance of a very real temptation for us all, that of avoiding
   unwelcome duties and shrinking from rough work, on the plea of holding
   sweet communion with Jesus on the mountain. It was not good' to stay
   there, and leave demoniacs uncured in the plain.

   III. The cloud and the witnessing voice.

   Peter's words receive no answer, for, while he is speaking, another
   solemn and silencing wonder has place. Suddenly a strange cloud forms
   in the cloudless sky. It is bright' with no reflection caught from the
   sun; it is borne along by no wind; slowly it settles down upon them,
   like a roof, and, bright though it is, casts a strange shadow.
   According to one reading of Luke's account, Christ and the two heavenly
   witnesses pass within its folds, leaving the disciples without, and
   that separation seems confirmed by Matthew's saying that the voice came
   out of the cloud.' Our evangelist points to its brightness as singular.
   It was not merely bright, as if smitten by the sunlight, but its whole
   substance was luminous. It is almost a contradiction to speak of a
   cloud of light, and the anomalous expression points to something beyond
   nature. We cannot but remember the pillar which had a heart of fire,
   and glowed in the darkness over the sleeping camp, and the cloud which
   filled the house, and drove the priests from the sanctuary by its
   brightness. Nor should we forget that at His Ascension Jesus was not
   lost to sight in the blue; but while He was yet visible in the act of
   blessing, a cloud received Him out of their sight.' It is, in fact, the
   familiar symbol of the divine presence, which had long been absent from
   the temple, and now reappears. We may note the beauty and felicity of
   the emblem. It blends light and darkness, so suggesting how the very
   same attributes' of God are both; and how His revelation of Himself
   reveals Him as unrevealable. The manifestation of His power is also the
   hiding of His power.' The inaccessible light is also thick darkness.
   The same characteristics of His nature are light and joy to some, and
   blackness and woe to others.

   We may note, too, Christ's passage into the cloud. Moses and Elijah,
   being purged from mortal weakness, could pass thither. But Jesus, alone
   of men, could pass in the flesh into that brightness, and be hid in its
   fiery heart, unshrinking and unconsumed. Who among us shall dwell with
   everlasting burnings? His entrance into it is but the witness to the
   purity of His nature, and the absence in Him of all fuel for fire. That
   bright cloud was His own calm home, His habitation from eternity,' and
   where no man, compassed with flesh and sin, could live, He enters as
   the Son into the bosom of the Father.

   Then comes the articulate witness to the Son. The solemnity and force
   of the attestation are increased, if we conceive of the disciples as
   outside the cloud, and parted from Jesus. This word is meant for them
   only, and so is distinguished from the similar voice at the baptism,
   and has added the imperative Hear him.' The voice bears witness to the
   mystery of our Lord's person. It points to the contrast between His two
   attendants and Him. They are servants, this is the Son.' It sets forth
   His supernaturally born humanity, and, deeper still, His true and
   proper divinity, which John unfolds, in his Gospel, as the deepest
   meaning of the name. It testifies to the unbroken union of love between
   the Father and Him, and therein to the absolute perfection of our
   Lord's character. He is the adequate object of the eternal, divine
   love. As He has been from the timeless depths of old, He is, in His
   human life, the object of the ever-unruffled divine complacency, in
   whom the Father can glass Himself as in a pure mirror. It enjoins
   obedient listening. God's voice bids us hear Christ's voice. If He is
   the beloved Son, listening to Him is listening to God. This is the
   purpose of the whole, so far as we are concerned. We are to hear Him,
   when He declares God; when He witnesses of Himself, of His love, His
   work, His death, His judgeship; when He invites us to come to Him, and
   find rest; when He commands and when He promises. Amid the Babel of
   this day, let us listen to that voice, low and gentle, pleading and
   soft, authoritative, majestic, and sovereign. It will one day shake not
   the earth only, but also the heaven.' But, as yet, it calls us with
   strange sweetness, and the music of love in every tone. Well for us if
   our hearts answer, Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.'

   Matthew tells us that this voice from the cloud completely unmanned the
   disciples, who fell on their faces, and lay there, we know not how
   long, till Jesus came and laid a loving hand on them, bidding them
   arise, and not fear. So when they staggered to their feet, and looked
   around, they saw nothing but the grey stones of the hillside and the
   blue sky. That dread voice was past,' and the silence was broken only
   by the hum of insects or the twitter of a far-off bird. The strange
   guests have gone; the radiance has faded from the Master's face, and
   all is as it used to be. They saw no one, save Jesus only.' It is the
   summing up of revelation; all others vanish, He abides. It is the
   summing up of the world's history. Thickening folds of oblivion wrap
   the past, and all its mighty names become forgotten; but His figure
   stands out, solitary against the background of the past, as some great
   mountain, which travellers see long after the lower summits are sunk
   beneath the horizon. Let us make this the summing up of our lives. We
   can venture to take Him for our sole helper, pattern, love, and aim,
   because He, in His singleness, is enough for our hearts. There are many
   fragmentary precious things, but there is only one pearl of great
   price. And then this will be a prophecy of our deaths--a brief
   darkness, a passing dread, and then His touch and His voice saying,
   Arise, be not afraid.' So we shall lift up our eyes, and find earth
   faded, and its voices fallen dim, and see no one any more, save Jesus
   only.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE SECRET OF POWER

   Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast
   him out? 20. And Jesus said unto them, Because of your
   unbelief.'--MATT. xvii. 19, 20.

   And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gave them
   power against unclean spirits to cast them out.' That same power was
   bestowed, too, on the wider circle of the seventy who returned again
   with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through Thy
   name.' The ground of it was laid in the solemn words with which Christ
   met their wonder at their own strength, and told how He beheld Satan as
   lightning fall from heaven.' Therefore had they triumphed, showing the
   fruits of their Master's victory; and therefore had He a right to renew
   the gift, in the still more comprehensive promise, I give unto you
   power--over all the power of the enemy.'

   What a commentary on such words this story affords! What has become of
   the disciples' supernatural might? Has it ebbed away as suddenly as it
   flowed? Is their Lord's endowment a shadow or His assurances delusion?
   Has He taken back what He gave? Not so. And yet His servants are
   ignominiously beaten. One poor devil-ridden boy brings all their
   resources to nothing. He stands before them writhing in the gripe of
   his tormentor, but they cannot set him free. The importunity of the
   father's prayers is vain, and the tension of expectancy in his eager
   face relaxes into the old hopeless languor as he slowly droops to the
   conviction that they could not cast him out.' The malicious scorn in
   the eyes of the Scribes, those hostile critics who knew that it would
   be so,' helps to produce the failure which they anticipated. The
   curious crowd buzz about them, and in the midst of it all stand the
   little knot of baffled disciples, possessors of power which seems to
   leave them when they need it most, with the unavailing spells dying
   half spoken on their lips, and their faint hearts longing that their
   Master would come down from the mount, and cover their weakness with
   His own great strength.

   No wonder that, as soon as Christ and they are alone, they wish to know
   how their mortifying defeat has come about. And they get an answer
   which they little expected, for the last place where men look for the
   explanation of their failures is within; but they will ascend into the
   heavens, and descend into the deeps for remote and recondite reasons,
   before they listen to the voice which says, The fault is nigh thee, in
   thy heart.' Christ's reply distinctly implies that the cause of their
   impotence lay wholly in themselves, not in any defect or withdrawal of
   power, but solely in that in them which grasped the power. They little
   expected, too, to be told that they had failed because they had not
   been sure they would succeed. They had thought that they believed in
   their ability to cast out the demon. They had tried to do so, with some
   kind of anticipation that they could. They had been surprised when they
   found that they could not. They had wonderingly asked why. And now
   Christ tells them that all along they had had no real faith in Him and
   in the reality of His gift. So subtly may unbelief steal into the
   heart, even while we fancy that we are working in faith. And a further
   portion of our Lord's reply points them to the great means by which
   this conquering faith can be maintained--namely, prayer and fasting.
   If, then, we put all these things together, we get a series of
   considerations, very simple and commonplace indeed, but all the better
   and truer therefor, which I venture to submit to you, as having a very
   important bearing on all our Christian work, and especially on the
   missionary work of the Church. The principles which the text suggests
   touch the perpetual possession of the power which conquers; the
   condition of its victorious exercise by us, as being our faith; the
   subtle danger of unsuspected unbelief to which we are exposed; and the
   great means of preserving our faith pure and strong. I ask your
   attention to a few considerations on these points in their order.

   But first, let me say very briefly, that I would not be understood as,
   by the selection of such a text, desiring to suggest that we have
   failed in our work. Thank God! we can point to results far, far greater
   than we have deserved, far greater than we have expected, however they
   may be beneath our desires, and still further below what the gospel was
   meant to accomplish. It may suit observers who have never done anything
   themselves, and have not particularly clear eyes for appreciating
   spiritual work, to talk of Christian missions as failures; but it would
   ill become us to assent to the lie. Failures indeed! with half a
   million of converts, with new forms of Christian life budding in all
   the wilderness of the peoples, with the consciousness of coming doom
   creeping about the heart of every system of idolatry! Is the green life
   in the hedges and in the sweet pastures starred with rathe primroses,
   and in the hidden copses blue with hyacinths, a failure, because the
   east wind bites shrewdly, and the tender ash delays to clothe herself
   with green'? No! no, we have not failed. Enough has been done to
   vindicate the enterprise, more than enough to fill our lips with
   thanksgiving, enough to entitle us to say to all would-be critics--Do
   you the same with your enchantments. But, on the other hand, we have to
   confess that the success has been slow and small, chequered and
   interrupted, that often we have been foiled, that we have confronted
   many a demon whom we could not cast out, and that at home and abroad
   the masses of evil seem to close in around us, and we make but little
   impression on their serried ranks. We have had success enough to assure
   us that we possess the treasure, and failures enough to make us feel
   how weak are the earthen vessels which hold it.

   And now let us turn to the principles which flow from this text.

   I. We have an unvarying power.

   No doubt the explanation of their defeat which most naturally suggested
   itself to these disciples would be that somehow or other--perhaps
   because of Christ's absence--they had lost the gift which they knew
   that they once had. And the same way of accounting for later want of
   success lingers among Christian people still. You will sometimes hear
   it said: God sends forth His Spirit in special fulness at special
   times, according to His own sovereign will; and till then we can only
   wait and pray.' Or, The miraculous powers which dwelt in the early
   Church have been withdrawn, and therefore the progress is slow.' The
   strong imaginative tendency to make an ideal perfect in the past leads
   us to think of the primitive age of the Church as golden, in opposition
   to the plain facts of the case. We fancy that because apostles were its
   teachers, and the Cross within its memory, the infant society was
   stronger, wiser, better than any age since, and had gifts which we have
   lost. What had it which we do not possess? The power of working
   miracles. What have we which it did not possess? A completed Bible, and
   the experience of nineteen centuries to teach us to understand it, and
   to confirm by facts our confidence that Christ's gospel is for all time
   and every land. What have we in common with it? The same mission to
   fulfil, the same wants in our brethren to meet, the same gospel, the
   same spirit, the same immortal Lord. All that any age has possessed to
   fit it for the task of witnessing for Christ we too possess. The Church
   has in it a power which is ever adequate to the conquest of the world;
   and that power is constant through all time, whether we consider it as
   recorded in an unvarying gospel, or as energised by an abiding spirit,
   or as flowing from and centred in an unchangeable Lord.

   We have a gospel which never can grow old. Its adaptation to the
   deepest needs of men's souls remains constant with these needs. These
   vary not from age to age. No matter what may be the superficial
   differences of dress, the same human heart beats beneath every robe.
   The great primal wants of men's spirits abide, as the great primal
   wants of their bodily life abide. Food and shelter for the one,--a
   loving, pardoning God, to know and love, for the other--else they
   perish. Wherever men go they carry with them a conscience which needs
   cleansing, a sense of separation from God joined with a dim knowledge
   that union with Him is life, a will which is burdened with its own
   selfhood, an imagination which paints the misty walls of this earthly
   prison with awful shapes that terrify and faint hopes that mock, a
   heart that hungers for love, and a reason which pines in atrophy
   without light. And all these the gospel which is lodged in our hands
   meets. It addresses itself to nothing in men that is not in man.
   Surface differences of position, culture, clime, age, and the like, it
   brushes aside as unimportant, and it goes straight to the universal
   wants. People tell us it has done its work, and much confident
   dogmatism proclaims that the world has outgrown it. We have a right to
   be confident also, with a confidence born of our knowledge, that it has
   met and satisfied for us the wants which are ours and every man's, and
   to believe that as long as men live by bread, so long will this word
   which proceedeth out of the mouth of God be the food of their souls.
   Areopagus and Piccadilly, Benares and Oxford, need the same message and
   will find the same response to all their wants in the same word.

   Many of the institutions in which Christendom has embodied its
   conceptions of God's truth will crumble away. Many of the conceptions
   will have to be modified, neglected truths will grow, to the
   dislocation of much systematic theology, and the Word better understood
   will clear away many a portentous error with which the Church has
   darkened the Word. Be it so. Let us be glad when the things which can
   be shaken are removed,' like mean huts built against the wall of some
   cathedral, masking and marring the completeness of its beauty; that the
   things which cannot be shaken may remain,' and all the clustered
   shafts, and deep-arched recesses, and sweet tracery may stand forth
   freed from the excrescences which hid them.

   The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. But the word
   of the Lord endureth for ever.'

   We have an abiding Spirit, the Giver to us of a power without
   variableness or the shadow of turning, I will pray the Father, and He
   shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you for ever.'
   The manner of His operations may vary, but the reality of His energy
   abides. The works' of wonder which Jesus did on earth may no more be
   done, but the greater works than these are still the sign of His
   presence, without whom no spiritual life is possible. Prophecies may
   fail, tongues may cease, but the more excellent gifts are poured out
   now as richly as ever. We are apt to look back to Pentecost and think
   that that marked a height to which the tide has never reached since,
   and therefore we are stranded amidst the ooze and mud. But the river
   which proceeds from the throne of God and of the Lamb is not like one
   of our streams on earth, that leaps to the light and dashes rejoicingly
   down the hillside, but creeps along sluggish in its level course, and
   dies away at last in the sands. It pours along the ages the same full
   volume with which it gushed forth at first. Rather, the source goes
   with the Church in all ages, and we drink not of water that came forth
   long ago in the history of the world, and has reached us through the
   centuries, but of that which wells out fresh every moment from the Rock
   that follows us. The Giver of all power is with us.

   We have a Lord, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. Lo, I am
   with you alway, even to the end of the world.' We have not merely to
   look back to the life and death of Christ in history, and recognise
   there the work, the efficacy of which shall endure for ever. But whilst
   we do this, we have also to think of the Christ that is risen again,
   who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for
   us.' And the one thought, as the other, should strengthen our
   confidence in our possession of all the might that we need for bringing
   the world back to our Lord.

   A work in the past which can never be exhausted or lose its power is
   the theme of our message. The mists of gathering ages wrap in slowly
   thickening folds of forgetfulness all other men and events in history,
   and make them ghostlike and shadowy; but no distance has yet dimmed or
   will ever dim that human form divine. Other names are like those stars
   that blaze out for a while, and then smoulder down into almost complete
   invisibility; but He is the very Light itself, that burns and is not
   consumed. Other landmarks sink below the horizon as the tribes of men
   pursue their solemn march through the centuries, but the Cross on
   Calvary shall stand for an ensign of the people, and to it shall the
   Gentiles seek.' To proclaim that accomplished salvation, once for all
   lodged in the heart of the world's history, and henceforth for ever
   valid, is our unalterable duty. The message carries in itself its own
   immortal strength.

   A living Saviour in the present, who works with us, confirming the word
   with signs following, is the source of our power. Not till He is
   impotent shall we be weak. The unmeasurable measure of the gift of
   Christ defines the degree, and the unending duration of His life who
   continueth for ever sets the period, of our possession of the grace
   which is given to every one of us. He is ever bestowing. He never
   withdraws what He once gives. The fountain sinks not a hairs-breadth,
   though nineteen centuries have drawn from it. Modern astronomy begins
   to believe that the sun itself by long expense of light will be shorn
   of its beams and wander darkling in space, circled no more by its
   daughter planets. But this Sun of our souls rays out for ever the
   energies of life and light and love, and after all communication
   possesses the infinite fulness of them all. His name shall be continued
   as long as the sun; all nations shall call Him blessed.'

   Here then, brethren, are the perpetual elements of our constant power,
   an eternal Word, an abiding Spirit, an unchanging Lord.

   II. The condition of exercising this power is Faith.

   With such a force at our command--a force that could shake the
   mountains and break the rocks--how come we ever to fail? So the
   disciples asked, and Christ's answer cuts to the very heart of the
   matter. Why could you not cast him out? For one reason only, because
   you had lost your hold of My strength, and therefore had lost your
   confidence in your own derived power, or had forgotten that it was
   derived, and essayed to wield it as if it were your own. You did not
   trust Me, so you did not believe that you could cast him out; or you
   believed that you could by your own might, therefore you failed. He
   throws them back decisively on themselves as solely responsible.
   Nowhere else, in heaven or in earth or hell, but only in us, does the
   reason lie for our breakdown, if we have broken down. Not in God, who
   is ever with us, ready to make all grace abound in us, whose will is
   that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth;
   not in the gospel which we preach, for it is the power of God unto
   salvation'; not in the demon might which has overcome us, for greater
   is He that is in us than he that is in the world.' We are driven from
   all other explanations to the bitterest and yet the most hopeful of
   all, that we only are to blame.

   And what in us is to blame? Some of us will answer--Our modes of
   working; they have not been free enough, or not orderly enough, or in
   some way or other not wisely adapted to our ends. Some will answer--Our
   forms of presenting the truth; they have not been flexible enough, or
   not fixed enough; they have been too much a reproduction of the old;
   they have been too licentious a departure from the old. Some will
   answer--Our ecclesiastical arrangements; they have been too democratic;
   they have been too priestly. Some will answer--Our intellectual
   culture; it has been too great, obscuring the simplicity that is in
   Christ; it has been too small, sending poorly furnished men into the
   field to fight with ordered systems of idolatry which rest upon a
   philosophical basis, and can only be overturned by undermining that. It
   is no part of my present duty to discuss these varying answers. No
   doubt there is room for improvement in all the fields which they
   indicate. But does not the spirit of our Lord's words here beckon us
   away from these purely secondary subjects to fix our self-examination
   on the depth and strength of our faith, as incomparably the most
   important element in the conditions which determine our success or our
   failure? I do not undervalue the worth of wise methods of action, but
   the history of the Church tells us that pretty nearly any methods of
   action are fruitful in the right hands, and that without living faith
   the best of them become like the heavy armour which half-smothered a
   feeble man. I do not pretend to that sublime indifference to dogma
   which is the modern form of supreme devotion to truth, but experience
   has taught us that wherever the name of Christ, as the Saviour of the
   world, has been lovingly proclaimed, there devils have been cast out,
   whatever private and sectional doctrines the exerciser has added to it.
   I do not disparage organisation, but courage is more than drill; and
   there is such a thing as the very perfection of arrangement without
   life, like cabinets in a museum, where all the specimens are duly
   classified, and dead. I believe, with the old preacher, that if God
   does not need our learning, He needs our ignorance still less, but it
   is of comparatively little importance whether the draught of living
   water be brought to thirsty lips in an earthen cup or a golden vase.


     The main thing is, does it hold good measure?

     Heaven soon sets right all other matters.'

   And therefore, while leaving full scope for all improvements in these
   subordinate conditions, let me urge upon you that the main thing which
   makes us strong for our Christian work is the grasp of living faith,
   which holds fast the strength of God. There is no need to plunge into
   the jungle of metaphysical theology here. Is it not a fact that the
   might with which the power of God has wrought for men's salvation has
   corresponded with the strength of the Church's desire and the purity of
   its trust in His power? Is it not a truth plainly spoken in Scripture
   and confirmed by experience, that we have the awful prerogative of
   limiting the Holy One of Israel, and quenching the Spirit? Was there
   not a time in Christ's life on earth when He could do no mighty works
   because of their unbelief? We receive all spiritual gifts in proportion
   to our capacity, and the chief factor in settling the measure of our
   capacity is our faith. Here on the one hand is the boundless ocean of
   the divine strength, unfathomable in its depth, full after all
   draughts, tideless and calm, in all its movement never troubled, in all
   its repose never stagnating; and on the other side is the empty aridity
   of our poor weak natures. Faith opens these to the influx of that great
   sea, and according to our faith,' in the exact measure of our
   receptivity, does it enter our hearts. In itself the gift is boundless.
   It has no limit except the infinite fulness of the power which worketh
   in us. But in reference to our possession it is bounded by our
   capacity, and though that capacity enlarges by the very fact of being
   filled, and so every moment becomes greater through fruition, yet at
   each moment it is the measure of our possession, and our faith is the
   measure of our capacity. Our power is God's power in us, and our faith
   is the power with which we grasp God's power and make it ours. So then,
   in regard to God, our faith is the condition of our being strengthened
   with might by His Spirit.

   Consider, too, how the same faith has a natural operation on ourselves
   which tends to fit us for casting out the evil spirits. Given a man
   full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in
   one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been
   driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into
   unwearied energy. Such a man will be made wise to devise, gentle to
   attract, bold to rebuke, fertile in expedients, and ready to be
   anything that may help the aim of his life. Fear will be dead in him,
   for faith is the true anaesthesia of the soul; and the knife may cut
   into the quivering flesh, and the spirit be scarce conscious of a pang.
   Love, ambition, and all the swarm of distracting desires will be driven
   from the soul in which the lamp of faith burns bright. Ordinary human
   motives will appeal in vain to the ears which have heard the tones of
   the heavenly music, and all the pomps of life will show poor and tawdry
   to the sight that has gazed on the vision of the great white throne and
   the crystal sea. The most ignorant and erroneous religious
   sentiment'--to use a modern phrase--is mightier than all other forces
   in the world's history. It is like some of those terrible compounds of
   modern chemistry, an inert, innocuous-looking drop of liquid. Shake it,
   and it flames heaven high, shattering the rocks and ploughing up the
   soil. Put even an adulterated and carnalised faith into the hearts of a
   mob of wild Arabs, and in a century they will stream from their
   deserts, and blaze from the mountains of Spain to the plains of Bengal.
   Put a living faith in Christ and a heroic confidence in the power of
   His Gospel to reclaim the worst sinners into a man's heart, and he will
   out of weakness be made strong, and plough his way through obstacles
   with the compact force and crashing directness of lightning. There have
   been men of all sorts who have been honoured to do much in this world
   for Christ. Wise and foolish, learned and ignorant, differing in tone,
   temper, creed, forms of thought, and manner of working, in every
   conceivable degree; but one thing, and perhaps one thing only, they
   have all had--a passion of enthusiastic personal devotion to their
   Lord, a profound and living faith in Him and in His salvation. All in
   which they differed is but the gay gilding on the soldier's coat. That
   in which they were alike is as the strong arm which grasps the sword,
   and has its muscles braced by the very clutch. Faith is itself a source
   of strength, as well as the condition of drawing might from heaven.

   Consider, too, how faith has power over men who see it. The exhibition
   of our own personal convictions has more to do in spreading them than
   all the arguments which we use. There is a magnetism and a contagious
   energy in the sight of a brother's faith which few men can wholly
   resist. If you wish me to weep, your own tears must flow; and if you
   would have me believe, let me see your soul heaving under the emotion
   which you desire me to feel. The arrow may be keen and true, the shaft
   rounded and straight, the bow strong, and the arm sinewy; but unless
   the steel be winged it will fall to the ground long before it strikes
   the butt. Your arrows must be winged with faith, else orthodoxy, and
   wise arrangements, and force and zeal, will avail nothing. No man will
   believe in, and no demon will obey, spells which the would-be exorcist
   only half believes himself. Even if he speak the name of Christ, unless
   he speak it with unfaltering confidence, all the answer he will get
   will only be the fierce and taunting question, Jesus I know, and Paul I
   know, but who are ye?' Brethren, let us give heed to the solemn rebuke
   which our Master lovingly reads to us in these words, and while we aim
   at the utmost possible perfection in all subordinate matters, let us
   remember that they all without faith are weak, as an empty suit of
   armour with no life beneath the corselet; and that faith without them
   all is strong, like the knight of old, who rode into the bloody field
   in simple silken vest, and conquered. That which determines our success
   or failure in the work of our Lord is our faith.

   III. Our faith is ever threatened by subtle unbelief.

   It would appear that the disciples were ignorant of the unbelief that
   had made them weak. They fancied that they had confidence in their
   Christ-given power, and they certainly had in some dull kind of fashion
   expected to succeed in their attempt. But He who sees the heart knew
   that there was no real living confidence in their souls; and His words
   are a solemn warning to us all, of how possible it is for us to have
   our faith all honeycombed by gnawing doubt while we suspect it not,
   like some piece of wood apparently sound, the whole substance of which
   has been eaten away by hidden worms. We may be going on with Christian
   work, and may even be looking for spiritual results. We may fancy
   ourselves faithful stewards of the gospel, and all the while there may
   be an utter absence of the one thing which makes our words more than so
   much wind whistling through an archway. The shorn Samson went out to
   shake himself as at other times,' and knew not that the Spirit of the
   Lord had departed from him. Who among us is not exposed to the assaults
   of that pestilence that walketh in darkness? and, alas! who among us
   can say that he has repelled the contagion? Subtly it creeps over us
   all, the stealthy intangible vapour, unfelt till it has quenched the
   lamp which alone lights the darkness of the mine, and clogged to
   suffocation the labouring lungs.

   I will not now speak of the general sources of danger to our faith,
   which are always in operation with a retarding force as constant as
   friction, as certain as the gravitation which pulls the pendulum to
   rest at its lowest point. But I may very briefly particularise two of
   the enemies of that faith, which have a special bearing on our
   missionary work, and may be illustrated from the narrative before us.

   First, all our activity in spreading the Gospel, whether by personal
   effort or by our gifts, like every form of outward action, tends to
   become mechanical, and to lose its connection with the motive which
   originated it. Of course it is also true, on the other side, that all
   outward action also tends to strengthen the motive from which it flows.
   But our Christian work will not do so, unless it be carefully watched,
   and pains be taken to keep it from slipping off its original
   foundation, and so altering its whole character. We may very easily
   become so occupied with the mere external occupation as to be quite
   unconscious that it has ceased to be faithful work, and has become
   routine, dull mechanism, or the result of confidence, not in Christ,
   whose power once flowed through us, but in ourselves the doers. So
   these disciples may have thought, We can cast out this devil, for we
   have done the like already,' and have forgotten that it was not they,
   but Christ in them, who had done it.

   How widely this foe to our faith operates amid the multiplied
   activities of this busy age, one trembles to think. We see all around
   us a Church toiling with unexampled expenditure of wealth, and effort,
   and time. It is difficult to repress the suspicion that the work is out
   of proportion to the life. Ah, brethren, how much of all this energy of
   effort, so admirable in many respects, will He whose fan is in His hand
   accept as true service--how much of it will be wheat for the garner,
   how much chaff for the fire? It is not for us to divide between the
   two, but it is for us to remember that it is not impossible to make of
   our labours the most dangerous enemy to the depth of our still life
   hidden with Christ in God, and that every deed of apparent service
   which is not the real issue of living faith is powerless for good to
   others, and heavy with hurt to ourselves. Brethren and fathers in the
   ministry! how many of us know what it is to talk and toil away our
   early devotion; and all at once to discover that for years perhaps we
   have been preaching and labouring from mere habit and routine, like
   corpses galvanised into some ghastly and transient caricature of life.
   Christian men and women, beware lest this great enterprise of missions,
   which our fathers began from the holiest motives and in the simplest
   faith, should in our hand be wrenched away from its only true basis,
   and be done with languid expectation and more languid desires of
   success, from no higher motive than that we found it in existence, and
   have become accustomed to carry it on. If that be our reason, then we
   harm ourselves, and mask from our own sight our own unbelief. If that
   be the case the work may go on for a while, like a clock ticking with
   fainter and fainter beats for a minute after it has run down; but it
   will soon cease, and neither heaven nor earth will be much the poorer
   for its ending.

   Again, the atmosphere of scornful disbelief which surrounded the
   disciples made their faith falter. It was too weak to sustain itself in
   the face of the consciousness that not a man in all that crowd believed
   in their power; and it melted away before the contempt of the scribes
   and the incredulous curiosity of the bystanders, without any reason
   except the subtle influence which the opinions and characters of those
   around us have on us all.

   And, brethren, are not we in danger to-day of losing the firmness of
   our grasp on Christ, as our Saviour and the world's, from a precisely
   similar cause? We live in an atmosphere of hesitancy and doubt, of
   scornful rejection of His claims, of contemptuous disbelief in anything
   which a scalpel cannot cut. We cannot but be conscious that to hold by
   Jesus Christ as the Incarnate God, the supernatural Beginning of a new
   life, the sole Hope of the world, is to expose ourselves to the
   contempt of so-called advanced and liberal thinkers, and to be out of
   harmony with the prevailing set of opinions. The current of educated
   thought runs strongly against such beliefs, and I suppose that every
   thoughtful man among us feels that a great danger to our faith to-day
   comes from the force with which that current swings us round, and
   threatens to make some of us drag our anchors, and drift, and strike
   and go to pieces on the sands. For one man who is led by the sheer
   force of reason to yield to the intellectual grounds on which modern
   unbelief reposes, there are twenty who simply catch the infection in
   the atmosphere. They find that their early convictions have evaporated,
   they know not how; only that once the fleece was wet with dew and now
   it is dry. For unbelief has a contagious energy wholly independent of
   reason, no less than has faith, and affects multitudes who know nothing
   of its grounds, as the iceberg chills the summer air for leagues, and
   makes the sailors shiver long before they see its barren peaks.

   Therefore, brethren, let us all take heed to ourselves, lest we suffer
   our grasp of our dear Lord's hand to relax for no better reason than
   because so many have left His side. To us all His pleading love, which
   knows how much we are moulded by the example of others, is saying, in
   view of the fashion of unbelief, Will ye also go away?' Let us answer,
   with a clasp that clings the tighter for our danger of being sucked in
   by the strong current, Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words
   of eternal life.' We cannot help seeing that the creeping paralysis of
   hesitancy and doubt about even the power of Christ's name is stealing
   over portions of the Church, and stiffening the arm of its activity.
   Lips that once spoke with full confidence the words that cast out
   devils, mutter them now languidly with half-belief. Hearts that were
   once full of sympathy with the great purpose for which Christ died are
   growing cold to the work of preaching the Gospel to the heathen,
   because they are growing to doubt whether, after all, there is any
   Gospel at all. This icy breath, dear brethren, is blowing over our
   Churches and over our hearts. And wherever it reaches, there labour for
   Jesus and for men languishes, and we recoil baffled with unavailing
   exorcisms dying in our throats, and the rod of our power broken in our
   hands. Why could not we cast him out? Because of your unbelief.'

   IV. Our faith can only be maintained by constant devotion and rigid
   self-denial.

   I can touch but very lightly on that solemn thought in which our Lord
   sets forth the condition of our faith, and therefore of our power. This
   kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. The discipline then which
   nurtures faith is mainly moral and spiritual--not as a substitute for,
   or to the exclusion of, the intellectual discipline, which is
   presupposed, not neglected, in these words.

   The first condition of the freshness and energy of faith is constant
   devotion. The attrition of the world wears it thin, the distractions of
   life draw it from its clinging hold on Christ, the very toil for Him is
   apt to entice our thoughts from out of the secret place of the most
   High into the busy arena of our strife. Therefore we have ever need to
   refresh the drooping flowers of the chaplet by bathing them in the
   Fountain of Life, to rise above all the fevered toil of earth to the
   calm heights where God dwells, and in still communion with Him to
   replenish our emptied vessels and fill our dimly burning lamps with His
   golden oil. The sister of the cumbered Martha is the contemplative
   Mary, who sits in silence at the Master's feet and lets His words sink
   into her soul; the closest friend of Peter the apostle of action is
   John the apostle of love. If our work is to be worthy, it must ever be
   freshened anew by our gaze into His face; if our communion with Him is
   to be deep, it must never be parted from outward service. Our Master
   has left us the example, in that, when the night fell and every man
   went to his own home, Jesus went to the Mount of Olives; and thence,
   after His night of prayer, came very early in the morning to the
   temple, and taught. The stream that is to flow broad and life-giving
   through many lands must have its hidden source high among the pure
   snows that cap the mount of God. The man that would work for God must
   live with God. It was from the height of transfiguration that He came,
   before whom the demon that baffled the disciples quailed and slunk away
   like a whipped hound. This kind goeth not out but by prayer.

   The second condition is rigid self-denial. Fasting is the expression of
   the purpose to control the lower life, and to abstain from its delights
   in order that the life of the spirit may be strengthened. As to the
   outward fact, it is nothing--it may be practised or not. If it be, it
   will be valuable only in so far as it flows from and strengthens that
   purpose. And such vigorous subordination of all the lower powers, and
   abstinence from many an inferior good, both material and immaterial, is
   absolutely necessary if we are to have any wholesome strength of faith
   in our souls. In the recoil from the false asceticism of Roman
   Catholicism and Puritanism, has not this generation of the Church gone
   too far in the opposite direction? and in the true belief that
   Christianity can sanctify all joys, and ensure the harmonious
   development of all our powers, have we not been forgetting that hand
   and foot may cause us to stumble, and that we had better live maimed
   than die with all our limbs? There is a true asceticism, a
   discipline--a gymnastic unto godliness,' as Paul calls it. And if our
   faith is to grow high and bear rich clusters on the topmost boughs that
   look up to the sky, we must keep the wild lower shoots close nipped.
   Without rigid self-control and self-limitation, no vigorous faith.

   And without them no effectual work! It is no holiday task to cast out
   devils. Self-indulgent men will never do it. Loose-braced, easy souls,
   that lie open to all the pleasurable influences of ordinary life, are
   no more fit for God's weapons than a reed for a lance, or a bit of
   flexible lead for a spear-point. The wood must be tough and compact,
   the metal hard and close-grained, out of which God makes His shafts.
   The brand that is to guide men through the darkness to their Father's
   home must glow with a pallor of consuming flame that purges its whole
   substance into light. This kind goeth not out but by prayer and
   fasting.

   Dear brethren, what solemn rebuke these words have for us all! How they
   winnow our works of Christian activity! How they show us the hollowness
   of our services, the self-indulgence of our lives, the coldness of our
   devotion, the cowardice of our faith! How marvellous they make the
   fruits which God's great goodness has permitted us to see even from our
   doubting service! Let us turn to Him with fresh thankfulness that unto
   us, who are less than the least of all saints, is this grace given,
   that we should preach among the nations the unsearchable riches of
   Christ.' Let us not be driven from our confidence that we have a gospel
   to preach for all the world; but strong in the faith which rests on
   impregnable historical grounds, on our own experience of what Christ
   has done for us, and on nineteen centuries of growing power and
   unfolding wisdom, let us thankfully welcome all that modern thought may
   supply for the correction of errors in belief, in organisation, and in
   life, that may have gathered round His perfect and eternal
   gospel--being assured, as we have a right to be, that all will but lift
   higher the Name which is above every name, and set forth more plainly
   that Cross which is the true tree of life to all the families of men.
   Let us cast ourselves before Him with penitent confession, and say,--O
   Lord, our strength! we have not wrought any deliverance on earth; we
   have been weak when all Thy power was at our command; we have spoken
   Thy word as if it were an experiment and a peradventure whether it had
   might; we have let go Thy hand and lost Thy garment's hem from our
   slack grasp; we have been prayerless and self-indulgent. Therefore Thou
   hast put us to shame before our foes, and our enemies laugh among
   themselves. Thou that dwellest between the cherubim, shine forth; stir
   up Thy strength and come and save us!' Then will the last words that He
   spoke on earth ring out again from the throne: All power is given unto
   Me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations; and
   lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE COIN IN THE FISH'S MOUTH

   And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying, What
   thinkest them, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or
   tribute? of their own children, or of strangers? 26. Peter saith unto
   Him, Of strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children
   free.'--MATT. xvii. 25, 26.

   All our Lord's miracles are signs' as well as wonders.' They have a
   meaning. They not only authenticate His teaching, but they are
   themselves no inconsiderable portion of the teaching. They are not only
   the great bell before His sermon,' but they are also a portion of the
   sermon.

   That doctrinal or dogmatic purpose characterises all the miracles in
   varying degrees. It is the only purpose of the one before us. This
   singular miracle of finding the coin in the fish's mouth and giving it
   for the tribute-money is unlike our Lord's other works in several
   particulars. It is the only miracle--with the exception of the cursing
   of the barren fig-tree, and the episode of the unclean spirits entering
   into the swine--in which there is no message of love or blessing for
   man's sorrow and pain. It is the only miracle in which our Lord uses
   His power for His own service or help, and it is like the whole brood
   of legendary miracles, and unlike all the rest of Christ's in that, at
   first sight, it seems done for a very trivial end--the providing of
   some three shillings of our money.

   Now, if we put all these things together, the absence of any
   alleviation of man's sorrow, the presence of a personal end, and the
   apparent triviality of the result secured, I think we shall see that
   the only explanation of the miracle is given by regarding it as being
   what I may call a teaching one, full of instruction with regard to our
   Lord's character, person, and work. It is a parable as well as a
   miracle, and it is in that aspect that I wish to look at it now, and
   try to bring out its lessons.

   I. We have here, first, the freedom of the Son.

   The whole point of the story depends upon the fact that this
   tribute-money was not a civil, but an ecclesiastical impost. It had
   originally been levied in the Wilderness, at the time of the numbering
   of the people, and was enjoined to be repeated at each census, when
   every male Israelite was to pay half a shekel for a ransom for his
   soul,' an acknowledgment that his life was forfeited by sin. In later
   years it came to be levied as an annual payment for the support of the
   temple and its ceremonial. It was never compulsory, there was no power
   to exact it. The question of the collectors, Doth not your Master pay
   tribute?' does not sound like the imperative demand which a publican'
   would have made for payment of an impost due to the Roman Government.
   It was an optional church-rate,' and the very fact that it was so,
   would make Jews who were, or wished to be considered, patriotic or
   religious, the more punctilious in paying it.

   The question put to Peter possibly implies a doubt whether this Rabbi,
   who held lax views on so many points of Pharisaical righteousness,
   would be likely to recognise the obligation of the tax. Peter's quick
   answer seems to be prompted by zeal for his Master's honour, on which
   the question appears to him to cast a slur. It was perhaps too quick,
   but the apostle has been too much blamed for his answer, which was in
   fact correct, and for which our Lord does not blame him. When he comes
   to Christ to tell what has happened, before he can speak, Christ puts
   to him this little parable which I have taken as part of my text: How
   thinkest thou? Do kings of this world take custom?'--meaning thereby
   not imports or exports, but taxes of all kinds of things,--or
   tribute,'--meaning thereby taxes on persons--from their own children,
   or from subjects who are not their children?' The answer, of course,
   is, From the latter.' So the answer comes, Then are the children free.'

   Christ then here claims in some sense, Sonship to Him to whom the
   tribute is paid, that is, to God, and therefore freedom from the
   obligation to pay the tribute. But notice, for this is an important
   point in the explanation of the words, that the plural in our Lord's
   words, Then are the children free,' is not intended to include Peter
   and the others in the same category as Himself. The only question in
   hand is as to His obligation to pay a certain tax; and to include any
   one else would have been irrelevant, as well as erroneous. The plural
   belongs to the illustration, not to its application, and corresponds
   with the plural in the question, Of whom do the kings of the earth take
   custom?' The kings of the earth are contrasted with the one King of the
   heavens, the supreme and sole Sovereign; and the children of the kings
   of the earth are contrasted with the only begotten Son of the only King
   of kings and Lord of lords.

   So that here there is no mixing up of Himself with others, or of others
   with Himself, but the claiming of an unique position, singular and
   sole, belonging to Him only, in which He stands as the Son of the
   mighty Monarch to whom the tribute is paid. He claims to have the
   divine nature, the divine prerogatives, to bear a specific relationship
   to God Himself, and to be, as other words in Scripture put it, the
   brightness of the Father's glory and the express image of His person.'

   If there is anything certain about Jesus Christ's teaching, this is
   certain about it, that He proclaimed Himself to be the Son of God, in
   such a sense as no man shared with Him, and in such a sense as
   vindicated the attitude which He took up, the demands which He made,
   and the gifts which He offered to men.

   What a deduction must be made from the wisdom of His teaching, and from
   the meekness of His Spirit, if that claim was an illusion! What shall
   we say of the sanity of a man who poses himself before the whole race,
   claiming to be the Son of God, and whose continual teaching to them
   therefore is, not, Believe in goodness'; Believe in virtue'; Believe in
   truth'; Believe in My word'; but Believe in Me'? Was there ever
   anywhere else a religious teacher, all of whose words were gracious and
   wise and sweet, but who--


     Make the important stumble,

     Of saying that he, the sage and humble,

     Was likewise--one with the Creator'?

   But now what is the freedom based on sonship which our Lord here
   claims?

   I have said that this tax was levied with a double meaning; first, it
   was an atonement or ransom for the soul; second, it was devoted to the
   temple and its worship. And now, mark, that in both these aspects our
   Lord alleges His true sonship as the reason why He is exempt from it.

   That is to say, first, Jesus Christ claims to have no need of a ransom
   for His soul. Never one word dropped from His lips which indicated the
   smallest consciousness of flaw or failure, of defect or imperfection,
   still less of actual transgression. He takes His position outside the
   circle of sinful men which includes all others. It is a strange
   characteristic in a religious teacher, very unlike the usual tone of
   devout men. And stranger still is the fact that the absence of this
   consciousness of evil has never been felt to be itself evil and a blot.
   Think of a David's agony of penitence. Think of a Paul's, Of whom I am
   chief!' Think of the long wail of an Augustine's confessions. Think of
   the stormy self-accusations of a Luther; and then think that He who
   inspired them all, never, by word or deed, betrayed the slightest
   consciousness that in Himself there was the smallest deflection from
   the perfect line of right, the least speck or stain on the perfect gold
   of His purity. And remember, too, that when He challenges the world
   with, Which of you convinceth Me of sin?' with the exception of half a
   dozen men, of whom we can scarcely say whether their want of spiritual
   insight or their arrogance of self-importance is the most flagrant,
   who, in the course of nineteen centuries, have ventured to fling their
   little handfuls of mud at Him, the whole world has answered, Thou art
   fairer than the children of men; grace is poured into Thy lips.'

   The Son needs no ransom for His soul,' which, being translated, is but
   this: the purity and the innocence of Jesus Christ, which is a manifest
   fact in His biography, is only explicable when we believe that we have
   before us the Incarnate God, and therefore the Perfect Man. And the Son
   needs no temple for His worship. His whole life, as human, was a life
   of communion and prayer with His Father in heaven. And just because He
   dwelt in' God's bosom all the year,' for Him ritual and temple were
   nought. Sense-bound men needed them; He needed them not. In this
   place,' said He, is one greater than the temple.' He was all which the
   temple symbolised. Was it the dwelling-place of God, the place of
   sacrifice, the meeting-place of man with God, the place of divine
   manifestation? The temple of His body' was in deepest reality all
   these. In it dwelt the whole fulness of the Godhead. It was at once
   sacrifice and place of sacrifice, even as He is the true everlasting
   Priest. In Him men see God, and meet with God. He is greater than the
   temple because He is the true temple, and He is the true temple because
   He is the Son. And because He is the Son, therefore He is free from all
   dependence upon, and connection with, the outward worship of ceremony
   and sacrifice and priest and ritual.

   Now, dear brethren, let me pause for one moment to press upon you and
   upon myself this question: Do I welcome that Christ with the full
   conviction that He is the Son of God? It seems to me that, in this
   generation, the question of questions, as far as religion is concerned,
   is the old one which Christ asked of His disciples by the fountains and
   woods of Caesarea Philippi: Whom say ye that I, the Son of Man, am?'
   Can you lift up your face to meet His clear and all-searching eye, and
   say: Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God'? If you can, you
   are on the way to understanding Him and His work; if you cannot, His
   life and work are all wrapped in darkness for you, His death robbed of
   its truest power, and your life deprived of its surest anchor.

   II. Now, there is a second lesson that I would gather from this
   miracle--the voluntary submission of the Son to the bonds from which He
   is free.

   He bids His disciple pay the tribute for Him, for a specific reason:
   Lest we should offend them.' That, of course, is simply a piece of
   practical wisdom, to prevent any narrow or purblind souls from
   stumbling at His teaching, by reason of His neglect of this trivial
   matter. The question of how far religious teachers or any others are at
   liberty, when they are not actuated by personal motives, to render
   compliance with ceremonies which are of no value to them, is a wide
   one, which I have no need to dwell upon here. But, turning from that
   specific aspect of the incident, I think we may look upon it as being
   an illustration, in regard to a very small matter, of what is really
   the essence of our Lord's relation to the whole world and
   ourselves--His voluntary taking upon Himself of bonds from which He is
   free.

   Is it not a symbol of the very heart of the meaning of His Incarnation?
   For as much as the children are partakers of flesh and blood He also
   Himself likewise takes part of the same.' He is found in fashion as a
   man.' He chooses to enter within the limits and the obligations of
   humanity. Round the radiant glories of the divinity, He gathers the
   folds of the veil of human flesh. He immerses the pillar of fire in a
   cloud of smoke. He comes amongst us, taking on His own wrists the
   fetters that bind us, suffering Himself to be cribbed, cabined, and
   confined' within the narrow limits of our manhood, in order that by His
   voluntary acceptance of it we may be redeemed from our corruption.

   Is it not a parable of His life and lowly obedience? He proclaimed the
   same principle as the guide for all His conduct, when, sinless, He
   presented Himself to John for the baptism of repentance,' and overcame
   the baptiser's scruples with the words, Thus it becometh us to fulfil
   all righteousness.' He comes under the law. Bound to no such service,
   He binds Himself to all human duties that He may hallow the bonds which
   He has worn, may set us the pattern of perfect obedience, and may know
   a servant's heart.

   The Prince is free, but King's Son though He be, He goes among His
   Father's poor subjects, lives their squalid lives, makes experience of
   their poverty, and hardens His hands by labouring like them. Sympathy
   He learned in huts where poor men lie.'

   Is it not the rehearsal in parable of His death? He was free from the
   bonds of mortality, and He took upon Him our human flesh. He was free
   from the necessity of death, even after He had taken our flesh upon
   Him. But, being free from the necessity, He submitted to the actuality,
   and laid down His life of Himself, because of His loving will, to save
   and help each of us. Oh, dear friends! we never can understand the
   meaning and the beauty, either of the life or of the death of our
   Master, unless we look at each from this point of view, that it is His
   willing acceptance of the bonds that bind us. His own loving will
   brought Him here; His own loving will kept Him here; His own loving
   will impelled Him along the path of life, though at every step of it He
   trod as with naked feet upon burning iron; His own loving Will brought
   Him to the Cross; His own loving will, and not the Roman soldiers'
   nails, fastened Him to it. Let us look, then, to Him with thankfulness,
   and recognise in that death His thorough identification with all the
   bonds and miseries of our condition. He took part of the same that
   through death He might deliver them that by fear of death were all
   their lifetime subject to bondage.'

   III. Then there is another lesson which I think we may fairly gather
   from this miracle, viz. that we have here the supernatural glory which
   ever accompanies the humiliation of the Son.

   The miracle, at first sight, appears to be for a very trivial end. Men
   have made merry with it by reason of that very triviality. But the
   miracle is vindicated, peculiar as it is, by a deep divine congruity
   and decorum. He will submit, Son though He be, to this complete
   identification of Himself with us. But He will so submit as, even in
   submitting, to assert His divine dignity. As has been well said, In the
   midst of the act of submission majesty flashes forth.' A multiform
   miracle--containing many miracles in one--a miracle of omniscience, and
   a miracle of influence over the lower creatures is wrought. The first
   fish that rises carries in its mouth the exact sum needed.

   Here, therefore, we have another illustration of that remarkable
   blending of humiliation and glory, which is a characteristic of our
   Lord's life. These two strands are always twined together, like a
   twisted line of gold and black. At each moment of special abasement
   there is some special coruscation of the brightness of His glory.
   Whensoever He stoops there is something accompanying the stooping, to
   tell how great and how merciful He is who bows. Out of the deepest
   darkness there flashes some light. So at His cradle, which seems to be
   the identifying of Him with humanity in its most helpless and lowest
   condition, there shall be angels, and the stars in their courses shall
   bow and move to guide wise men from afar with offerings to His feet.
   And at His Cross, where He sounds the very bass string and touches the
   lowest point of humiliation and defeat, a clearer vision sees in that
   humiliation the highest glory.

   And thus, here, He will not only identify Himself with sinful men who
   need a ransom, and with sense-bound men who need a sacrifice and a
   temple, but He will so identify Himself with them as that He shall send
   His power into the recesses of the lake, where His knowledge sees, as
   clearly as our eyes see the men that stand beside us, and obedient to
   an unconscious impulse from Him, the dumb creature that had swallowed,
   as it sunk, the shining stater that had dropped out of the girdle of
   some fisherman, shall rise first to the hook; in token that not only in
   His Father's house does He rule as a Son over His own house, but that
   He doeth as He hath pleased, in all deep places,' and that in Him the
   ancient hope is fulfilled of a Son of Man who hath dominion over the
   fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea.'
   The miracle was for a trivial end in appearance, but it was a
   demonstration, though to one man only at first, yet through him to all
   the world, that this Christ, in His lowliness, is the Everlasting Son
   of the Father.

   IV. And so, lastly, we have here also the lesson of the sufficiency for
   us all of what He provides.

   That take, and give unto them for Me and for thee. He does not say For
   us.' He and Peter do not stand on the game level. He has chosen to
   submit Himself to the obligations, Peter was necessarily under them.
   That which is found by miracle in the fish's mouth is precisely the
   amount required for both the one and the other. It is rendered, as the
   original has it, Instead of thee and Me,' putting emphasis upon the
   characteristic of the tribute as being ransom, or payment, for a man's
   soul.

   And so, although this thought is not part of the original purpose of
   the miracle, and, therefore, is different from those which I have
   already been dwelling on, which are part of that purpose, I think we
   may fairly see here this great truth,--that that which Christ brings to
   us by supernatural act, far greater than the miracle here, is enough
   for all the claims and obligations that God, or man, or law, or
   conscience have upon any of us. His perfect obedience and stainless
   life discharged for Himself all the obligations to law and
   righteousness under which He came as a Man; His perfect life and His
   mighty death are for us the full discharge of all that can be brought
   against us.

   There are many and solemn claims and claimants upon each of us. Law and
   duty, that awful ought' which should rule our lives and which we have
   broken thousands of times, come to each of us in many an hour of clear
   vision, and take us by the throat, and say, Pay us what thou owest!'
   And there is a Judgment Day before all of us; which is no mere bugbear
   to frighten children, but will be a fact of experience in our case.
   Friend! how are you going to meet your obligations? You owe God all
   your love, all your heart, will, strength, service. What an awful score
   of unpaid debts, with accumulated interest, there stands against each
   of our names! Think of some bankrupt sitting in his counting-house with
   a balance-sheet before him that shows his hopeless insolvency. He sits
   and broods, and broods, and does not know what in the world he is going
   to do. The door opens--a messenger enters and gives him an envelope. He
   tears it open, and there flutters out a cheque that more than pays it
   all. The illustration is a very low one; it does not cover the whole
   ground of Christ's work for you. It puts a possibly commercial aspect
   into it, which we have to take care of lest it become the exclusive
   one; but it is true for all that. You are the bankrupt. What have you
   to pay? Oh, behold that precious treasure of gold tried in the fire,
   which is Christ's righteousness and Christ's death; and by faith in
   Him, that take and give' and all the debt will be discharged, and you
   will be set free and made a son by that Son who has taken upon Himself
   all our bonds, and so has broken them; who has taken upon Himself all
   our debts, and so has cancelled them every one.
     __________________________________________________________________
     __________________________________________________________________

                         EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.

  ST. MATTHEW
  Chaps. XVIII to XXVIII
     __________________________________________________________________

CONTENTS

   THE LAW OF PRECEDENCE IN THE KINGDOM (Matt. xviii. 1-14)

   SELF-MUTILATION FOR SELF-PRESERVATION (Matt. xviii. 8, R.V.)

   THE LOST SHEEP AND THE SEEKING SHEPHERD (Matt. xviii. 12).

   THE PERSISTENCE OF THWARTED LOVE (Matt. xviii. 13; Luke xv. 4)

   FORGIVEN AND UNFORGIVING (Matt. xviii. 22)

   THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE KING (Matt. xix. 16-26)

   NEAREST TO CHRIST (Matt. xx. 23)

   THE SERVANT-LORD AND HIS SERVANTS (Matt. xx. 28)

   WHAT THE HISTORIC CHRIST TAUGHT ABOUT HIS DEATH (Matt. xx. 28)

   THE COMING OF THE KING TO HIS PALACE (Matt. xxi. 1-16)

   A NEW KIND OF KING (Matt. xxi. 4, 5)

   THE VINEYARD AND ITS KEEPERS (Matt. xxi. 33-46)

   THE STONE OF STUMBLING (Matt. xxi. 44)

   TWO WAYS OF DESPISING GOD'S FEAST (Matt. xxii. 1-14)

   THE TABLES TURNED: THE QUESTIONERS QUESTIONED (Matt. xxii. 34-46)

   THE KING'S FAREWELL (Matt. xxiii. 27-39)

   TWO FORMS OF ONE SAYING (Matt. xxiv. 13, R.V.; Luke xxi. 19)

   THE CARRION AND THE VULTURES (Matt. xxiv. 28)

   WATCHING FOR THE KING (Matt. xxiv. 42-51)

   THE WAITING MAIDENS (Matt. xxv. 1-13)

   DYING LAMPS (Matt. xxv. 8)

   THEY THAT WERE READY' (Matt. xxv. 10)

   TRADERS FOR THE MASTER (Matt. xxv. 14-30)

   WHY THE TALENT WAS BURIED (Matt. xxv. 24, 25)

   THE KING ON HIS JUDGMENT THRONE (Matt. xxv. 31-46)

   THE DEFENCE OF UNCALCULATING LOVE (Matt. xxvi. 6-16)

   THE NEW PASSOVER (Matt. xxvi. 17-30)

   IS IT I?' (Matt. xxvi. 22, 25; John xiii. 25)

   THIS CUP' (Matt. xxvi. 27, 28)

   UNTIL THAT DAY' (Matt. xxvi. 29)

   GETHSEMANE, THE OIL-PRESS (Matt. xxvi. 36-46)

   THE LAST PLEADING OF LOVE (Matt. xxvi. 50)

   THE REAL HIGH PRIEST AND HIS COUNTERFEIT (Matt. xxvi. 57-68)

   JESUS CHARGED WITH BLASPHEMY (Matt. xxvi. 35)

   SEE THOU TO THAT!' (Matt. xxvii. 4, 24)

   THE SENTENCE WHICH CONDEMNED THE JUDGES (Matt. xxvii. 11-26)

   THE CRUCIFIXION (Matt. xxvii. 33-50)

   THE BLIND WATCHERS AT THE CROSS (Matt. xxvii. 36)

   TAUNTS TURNING TO TESTIMONIES (Matt. xxvii. 41-43)

   THE VEIL RENT (Matt. xxvii. 51)

   THE PRINCE OF LIFE (Matt. xxviii. 1-15)

   THE RISEN LORD'S GREETINGS AND GIFTS (Matt. xxviii. 9; John xx. 19)

   ON THE MOUNTAIN (Matt. xxviii. 16, 17; 1 Cor. xv. 6)
     __________________________________________________________________

THE LAW OF PRECEDENCE IN THE KINGDOM

   At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the
   greatest in the kingdom of heaven? 2. And Jesus called a little child
   unto Him, and set him in the midst of them, 3. And said, Verily I say
   unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye
   shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. 4. Whosoever therefore
   shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the
   kingdom of heaven. 5. And whoso shall receive one such little child in
   My name receiveth Me. 6. But whoso shall offend one of these little
   ones which believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone were
   hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the
   sea. 7. Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be
   that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh! 8.
   Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast
   them from thee; it is better for thee to enter into life halt or
   maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into
   everlasting fire. 9. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and
   cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one
   eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire. 10. Take
   heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you,
   That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of My Father
   which is in heaven. 11. For the Son of Man is come to save that which
   was lost. 12. How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of
   them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth
   into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? 13. And if
   so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that
   sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray. 14. Even so
   it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these
   little ones should perish.' --MATT. xviii. 1-14.

   Mark tells us that the disciples, as they journeyed, had been
   squabbling about pre-eminence in the kingdom, and that this
   conversation was brought on by our Lord's question as to the subject of
   their dispute. It seems at first sight to argue singular insensibility
   that the first effect of His reiterated announcement of His sufferings
   should have been their quarrelling for the lead; but their behaviour is
   intelligible if we suppose that they regarded the half-understood
   prophecies of His passion as indicating the commencement of the short
   conflict which was to end in His Messianic reign. So it was time for
   them to be getting ready and settling precedence. The form of their
   question, in Matthew, connects it with the miracle of the coin in the
   fish's mouth, in which there was a very plain assertion of Christ's
   royal dignity, and a distinguishing honour given to Peter. Probably the
   then' of the question means, Since Peter is thus selected, are we to
   look to him as foremost? Their conception of the kingdom and of rank in
   it is frankly and entirely earthly. There are to be graded dignities,
   and these are to depend on His mere will. Our Lord not only answers the
   letter of their question, but cuts at the root of the temper which
   inspired it.

   I. He shows the conditions of entrance into and eminence in His kingdom
   by a living example. There were always children at hand round Him, when
   He wanted them. Their quick instinct for pure and loving souls drew
   them to Him; and this little one was not afraid to be taken by the
   hand, and to be afterwards caught up in His arms, and pressed to His
   heart. One does not wonder that the legend that he was Ignatius the
   martyr should have been current; for surely the remembrance of that
   tender clasping arm and gentle breast would not fade nor be fruitless.
   The disciples had made very sure that they were to be in the kingdom,
   and that the only question concerning them was how high up in it they
   were each to be. Christ's answer is like a dash of cold water to that
   confidence. It is, in effect, Greatest in the kingdom! Make sure that
   you go in at all, first; which you will never do, so long as you keep
   your present ambitious minds.'

   Verse 3 lays down the condition of entrance into the kingdom, from
   which necessarily follows the condition of supremacy in it. What a
   child is naturally, and without effort or merit, by reason of age and
   position, we must become, if we are to pass the narrow portal which
   admits into the large room. That becoming' is impossible without a
   revolution in us. Be converted' is corrected, in the Revised Version,
   into turn,' and rightly; for there is in the word a distinct reference
   to the temper of the disciples as displayed by their question. As long
   as they cherished it they could not even get inside, to say nothing of
   winning promotion to dignities in the kingdom. Their very question
   condemned them as incapable of entrance. So there must be a radical
   change, not unaccompanied, of course, with repentance, but mainly
   consisting in the substitution of the child's temper for theirs. What
   is the temper thus enjoined? We are to see here neither the entirely
   modern and shallow sentimental way of looking at childhood, in which
   popular writers indulge, nor the doctrine of its innocence. It is not
   Christ's teaching, either that children are innocent, or that men enter
   the kingdom by making themselves so. But the child is, by its very
   position, lowly and modest, and makes no claims, and lives by
   instinctive confidence, and does not care about honours, and has these
   qualities which in us are virtues, and is not puffed up by possessing
   them. That is the ideal which is realised more generally in the child
   than analogous ideals are in mature manhood. Such simplicity, modesty,
   humility, must be ours. We must be made small ere we can enter that
   door. And as is the requirement for entrance, so is it for eminence.
   The child does not humble himself, but is humble by nature; but we must
   humble ourselves if we would be great.

   Christ implies that there are degrees in the kingdom. It has a
   nobility, but of such a kind that there may be many greatest; for the
   principle of rank there is lowliness. We rise by sinking. The deeper
   our consciousness of our own unworthiness and weakness, the more
   capable are we of receiving the divine gifts, and therefore the more
   fully shall we receive them. Rivers run in the hollows; the
   mountain-tops are dry. God works with broken reeds, and the princes in
   His realm are beggars taken from the dunghill. A lowliness which made
   itself lowly for the sake of eminence would miss its aim, for it would
   not be lowliness. The desire to be foremost must be cast out, in order
   that it may be fulfilled.

   II. The question has been answered, and our Lord passes to other
   thoughts rising out of His answer. Verses 5 and 6 set forth
   antithetically our duties to His little ones. He is not now speaking of
   the child who served as a living parable to answer the question, but of
   men who have made themselves like the child, as is plain from the
   emphatic one such child,' and from verse 6 (which believe on Me').

   The subject, then, of these verses is the blessedness of recognising
   and welcoming Christlike lowly believers, and the fatal effect of the
   opposite conduct. To receive one such little child in My name' is just
   to have a sympathetic appreciation of, and to be ready to welcome to
   heart and home, those who are lowly in their own and in the world's
   estimate, but princes of Christ's court and kingdom. Such welcome and
   furtherance will only be given by one who himself has the same type of
   character in some degree. He who honours and admires a certain kind of
   excellence has the roots of it in himself. A possible artist lies in
   him who thrills at the sight or hearing of fair things painted or sung.
   Our admiration is an index of our aspiration, and our aspiration is a
   prophecy of our attainment. So it will be a little one's heart which
   will welcome the little ones, and a lover of Christ who receives them
   in His name. The reception includes all forms of sympathy and aid. In
   My name' is equivalent to for the sake of My revealed character,' and
   refers both to the receiver and to the received. The blessedness of
   such reception, so far as the receiver is concerned, is not merely that
   he thereby comes into happy relations with Christ's foremost servants,
   but that he gets Christ Himself into his heart. If with true
   appreciation of the beauty of such a childlike disposition, I open my
   heart or my hand to its possessor, I do thereby enlarge my capacity for
   my own possession of Christ, who dwells in His child, and who comes
   with him where He is welcomed. There is no surer way of securing Him
   for our own than the loving reception of His children. Whoso lodges the
   King's favourites will not be left unvisited by the King. To recognise
   and reverence the greatest in the kingdom is to be oneself a member of
   their company, and a sharer in their prerogatives.

   On the other hand, the antithesis of receiving' is causing to stumble,'
   by which is meant giving occasion for moral fall. That would be done by
   contests about pre-eminence, by arrogance, by non-recognition. The
   atmosphere of carnality and selfishness in which the disciples were
   moving, as their question showed, would stifle the tender life of any
   lowly believer who found himself in it; and they were not only injuring
   themselves, but becoming stumbling-blocks to others, by their ambition.
   How much of the present life of average Christians is condemned on the
   same ground! It is a good test of our Christian character to ask--would
   it help or hinder a lowly believer to live beside us? How many
   professing Christians are really, though unconsciously, doing their
   utmost to pull down their more Christlike brethren to their own low
   level! The worldliness and selfish ambitions of the Church are
   responsible for the stumbling of many who would else have been of
   Christ's little ones.' But perhaps we are rather to think of deliberate
   and consciously laid stumbling-blocks. Knowingly to try to make a good
   man fall, or to stain a more than usually pure Christian character, is
   surely the very height of malice, and presupposes such a deadly hatred
   of goodness and of Christ that no fate can be worse than the possession
   of such a temper. To be flung into the sea, like a dog, with a stone
   round his neck, would be better for a man than to live to do such a
   thing. The deed itself, apart from any other future retribution, is its
   own punishment; yet our Lord's solemn words not only point to such a
   future retribution, which is infinitely more terrible than the
   miserable fate described would be for the body, but to the consequences
   of the act, as so bad in its blind hatred of the highest type of
   character, and in its conscious preference of evil, as well as so fatal
   in its consequences, that it were better to die drowned than to live
   so.

   III. Verses 10-14 set forth the honour and dignity of Christ's little
   ones.' Clearly the application of the designation in these closing
   verses is exclusively to His lowly followers. The warning not to
   despise them is needed at all times, and, perhaps, seldom more, even by
   Christians, than now, when so many causes induce a far too high
   estimate of the world's great ones, and modest, humble godliness looks
   as dull and sober as some russet-coated little bird among gorgeous
   cockatoos and birds of paradise. The world's standard is only too
   current in the Church; and it needs a spirit kept in harmony with
   Christ's spirit, and some degree of the child-nature in ourselves, to
   preserve us from overlooking the delicate hidden beauties and unworldly
   greatness of His truest disciples.

   The exhortation is enforced by two considerations,--a glimpse into
   heaven, and a parable. Fair interpretation can scarcely deny that
   Christ here teaches that His children are under angel-guardianship. We
   should neither busy ourselves in curious inferences from His reticent
   words, nor try to blink their plain meaning, but rather mark their
   connection and purpose here. He has been teaching that pre-eminence
   belongs to the childlike spirit. He here opens a door into the court of
   the heavenly King, and shows us that, as the little ones are foremost
   in the kingdom of heaven, so the angels who watch over them are nearest
   the throne in heaven itself. The representation is moulded on the
   usages of Eastern courts, and similar language in the Old Testament
   describes the principal courtiers as the men who see the King's face
   continually.' So high is the honour in which the little ones are held,
   that the highest angels are set to guard them, and whatever may be
   thought of them on earth, the loftiest of creatures are glad to serve
   and keep them.

   Following the Revised Version we omit verse 11. If it were genuine, the
   connection would be that such despising contradicted the purpose of
   Christ's mission; and the for' would refer back to the injunction, not
   to the glimpse into heaven which enforced it.

   The exhortation is further confirmed by the parable of the ninety and
   nine, which is found, slightly modified in form and in another
   connection, in Luke xv. Its point here is to show the importance of the
   little ones as the objects of the seeking love of God, and as so
   precious to Him that their recovery rejoices His heart. Of course, if
   verse 11 be genuine, the Shepherd is Christ; but, if we omit it, the
   application of the parable in verse 14 as illustrating the loving will
   of God becomes more direct. In that case God is the owner of the sheep.
   Christ does not emphasise His own love or share in the work, reference
   to which was not relevant to His purpose, but, leaving that in shadow,
   casts all the light on the loving divine will, which counts the little
   ones as so precious that, if even one of them wanders, all heaven's
   powers are sent forth to find and recover it. The reference does not
   seem to be so much to the one great act by which, in Christ's
   incarnation and sacrifice, a sinful world has been sought and redeemed,
   as to the numberless acts by which God, in His providence and grace,
   restores the souls of those humble ones if ever they go astray. For the
   connection requires that the wandering sheep here should, when it
   wanders, be one of these little ones'; and the parable is introduced to
   illustrate the truth that, because they belong to that number, the
   least of them is too precious to God to be allowed to wander away and
   be lost. They have for their keepers the angels of the presence; they
   have God Himself, in His yearning love and manifold methods of
   restoration, to look for them, if ever they are lost, and to bring them
   back to the fold. Therefore, see that ye despise not one of these
   little ones,' each of whom is held by the divine will in the grasp of
   an individualising love which nothing can loosen.
     __________________________________________________________________

SELF-MUTILATION FOR SELF-PRESERVATION

   If thy hand or thy foot causeth thee to stumble, cut it off, and cast
   it from thee.'--MATT. xviii. 8, R.V.

   No person or thing can do our characters as much harm as we ourselves
   can do. Indeed, none can do them any harm but ourselves. For men may
   put stumbling-blocks in our way, but it is we who make them
   stumbling-blocks. The obstacle in the path would do us no hurt if it
   were not for the erring foot, nor the attractive prize if it were not
   for the hand that itched to lay hold of it, nor the glittering bauble
   if it were not for the eye that kindled at the sight of it. So our Lord
   here, having been speaking of the men that put stumbling-blocks in the
   way of His little ones, draws the net closer and bids us look at home.
   A solemn woe of divine judgment is denounced on those who cause His
   followers to stumble; let us leave God to execute that, and be sure
   that we have no share in their guilt, but let us ourselves be the
   executioners of the judgment upon the things in ourselves which alone
   give the stumbling-blocks, which others put before us, their fatal
   power.

   There is extraordinary energy in these words. Solemnly they are
   repeated twice here, verbatim; solemnly they are repeated verbatim
   three times in Mark's edition. The urgent stringency of the command,
   the terrible plainness of the alternative put forth by the lips that
   could say nothing harsh, and the fact that the very same injunction
   appears in a wholly different connection in the Sermon on the Mount,
   show us how profoundly important our Lord felt the principle to be
   which He was here laying down.

   We mark these three points. First, the case supposed, If thy hand or
   thy foot cause thee to stumble.' Then the sharp, prompt remedy
   enjoined, Cut them off and cast them from thee.' Then the solemn motive
   by which it is enforced, It is better for thee to enter into life
   maimed than, being a whole man, to be cast into hell-fire.'

   I. First, then, as to the case supposed.

   Hand and foot and eye are, of course, regarded as organs of the inward
   self, and symbols of its tastes and capacities. We may perhaps see in
   them the familiar distinction between the practical and the
   theoretical:--hand and foot being instruments of action, and the eye
   the organ of perception. Our Lord takes an extreme case. If members of
   the body are to be amputated and plucked out should they cause us to
   stumble, much more are associations to be abandoned and occupations to
   be relinquished and pleasures to be forsaken, if these draw us away.
   But it is to be noticed that the whole stringency of the commandment
   rests upon that if. If they cause thee to stumble,' then, and not else,
   amputate. The powers are natural, the operation of them is perfectly
   innocent, but a man may be ruined by innocent things. And, says Christ,
   if that process is begun, then, and only then, does My exhortation come
   into force.

   Now, all that solemn thought of a possible injurious issue of innocent
   occupations, rests upon the principles that our nature has an ideal
   order, so as that some parts of it are to be suppressed and some are to
   rule, and that there are degrees of importance in men's pursuits, and
   that where the lower interfere and clog the operations of the higher,
   there they are harmful. And so the only wisdom is to excise and cut
   them off.

   We see illustrations in abundance every day. There are many people who
   are being ruined in regard to the highest purposes of their lives,
   simply by an over-indulgence in lower occupations which in themselves
   may be perfectly right. Here is a young woman that spends so much of
   her day in reading novels that she has no time to look after the house
   and help her mother. Here is a young man so given to athletics that his
   studies are neglected--and so you may go all round the circle, and find
   instances of the way in which innocent things, and the excessive or
   unwise exercise of natural faculties, are destroying men. And much more
   is that the case in regard to religion, which is the highest object of
   pursuit, and in regard to those capacities and powers by which we lay
   hold of God. These are to be ministered to by the rest, and if there be
   in my nature or in the order of my life something which is drawing away
   to itself the energy that ought to go in that other direction, then,
   howsoever innocent it may be, per se, it is harming me. It is a wen
   that is sucking all the vital force into itself, and turning it into
   poison. And there is only one cure for it, and that is the knife.

   Then there is another point to be observed in this case supposed, and
   that is that the whole matter is left to the determination of personal
   experience. No one else has the right to decide for you what it is safe
   and wise for you to do in regard to things which are not in themselves
   wrong. If they are wrong in themselves, of course the consideration of
   consequences is out of place altogether; but if they be not wrong in
   themselves, then it is you that must settle whether they are legitimate
   for you or not. Do not let your Christian liberty be interfered with by
   other people's dictation in regard to this matter. How often you hear
   people say, I could not do it'; meaning thereby, therefore he ought not
   to do it!' But that inference is altogether illegitimate. True, there
   are limitations of our Christian liberty in regard to things
   indifferent and innocent. Paul lays down the most important of these in
   three sentences. All things are lawful for me, but all things are not
   expedient.' All things are lawful for me, but all things edify
   not';--you must think of your brethren as well as of yourself. All
   things are lawful for me, yet will I not be brought under the power of
   any'; keep master of them, and rather abstain altogether than become
   their slave. But these three limitations being observed, then, in
   regard to all such matters, nobody else can prescribe for you or me. To
   his own Master he standeth or falleth.'

   But, on the other hand, do not you be led away into things that damage
   you, because some other man does them, as he supposes, without injury.
   Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he
   alloweth.' There are some Christian people who are simply very
   unscrupulous and think themselves very strong; and whose consciences
   are not more enlightened, but less sensitive, than those of the
   narrow-minded brethren' upon whom they look askance.

   And so, dear friend, you ought to take the world--to inhale it, if I
   may so say, as patients do chloroform; only you must be your own doctor
   and keep your own fingers on your pulse, and watch the first sign of
   failure there, and take no more. When the safety lamps begin to burn
   blue you may be quite sure there is choke-damp about; and when
   Christian men and women begin to find prayer wearisome, and religious
   thoughts dull, and the remembrance of God an effort or a pain, then,
   whatever anybody else may do, it is time for them to pull up. If thy
   hand offend thee,' never mind though your brother's hand is not
   offending him, do the necessary thing for your health, cut it off and
   cast it from you.'

   But of course there must be caution and common-sense in the application
   of such a principle. It does not mean that we are to abandon all things
   that are susceptible of abuse, for everything is so; and if we are to
   regulate our conduct by such a rule, it is not the amputation of a hand
   that will be sufficient. We may as well cut off our heads at once, and
   go out of the world altogether; for everything is capable of being thus
   abused.

   Nor does the injunction mean that unconditionally we are to abandon all
   occupations in which there is danger. It can never be a duty to shirk a
   duty because it is dangerous. And sometimes it is as much a Christian
   man's duty to go into, and to stand in, positions that are full of
   temptation and danger, as it is a fireman's business to go into a
   burning house at the risk of suffocation. There were saints in Caesar's
   household, flowers that grew on a dunghill, and they were not bidden to
   abandon their place because it was full of possible danger to their
   souls. Sometimes Christ sets His sentinels in places where the bullets
   fly very thick; and if we are posted in such a place--and we all are so
   some time or other in our lives--the only course for us is to stand our
   ground until the relieving guard comes, and to trust that He said a
   truth that was always to be true, when He sent out His servants to
   their dangerous work, with the assurance that if they drank any deadly
   thing it should not hurt them.

   II. So much, then, for the first of the points here. Now a word, in the
   second place, as to the sharp remedy enjoined.

   Cut it off and cast it from thee.' Entire excision is the only safety.
   I myself am to be the operator in that surgery. I am to lay my hand
   upon the block, and with the other hand to grasp the axe and strike.
   That is to say, we are to suppress capacities, to abandon pursuits, to
   break with associates, when we find that they are damaging our
   spiritual life and hindering our likeness to Jesus Christ.

   That is plain common-sense. In regard to physical intoxication, it is a
   great deal easier to abstain altogether than to take a very little and
   then stop. The very fumes of alcohol will sometimes drive a reclaimed
   drunkard into a bout of dissipation that will last for weeks;
   therefore, the only safety is in entire abstinence. The rule holds in
   regard to everyday life. Every man has to give up a great many things
   if he means to succeed in one, and has to be a man of one pursuit if
   anything worth doing is to be done. Christian men especially have to
   adopt that principle, and shear off a great deal that is perfectly
   legitimate, in order that they may keep a reserve of strength for the
   highest things.

   True, all forms of life are capable of being made Christian service and
   Christian discipline, but in practice we shall find that if we are
   earnestly seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, not only
   shall we lose our taste for a great deal that is innocent, but we shall
   have, whether we lose our taste for them or not--and more imperatively
   if we have not lost our taste for them than if we have--to give up
   allowable things in order that with all our heart, and soul, and
   strength, and mind, we may love and serve our Master. There are no
   half-measures to be kept; the only thing to do with the viper is to
   shake it off into the fire and let it burn there. We have to empty our
   hands of earth's trivialities if we would grasp Christ with them. We
   have to turn away our eyes from earth if we would behold the Master,
   and rigidly to apply this principle of excision in order that we may
   advance in the divine life. It is the only way to ensure progress.
   There is no such certain method of securing an adequate flow of sap up
   the trunk as to cut off all the suckers. If you wish to have a current
   going down the main bed of the stream, sufficient to keep it clear, you
   must dam up all the side channels.

   But it is not to be forgotten that this commandment, stringent and
   necessary as it is, is second best. The man is maimed, although it was
   for Christ's sake that he cut off his hand, or put out his eye. His
   hand was given him that with it he might serve God, and the highest
   thing would have been that in hand and foot and eye he should have been
   anointed, like the priests of old, for the service of his Master. But
   until he is strong enough to use the faculty for God, the wisest thing
   is not to use it at all. Abandon the outworks to keep the citadel. And
   just as men pull down the pretty houses on the outskirts of a fortified
   city when a siege is impending, in order that they may afford no cover
   to the enemy, so we have to sweep away a great deal in our lives that
   is innocent and fair, in order that the foes of our spirit may find no
   lodgment there. It is second best, but for all that it is absolutely
   needful. We must lay aside every weight,' as well as the sin which so
   easily besets us.' We must run lightly if we would run well. We must
   cast aside all burdens, even though they be burdens of treasure and
   delights, if we would run with patience the race that is set before
   us.' If thy foot offend thee,' do not hesitate, do not adopt
   half-measures, do not try moderation, do not seek to sanctify the use
   of the peccant member; all these may be possible and right in time, but
   for the present there is only one thing to do--down with it on the
   block, and off with it! Cut it off and cast it from thee.'

   III. And now, lastly, a word as to the solemn exhortation by which this
   injunction is enforced.

   Christ rests His command of self-denial and self-mutilation upon the
   highest ground of self-interest. It is better for thee.' We are told
   nowadays that this is a very low motive to appeal to, that Christianity
   is a religion of selfishness, because it says to men, Your life or your
   death depends upon your faith and your conduct.' Well, I think it will
   be time for us to listen to fantastic objections of this sort when the
   men that urge them refuse to turn down another street, if they are
   warned that in the road on which they are going they will meet their
   death. As long as they admit that it is a wise and a kind thing to say
   to a man, Do not go that way or your life will be endangered,' I think
   we may listen to our Master saying to us, Do not do that lest thou
   perish; do this, that thou may'st enter into life.'

   And then, notice that a maimed man may enter into life, and a complete
   man may perish. The first may be a very poor creature, very ignorant,
   with a limited nature, undeveloped capacities, intellect and the like
   all but dormant in him, artistic sensibilities quite atrophied, and yet
   he may have got hold of Jesus Christ and His love, and be trying to
   love Him back again and serve Him, and so be entering into life even
   here, and be sure of a life more perfect yonder. And the complete man,
   cultured all round, with all his faculties polished and exercised to
   the full, may have one side of his nature undeveloped--that which
   connects him with God in Christ. And so he may be like some fair tree
   that stands out there in the open, on all sides extending its equal
   beauty, with its stem symmetrical, cylindrical, perfect in its green
   cloud of foliage, yet there may be a worm at the root of it, and it may
   be given up to rottenness and destruction. Cultivated men may perish,
   and uncultured men may have the life. The maimed man may touch Christ
   with his stump, and so receive life, and the complete man may lay hold
   of the world and the flesh and the devil with his hands, and so share
   in their destruction.

   Ay! and in that case the maimed man has the best of it. It is a very
   plain axiom of the rudest common-sense, this of my text: It is better
   for thee to enter into life maimed, than to go into hell-fire with both
   thy hands.' That is to say, it is better to live maimed than to die
   whole. A man comes into a hospital with gangrene in his leg; the doctor
   says it must come off; the man says, It shall not,' and he is dead
   to-morrow. Who is the fool--the man that says, Here, then, cut away;
   better life than limb,' or the man that says, I will keep it and I will
   die'?

   Better to enter into life maimed,' because you will not always be
   maimed. The life will overcome the maiming. There is a wonderful
   restoration of capacities and powers that have been sacrificed for
   Christ's sake, a restoration even here. As crustaceans will develop a
   new claw in place of one that they have thrown off in their peril to
   save their lives, so we, if we have for Christ's sake maimed ourselves,
   will find that in a large measure the suppression will be recompensed
   even here on earth.

   And hereafter, as the Rabbis used to say, No man will rise from the
   grave a cripple.' All the limitations which we have imposed upon
   ourselves, for Christ's sake, will be removed then. Then shall the eyes
   of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped; then
   shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall
   sing.' Verily I say unto thee, there is no man that hath left any' of
   his possessions, affections, tastes, capacities, for My sake but he
   shall receive a hundredfold more in this life, and in the world to
   come, life everlasting.' No man is a loser by giving up anything for
   Jesus Christ.

   And, on the other hand, the complete man, complete in everything except
   his spiritual nature, is a fragment in all his completeness; and
   yonder, there will for him be a solemn process of stripping. Take it
   from him, and give it to him that hath ten talents.' Ah! how much of
   that for which some of you are flinging away Jesus Christ will fade
   from you when you go yonder. His glory shall not descend after him'; as
   he came, so shall he go.' Tongues, they shall cease; knowledge, it
   shall vanish away'; gifts will fail, capacities will disappear when the
   opportunities for the exercise of them in a material world are at an
   end, and there will be little left to the man who would carry hands and
   feet and eyes all into the fire and forgot the one thing needful,' but
   a thin thread, if I may so say, of personality quivering with the sense
   of responsibility, and preyed upon by the gnawing worm of a too-late
   remorse.

   My brother, the lips of Incarnate Love spoke those solemn words of my
   text, which it becomes not me to repeat to you as if they were mine;
   but I ask you to weigh this, His urgent commandment, and to listen to
   His solemn assurance, by which He enforces the wisdom of the
   self-suppression: It is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than
   having two hands, to be cast into hell-fire.'

   Give your hearts to Jesus Christ, and set the following in His
   footsteps and the keeping of His commandments high above all other
   aims. You will have to suppress much and give up much, but such
   suppression is the shortest road to becoming perfect men, complete in
   Him, and such surrender is the surest way to possess all things. He
   that loseth his life'--which is more than hand or eye--for Christ's
   sake,' the same shall find it.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE LOST SHEEP AND THE SEEKING SHEPHERD

   If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he
   not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth Into the mountains, and
   seeketh that which is gone astray!--MATT. xviii. 12.

   We find this simple parable, or germ of a parable, in a somewhat more
   expanded form, as the first of the incomparable three in the fifteenth
   chapter of Luke's Gospel. Perhaps our Lord repeated the parable more
   than once. It is an unveiling of His inmost heart, and therein a
   revelation of the very heart of God. It touches the deepest things in
   His relation to men, and sets forth thoughts of Him, such as man never
   dared to dream. It does all this by the homeliest image and by an
   appeal to the simplest instincts. The most prosaic shepherd looks for
   lost sheep, and everybody has peculiar joy over lost things found. They
   may not be nearly so valuable as things that were not lost. The
   unstrayed may he many, and the strayed be but one. Still there is a
   keener joy in the recovery of the one than in the unbroken possession
   of the ninety-and-nine. That feeling in a man may be only selfishness,
   but homely as it is--when the loser is God, and the lost are men, it
   becomes the means of uttering and illustrating that truth concerning
   God which no religion but that of the Cross has ever been bold enough
   to proclaim, that He cares most for the wanderers, and rejoices over
   the return of the one that went astray more than over the
   ninety-and-nine who never wandered.

   There are some significant differences between this edition of the
   parable and the form which it assumes in the Gospel according to Luke.
   There it is spoken in vindication of Christ's consorting with publicans
   and sinners; here it is spoken in order to point the lesson of not
   despising the least and most insignificant of the sons of men. There
   the seeking Shepherd is obviously Christ; here the seeking Shepherd is
   rather the Divine Father; as appears by the words of the next verse:
   For it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of
   these little ones should perish.' There the sheep is lost; here the
   sheep goes astray. There the Shepherd seeks till He find, here the
   Shepherd, perhaps, fails to find; for our Lord says, If so be that he
   find it.'

   But I am not about to venture on all the thoughts which this parable
   suggests, nor even to deal with the main lesson which it teaches. I
   wish merely to look at the two figures--the wanderer and the seeker.

   I. First, then, let us look at that figure of the one wanderer.

   Of course I need scarcely remind you that in the immediate application
   of the parable in Luke's Gospel, the ninety-and-nine were the
   respectable people who thought the publicans and harlots altogether too
   dirty to touch, and regarded it as very doubtful conduct on the part of
   this young Rabbi from Nazareth to be mixed up with persons whom no one
   with a proper regard for whited sepulchres would have anything to do
   with. To them He answers, in effect--I am a shepherd; that is my
   vindication. Of course a shepherd goes after and cares for the lost
   sheep. He does not ask about its worth, or anything else. He simply
   follows the lost because it is lost. It may be a poor little creature
   after all, but it is lost, and that is enough. And so He vindicates
   Himself to the ninety-and-nine: You do not need Me, you are found. I
   take you on your own estimation of yourselves, and tell you that My
   mission is to the wanderers.'

   I do not suppose, however, that any of us have need to be reminded that
   upon a closer and deeper examination of the facts of the case, every
   hoof of the ninety-and-nine belonged to a stray sheep too; and that in
   the wider application of the parable all men are wanderers.
   Remembering, then, this universal application, I would point out two or
   three things about the condition of these strayed sheep, which include
   the whole race. The ninety-and-nine may shadow for us a number of
   beings, in unfallen worlds, immensely greater than even the multitudes
   of wandering souls that have lived here through weary ages of sin and
   tears, but that does not concern us now.

   The first thought I gather from the parable is that all men are
   Christ's sheep. That sounds a strange thing to say. What? all these men
   and women who, having run away from Him, are plunged in sin, like sheep
   mired in a black bog, the scoundrels and the profligates, the scum and
   the outcasts of great cities; people with narrow foreheads, and
   blighted, blasted lives, the despair of our modern civilisation--are
   they all His? And in those great wide-lying heathen lands where men
   know nothing of His name and of His love, are they all His too? Let Him
   answer, Other sheep I have'--though they look like goats to-day--which
   are not of this fold, them also must I bring, and they shall hear My
   voice.' All men are Christ's, because He has been the Agent of divine
   creation, and the grand words of the hundredth Psalm are true about
   Him. It is He that hath made us, and we are His. We are His people and
   the sheep of His pasture.' They are His, because His sacrifice has
   bought them for His. Erring, straying, lost, they still belong to the
   Shepherd.

   Notice next, the picture of the sheep as wandering. The word is,
   literally, which goeth astray,' not which is gone astray.' It pictures
   the process of wandering, not the result as accomplished. We see the
   sheep, poor, silly creature, not going anywhere in particular, only
   there is a sweet tuft of grass here, and it crops that; and here is a
   bit of ground where there is soft walking, and it goes there; and so,
   step by step, not meaning anything, not knowing where it is going, or
   that it is going anywhere; it goes, and goes, and goes, and at last it
   finds out that it is away from its beat on the hillside--for sheep keep
   to one bit of hillside generally, as any shepherd will tell you--and
   then it begins to bleat, and most helpless of creatures, fluttering and
   excited, rushes about amongst the thorns and brambles, or gets mired in
   some quag or other, and it will never find its way back of itself until
   some one comes for it.

   So,' says Christ to us, there are a great many of you who do not mean
   to go wrong; you are not going anywhere in particular, you do not start
   on your course with any intentions either way, of doing right or wrong,
   of keeping near God, or going away from Him, but you simply go where
   the grass is sweetest, or the walking easiest. But look at the end of
   it; where you have got to. You have got away from Him.'

   Now, if you take that series of parables in Luke xv., and note the
   metaphors there, you will see three different sides given of the
   process by which men's hearts stray away from God. There is the sheep
   that wanders. That is partly conscious, and voluntary, but in a large
   measure simply yielding to inclination and temptation. Then there is
   the coin that trundles away under some piece of furniture, and is
   lost--that is a picture of the manner in which a man, without volition,
   almost mechanically sometimes, slides into sins and disappears as it
   were, and gets covered over with the dust of evil. And then there is
   the worst of all, the lad that had full knowledge of what he was doing.
   I am going into a far-off country; I cannot stand this any longer--all
   restraint and no liberty, and no power of doing what I like with my
   own; and always obliged to obey and be dependent on my father for my
   pocket-money! Give me what belongs to me, for good and all, and let me
   go!' That is the picture of the worst kind of wandering, when a man
   knows what he is about, and looks at the merciful restraint of the law
   of God, and says: No! I had rather be far away; and my own master, and
   not always be "cribbed, cabined, and confined" with these limitations.'

   The straying of the half-conscious sheep may seem more innocent, but it
   carries the poor creature away from the shepherd as completely as if it
   had been wholly intelligent and voluntary. Let us learn the lesson. In
   a world like this, if a man does not know very clearly where he is
   going, he is sure to go wrong. If you do not exercise a distinct
   determination to do God's will, and to follow in His footsteps who has
   set us an example; and if your main purpose is to get succulent grass
   to eat and soft places to walk in, you are certain before long to
   wander tragically from all that is right and noble and pure. It is no
   excuse for you to say: I never meant it'; I did not intend any harm, I
   only followed my own inclinations.' More mischief is wrought'--to the
   man himself, as well as to other people--from want of thought than is
   wrought by' an evil will. And the sheep has strayed as effectually,
   though, when it set out on its journey, it never thought of straying.
   Young men and women beginning life, remember! and take this lesson.

   But then there is another point that I must touch for a moment. In the
   Revised Version you will find a very tiny alteration in the words of my
   text, which, yet, makes a large difference in the sense. The last
   clause of my text, as it stands in our Bible, is, And seeketh that
   which is gone astray'; the Revised Version more correctly reads, And
   seeketh that which is going astray.' Now, look at the difference in
   these two renderings. In the former the process is represented as
   finished, in the correct rendering it is represented as going on. And
   that is what I would press on you, the awful, solemn, necessarily
   progressive character of our wanderings from God. A man never gets to
   the end of the distance that separates between him and the Father, if
   his face is turned away from God. Every moment the separation is
   increasing. Two lines start from each other at the acutest angle and
   diverge more the further they are produced, until at last the one may
   be away up by the side of God's throne, and the other away down in the
   deepest depths of hell. So accordingly my text carries with solemn
   pathos, in a syllable, the tremendous lesson: The sheep is not gone,
   but going astray.' Ah! there are some of my hearers who are daily and
   hourly increasing the distance between themselves and their merciful
   Father.

   Now the last thing here in this picture is the contrast between the
   description given of the wandering sheep in our text, and that in St.
   Luke. Here it is represented as wandering, there it is represented as
   lost. That is very beautiful and has a meaning often not noticed by
   hasty readers. Who is it that has lost it? We talk about the lost soul
   and the lost man, as if it were the man that had lost himself, and that
   is true, and a dreadful truth it is. But that is not the truth that is
   taught in this parable, and meant by us to be gathered from it. Who is
   it that has lost it? He to whom it belonged.

   That is to say, wherever a heart gets ensnared and entangled with the
   love of the treasures and pleasures of this life, and so departs in
   allegiance and confidence and friendship from the living God, there God
   the Father regards Himself as the poorer by the loss of one of His
   children, by the loss of one of His sheep. He does not care to possess
   you by the hold of mere creation and supremacy and rule. He desires you
   to love Him, and then He deems that He has you. And if you do not love
   Him, He deems that He has lost you. There is something in the divine
   heart that goes out after His lost property. We touch here upon deep
   things that we cannot speak of intelligently; only remember this, that
   what looks like self-regard in man is the purest love in God, and that
   there is nothing in the whole revelation which Christianity makes of
   the character of God more wonderful than this, that He judges that He
   has lost His child when His child has forgotten to love Him.

   II. So much, then, for one of the great pictures in this text. I can
   spare but a sentence or two for the other--the picture of the Seeker.

   I said that in the one form of the parable it was more distinctly the
   Father, and in the other more distinctly the Son, who is represented as
   seeking the sheep. But these two do still coincide in substance,
   inasmuch as God's chief way of seeking us poor wandering sheep is
   through the work of His dear Son Jesus, and the coming of Christ is the
   Father's searching for His sheep in the cloudy and dark day.'

   According to my text God leaves the ninety-and-nine and goes into the
   mountains where the wanderer is, and seeks him. And this, couched in
   veiled form, is the great mystery of the divine love, the incarnation
   and sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord. Here is the answer by
   anticipation to the sarcasm that is often levelled at evangelical
   Christianity: You must think a good deal of human nature, and must have
   a very arrogant notion of the inhabitant of this little speck that
   floats in the great sea of the heavens, if you suppose that with all
   these millions of orbs he is so important that the divine Nature came
   down upon this little tiny molehill, and took his nature and died.'

   Yes!' says Christ, not because man was so great, not because man was so
   valuable in comparison with the rest of creation--he was but one
   amongst ninety-nine unfallen and unsinful--but because he was so
   wretched, because he was so small, because he had gone so far away from
   God; therefore, the seeking love came after him, and would draw him to
   itself.' That, I think, is answer enough to the cavil.

   And then, there is a difference between these two versions of the
   Parable in respect to their representation of the end of the seeking.
   The one says seeks until He finds.' Oh! the patient, incredible
   inexhaustibleness of the divine love. God's long-suffering, if I may
   take such a metaphor, like a sleuth-hound, will follow the object of
   its search through all its windings and doublings, until it comes up to
   it. So that great seeking Shepherd follows us through all the devious
   courses of our wayward, wandering footsteps doubling back upon
   themselves, until He finds us. Though the sheep may increase its
   distance, the Shepherd follows. The further away we get the more tender
   His appeal; the more we stop our ears the louder the voice with which
   He calls. You cannot wear out Jesus Christ, you cannot exhaust the
   resources of His bounteousness, of His tenderness. However we may have
   been going wrong, however far we may have been wandering, however
   vehemently we may be increasing, at every moment, our distance from
   Him, He is coming after us, serene, loving, long-suffering, and will
   not be put away.

   Dear friend! would you only believe that a loving, living Person is
   really seeking you, seeking you by my poor words now, seeking you by
   many a providence, seeking you by His Gospel, by His Spirit; and will
   never be satisfied till He has found you in your finding Him and
   turning your soul to Him!

   But, I beseech you, do not forget the solemn lesson drawn from the
   other form of the parable which is given in my text: If so be that He
   find it. There is a possibility of failure. What an awful power you
   have of burying yourself in the sepulchre, as it were, of your own
   self-will, and hiding yourself in the darkness of your own unbelief!
   You can frustrate the seeking love of God. Some of you have done
   so--some of you have done so all your lives. Some of you, perhaps at
   this moment, are trying to do so, and consciously endeavouring to steel
   your hearts against some softening that may have been creeping over
   them whilst I have been speaking. Are you yielding to His seeking love,
   or wandering further and further from Him? He has come to find you. Let
   Him not seek in vain, but let the Good Shepherd draw you to Himself,
   where, lifted on the Cross, He giveth His life for the sheep.' He will
   restore your soul and carry you back on His strong shoulder, or in His
   bosom near His loving heart, to the green pastures and the safe fold.
   There will be joy in His heart, more than over those who have never
   wandered; and there will be joy in the heart of the returning wanderer,
   such as they who had not strayed and learned the misery could never
   know, for, as the profound Jewish saying has it, In the place where the
   penitents stand, the perfectly righteous cannot stand.'
     __________________________________________________________________

PERSISTENCE OF THWARTED LOVE

   If so be that he find it.'--MATT. xviii. 13.

   Until he find it.'--LUKE xv. 4.

   Like other teachers, Jesus seems to have had favourite points of view
   and utterances which came naturally to His lips. There are several
   instances in the gospels of His repeating the same sayings in entirely
   different connections and with different applications. One of these
   habitual points of view seems to have been the thought of men as
   wandering sheep, and of Himself as the Shepherd. The metaphor has
   become so familiar that we need a moment's reflection to grasp the
   mingled tenderness, sadness, and majesty of it. He thought habitually
   of all humanity as a flock of lost sheep, and of Himself as high above
   them, unparticipant of their evil, and having one errand--to bring them
   back.

   And not only does He frequently refer to this symbol, but we have the
   two editions, from which my texts are respectively taken, of the
   Parable of the Lost Sheep. I say two editions, because it seems to me a
   great deal more probable that Jesus should have repeated Himself than
   that either of the Evangelists should have ventured to take this gem
   and set it in an alien setting. The two versions differ slightly in
   some unimportant expressions, and Matthew's is the more condensed of
   the two. But the most important variation is the one which is brought
   to light by the two fragments which I have ventured to isolate as
   texts. If He find' implies the possible failure of the Shepherd's
   search; till He find' implies His unwearied persistence in the teeth of
   all failure. And, taken in conjunction, they suggest some very blessed
   and solemn considerations, which I pray for strength to lay upon your
   minds and hearts now.

   I. But first let me say a word or two upon the more general thought
   brought out in both these clauses--of the Shepherd's search.

   Now, beautiful and heart-touching as that picture is, of the Shepherd
   away amongst the barren mountains searching minutely in every ravine
   and thicket, it wants a little explanation in order to be brought into
   correspondence with the fact which it expresses. For His search for His
   lost property is not in ignorance of where it is, and His finding of it
   is not His discovery of His sheep, but its discovery of its Shepherd.
   We have to remember wherein consists the loss before we can understand
   wherein consists the search.

   Now, if we ask ourselves that question first, we get a flood of light
   on the whole matter. The great hundredth Psalm, according to its true
   rendering, says, It is He that hath made us, and we are His; . . . we
   are . . . the sheep of His pasture.' But God's true possession of man
   is not simply the possession inherent in the act of creation. For there
   is only one way in which spirit can own spirit, or heart can possess
   heart, and that is through the voluntary yielding and love of the one
   to the other. So Jesus Christ, who, in all His seeking after us men, is
   the voice and hand of Almighty Love, does not count that He has found a
   man until the man has learned to love Him. For He loses us when we are
   alienated from Him, when we cease to trust Him, when we refuse to obey
   Him, when we will not yield to Him, but put Him far away from us.
   Therefore the search which, as being Christ's is God's in Christ, is
   for our love, our trust, our obedience; and in reality it consists of
   all the energies by which Jesus Christ, as God's embodiment and
   representative, seeks to woo and win you and me back to Himself, that
   He may truly possess us.

   If the Shepherd's seeking is but a tender metaphor for the whole
   aggregate of the ways by which the love that is divine and human in
   Jesus Christ moves round about our closed hearts, as water may feel
   round some hermetically sealed vessel, seeking for an entrance, then
   surely the first and chiefest of them, which makes its appeal to each
   of us as directly as to any man that ever lived, is that great mystery
   that Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, left the ninety-and-nine
   that were safe on the high pastures of the mountains of God, and came
   down among us, out into the wilderness, to seek and to save that which
   was lost.'

   And, brother, that method of winning--I was going to say, of
   earning--our love comes straight in its appeal to every single soul on
   the face of the earth. Do not say that thou wert not in Christ's heart
   and mind when He willed to be born and willed to die. Thou, and thou,
   and thou, and every single unit of humanity were there clear before Him
   in their individuality; and He died for thee, and for me, and for every
   man. And, in one aspect, that is more than to say that He died for all
   men. There was a specific intention in regard to each of us in the
   mission of Jesus Christ; and when He went to the Cross the Shepherd was
   not giving His life for a confused flock of which He knew not the
   units, but for sheep the face of each of whom He knows, and each of
   whom He loves. There was His first seeking; there is His chief seeking.
   There is the seeking which ought to appeal to every soul of man, and
   which, ever since you were children, has been making its appeal to you.
   Has it done so in vain? Dear friend, let not your heart still be hard.

   He seeks us by every record of that mighty love that died for us, even
   when it is being spoken as poorly, and with as many limitations and
   imperfections, as I am speaking it now. As though God did beseech you
   by us, pray you in Christ's stead.' It is not arrogance, God forbid! it
   is simple truth when I say, Never mind about me; but my word, in so far
   as it is true and tender, is Christ's word to you. And here, in our
   midst, that unseen Form is passing along these pews and speaking to
   these hearts, and the Shepherd is seeking His sheep.

   He seeks each of us by the inner voices and emotions in our hearts and
   minds, by those strange whisperings which sometimes we hear, by the
   suddenly upstarting convictions of duty and truth which sometimes,
   without manifest occasion, flash across our hearts. These voices are
   Christ's voice, for, in a far deeper sense than most men superficially
   believe, He is the true Light that lighteth every man coming into the
   world.'

   He is seeking us by our unrest, by our yearnings after we know not
   what, by our dim dissatisfaction which insists upon making itself felt
   in the midst of joys and delights, and which the world fails to satisfy
   as much as it fails to interpret. There is a cry in every heart, little
   as the bearer of the heart translates it into its true meaning--a cry
   after God, even the living God. And by all your unrests, your
   disappointments, your hopes unfulfilled, your hopes fulfilled and
   blasted in the fulfilment, your desires that perish unfruited; by all
   the mystic movements of the spirit that yearns for something beyond the
   material and the visible, Jesus Christ is seeking His sheep.

   He seeks us by the discipline of life, for I believe that Christ is the
   active Providence of God, and that the hands that were pierced on the
   Cross do move the wheels of the history of the world, and mould the
   destinies of individual spirits.

   The deepest meaning of all life is that we should be won to seek Him
   who in it all is seeking us, and led to venture our hopes, and fling
   the anchor of our faith beyond the bounds of the visible, that it may
   fasten in the Eternal, even in Christ Himself, the same yesterday and
   to-day and for ever' when earth and its training are done with.
   Brethren, it is a blessed thing to live, when we interpret life's
   smallnesses aright as the voice of the Master, who, by them all--our
   sadness and our gladness, the unrest of our hearts and the yearnings
   and longings of our spirits, by the ministry of His word, by the record
   of His sufferings--is echoing the invitation of the Cross itself, Come
   unto Me, all ye . . . and I will give you rest!' So much for the
   Shepherd's search.

   II. And now, in the second place, a word as to the possible thwarting
   of the search.

   If so be that He find.' That is an awful if, when we think of what lies
   below it. The thing seems an absurdity when it is spoken, and yet it is
   a grim fact in many a life--viz. that Christ's effort can fail and be
   thwarted. Not that His search is perfunctory or careless, but that we
   shroud ourselves in darkness through which that love can find no way.
   It is we, not He, that are at fault when He fails to find that which He
   seeks. There is nothing more certain than that God, and Christ the
   image of God, desire the rescue of every man, woman, and child of the
   human race. Let no teaching blur that sunlight fact. There is nothing
   more certain than that Jesus Christ has done, and is doing, all that He
   can do to secure that purpose. If He could make every man love Him, and
   so find every man, be sure that He would do it. But He cannot. For here
   is the central mystery of creation, which if we could solve there would
   be few knots that would resist our fingers, that a finite will like
   yours or mine can lift itself up against God, and that, having the
   capacity, it has the desire. He says, Come!' We say, I will not.' That
   door of the heart opens from within, and He never breaks it open. He
   stands at the door and knocks. And then the same solemn if comes--If
   any man opens, I will come in'; if any man keeps it shut, and holds on
   to prevent its being opened, I will stop out.

   Brethren, I seek to press upon you now the one plain truth, that if you
   are not saved men and women, there is no person in heaven or earth or
   hell that has any blame in the matter but yourself alone. God appeals
   to us, and says, What more could have been done to My vineyard that I
   have not done unto it?' His hands are clean, and the infinite love of
   Christ is free from all blame, and all the blame lies at our own doors.

   I must not dwell upon the various reasons which lead so many men among
   us--as, alas! the utmost charity cannot but see that there are--to turn
   away from Christ's appeals, and to be unwilling to have this Man'
   either to reign over' them or to save them. There are many such, I am
   sure, in my audience now; and I would fain, if I could, draw them to
   that Lord in whom alone they have life, and rest, and holiness, and
   heaven.

   One great reason is because you do not believe that you need Him. There
   is an awful inadequacy in most men's conceptions--and still more in
   their feelings--as to their sin. Oh dear friends, if you would only
   submit your consciences for one meditative half-hour to the light of
   God's highest law, I think you would find out something more than many
   of you know, as to what you are and what your sin is. Many of us do not
   much believe that we are in any danger. I have seen a sheep comfortably
   cropping the short grass on a down over the sea, with one foot out in
   the air, and a precipice of five hundred feet below it, and at the
   bottom the crawling water. It did not know that there was any danger of
   going over. That is like some of us. If you believed what is true--that
   sin when it is finished, bringeth forth death,' and understood what
   death' meant, you would feel the mercy of the Shepherd seeking you.
   Some of us think we are in the flock when we are not. Some of us do not
   like submission. Some of us have no inclination for the sweet pastures
   that He provides, and would rather stay where we are, and have the fare
   that is going there.

   We do not need to do anything to put Him away. I have no doubt that
   some of us, as soon as my voice ceases, will plunge again into worldly
   talk and thoughts before they are down the chapel steps, and so blot
   out, as well as they can, any vagrant and superficial impression that
   may have been made. Dear brethren, it is a very easy matter to turn
   away from the Shepherd's voice. I called, and ye refused. I stretched
   out My hands, and no man regarded.' That is all! That is what you do,
   and that is enough.

   III. So, lastly, the thwarted search prolonged.

   Till He find'--that is a wonderful and a merciful word. It indicates
   the infinitude of Christ's patient forgiveness and perseverance. We
   tire of searching. Can a mother forget' or abandon her seeking after a
   lost child? Yes! if it has gone on for so long as to show that further
   search is hopeless, she will go home and nurse her sorrow in her heart.
   Or, perhaps, like some poor mothers and wives, it will turn her brain,
   and one sign of her madness will be that, long years after grief should
   have been calm because hope was dead, she will still be looking for the
   little one so long lost. But Jesus Christ stands at the closed door, as
   a great modern picture shows, though it has been so long undisturbedly
   closed that the hinges are brown with rust, and weeds grow high against
   it. He stands there in the night, with the dew on His hair, unheeded or
   repelled, like some stranger in a hostile village seeking for a night's
   shelter. He will not be put away; but, after all refusals, still with
   gracious finger, knocks upon the door, and speaks into the heart. Some
   of you have refused Him all your lives, and perhaps you have grey hairs
   upon you now. And He is speaking to you still. He suffereth long, is
   not easily provoked, is not soon angry; hopeth all things,' even of the
   obstinate rejecters.

   For that is another truth that this word till' preaches to us--viz. the
   possibility of bringing back those that have gone furthest away and
   have been longest away. The world has a great deal to say about
   incurable cases of moral obliquity and deformity. Christ knows nothing
   about incurable cases.' If there is a worst man in the world--and
   perhaps there is--there is nothing but his own disinclination to
   prevent his being brought back, and made as pure as an angel.

   But do not let us deal with generalities; let us bring the truths to
   ourselves. Dear brethren, I know nothing about the most of you. I
   should not know you again if I met you five minutes after we part now.
   I have never spoken to many of you, and probably never shall, except in
   this public way; but I know that you need Christ, and that Christ wants
   you. And I know that, however far you have gone, you have not gone so
   far but that His love feels out through the remoteness to grasp you,
   and would fain draw you to itself.

   I dare say you have seen upon some dreary moor, or at the foot of some
   scaur' on the hillside, the bleached bones of a sheep, lying white and
   grim among the purple heather. It strayed, unthinking of danger,
   tempted by the sweet herbage; it fell; it vainly bleated; it died. But
   what if it had heard the shepherd's call, and had preferred to lie
   where it fell, and to die where it lay? We talk about silly sheep.' Are
   there any of them so foolish as men and women listening to me now, who
   will not answer the Shepherd's voice when they hear it, with, Lord,
   here am I, come and help me out of this miry clay, and bring me back.'
   He is saying to each of you, Turn ye, turn ye, why will ye die?' May He
   not have to say at last of any of us, Ye would not come to Me, that ye
   might have life!'
     __________________________________________________________________

FORGIVEN AND UNFORGIVING

   Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but,
   Until seventy times seven.' --MATT. xviii. 22.

   The disciples had been squabbling about pre-eminence in the kingdom
   which they thought was presently to appear. They had ventured to refer
   their selfish and ambitious dispute to Christ's arbitrament. He
   answered by telling them the qualifications of the greatest in the
   kingdom'--that they are to be humble like little children; that they
   are to be placable; that they are to use all means to reclaim
   offenders; and that, even if the offence is against themselves, they
   are to ignore the personal element, and to regard the offender, not so
   much as having done them harm, as having harmed himself by his
   evil-doing.

   Peter evidently feels that that is a very hard commandment for a man of
   his temperament, and so he goes to Jesus Christ for a little further
   direction, and proposes a question as to the limits of this
   disposition: How often shall my brother sin?' The very question betrays
   that he does not understand what forgiveness means; for it is not real,
   if the forgiven' sin is stowed away safely in the memory. I can
   forgive, but I cannot forget,' generally means, I do not quite
   forgive.' We are not to take the pardoned offence, and carry it to a
   kind of suspense account,' to be revived if another is committed, but
   we are to blot it out altogether. Peter thought that he had given a
   very wide allowance when he said seven times.' Christ's answer lifts
   the whole subject out of the realm of hard and fast lines and limits,
   for He takes the two perfect numbers ten' and seven,' and multiplies
   them together, and then He multiplies that by seven' once more; and the
   product is not four hundred and ninety, but is innumerableness. He does
   not mean that the four hundred and ninety-first offence is outside the
   pale, but He suggests indefiniteness, endlessness. So, as I say, He
   lifts the question out of the region in which Peter was keeping it,
   thereby betraying that he did not understand what he was talking about,
   and tells us that there are no limits to the obligation.

   The parable which follows, and follows with a therefore,' does not deal
   so much with Peter's question as to the limits of the disposition, but
   sets forth its grounds and the nature of its manifestations. If we
   understand why we ought to forgive, and what forgiveness is, we shall
   not say, How often?' The question will have answered itself.

   I turn to the parable rather than the words which I have read as our
   starting-point, to seek to bring out the lessons which it contains in
   regard to our relations to God, and to one another. There are three
   sections in it: the king and his debtor; the forgiven debtor and his
   debtor; and the forgiven debtor unforgiven because unforgiving. And if
   we look at these three points I think we shall get the lessons
   intended.

   I. The king and his debtor.

   A certain king has servants, whom he gathers together to give in their
   reckoning. And one of them is brought that owes him ten thousand
   talents. Now, it is to be noticed at the very outset that the analogy
   between debt and sin, though real, is extremely imperfect. No metaphor
   of that sort goes on all fours, and there has been a great deal of harm
   done to theology and to evangelical religion by carrying out too
   completely the analogy between money debts and our sins against God.
   But although the analogy is imperfect, it is very real. The first point
   that is to be brought out in this first part of the parable is the
   immense magnitude of every man's transgressions against God.
   Numismatists and arithmeticians may jangle about the precise amount
   represented by the thousand talents. It differs according to the talent
   which is taken as the basis of the calculation. There were several
   talents in use in the currency of ancient days. But the very point of
   the expression is not the specification of an exact amount, but the use
   of a round number which is to suggest an undefined magnitude. Ten
   thousand talents,' according to one estimate, is some two millions and
   a quarter of pounds sterling.

   But I would point out that the amount is stated in terms of talents,
   and any talent is a large sum; and there are ten thousand of these; and
   the reason why the account is made out in terms of talents, the largest
   denomination in the currency of the period, is because every sin
   against God is a great sin. He being what He is, and we being what we
   are, and sin being what it is, every sin is large, although the deed
   which embodies it may be, when measured by the world's foot-rule, very
   small. For the essence of sin is rebellion against God and the
   enthroning of self as His victorious rival; and all rebellion is
   rebellion, whether it is found in arms in the field, or whether it is
   simply sulkily refusing obedience and cherishing thoughts of treason.
   We are always apt to go wrong in our estimate of the great and small in
   human actions, and, although the terms of magnitude do not apply
   properly to moral questions at all, there is no more conspicuous misuse
   of language than when we speak of anything which has in it the virus of
   rebellion against God, and the breach of His law, as being a small sin.
   It may be a small act; it is a great sin. Little rattlesnakes are
   snakes; they have rattles and poison fangs as really as the most
   monstrous of the brood that coils and hisses in some cave. So the
   account is made out in terms of talents, because every sin is a great
   one. I need not dwell upon the numerousness that is suggested. Ten
   thousand' is the natural current expression for a number that is not
   innumerable, but is only known to be very great. The psalmist says:
   They are more than the hairs of my head.' How many hairs had you in
   your head, David? Do you know? No!' And how many sins have you
   committed? Do you know? No!' The number is beyond count by us, though
   it may be counted by Him against whom they are done. Do you believe
   that about yourself, my friend, that the debit side of your account has
   filled all the page and has to be carried forward on to another? Do we
   any of us realise, as we all of us ought to do, the infinite number,
   and the transcendent greatness, of our transgressions against the
   Father?

   But the next point to be noticed is the stern legal right of the
   creditor. It sounds harsh, cruel, almost brutal, that the man and his
   wife and his children should be sold into slavery, and all that he had
   should be taken from him, in order to go some little way towards the
   reduction of the enormous debt that he owed. Christ puts in that harsh
   and apparently cruel conduct in the story, not to suggest that it was
   harsh and cruel, but because it was according to the law of the time. A
   recognised legal right was exercised by the creditor when he said, Take
   him; sell him for a slave, and bring me what he fetches in the open
   markets.' So that we have here suggested the solemn thought of the
   right that divine justice, acting according to strict retributive law,
   has over each of us. Our own consciences attest it as perfectly within
   the scope of the divine retributive justice that our enormous sin
   should bring down a tremendous punishment.

   I said that the analogy between sin and debt was a very imperfect one.
   It is imperfect in regard to one point--viz. the implication of other
   people in the consequences of the man's evil; for although it is quite
   true that the evil that men do lives after them, and spreads far beyond
   their sight, and involves many people, no other is amenable to divine
   justice for the sinner's debt. It is quite true that, when we do an
   evil action, we never can tell how far its wind-borne seeds may be
   carried, or where they may alight, or what sort of unwholesome fruit
   they may bear, or who may be poisoned by them; but, on the other hand,
   we, and we only, are responsible for our individual transgressions
   against God. If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself; and if
   thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.'

   The same imperfection in the analogy applies to the next point in the
   parable--viz. the bankrupt debtor's prayer, Have patience with me, and
   I will pay thee all.' Easy to promise! I wonder how long it would have
   taken a penniless bankrupt to scrape together two and a quarter
   millions of pounds? He said a great deal more than he could make good.
   But the language of his prayer is by no means the language that becomes
   a penitent at God's throne. We have not to offer to make future
   satisfaction. No! that is impossible. What I have written I have
   written,' and the page, with all its smudges and blots and misshapen
   letters, cannot be made other than it is by any future pages fairly
   written. No future righteousness has any power to affect the guilt of
   past sin. There is one thing that does discharge the writing from the
   page. Do you remember Paul's words, blotting out the handwriting that
   was against us--nailing it to His Cross'? You sometimes dip your pens
   into red ink, and run a couple of lines across the page of an account
   that is done with. Jesus Christ does the same across our account, and
   the debt is non-existent, because He has died.

   But the prayer is the expression, if not of penitence yet of petition,
   and all the stern rigour of the law's requirement at once melts away,
   and the king who, in the former words, seemed so harsh, now is almost
   incredibly merciful. For he not only cancels the debt, but sets the man
   free. Thy ways are not as our ways; . . . as the heavens are higher
   than the earth, so great is His mercy toward' the sinful soul.

   II. So much, then, for the first part of this parable. Now a word as to
   the second, the forgiven debtor and his debt.

   Our Lord uses in the 27th and 28th verses of our text the same
   expression very significantly and emphatically. The lord of that
   servant was moved with compassion.' And then again, in the 28th verse,
   But that servant went out and found one of his fellow-servants.' The
   repetition of the same phrase hooks the two halves together, emphasises
   the identity of the man, and the difference of his demeanour, on the
   two occasions.

   The conduct described is almost impossibly disgusting and truculent. He
   found his fellow-servant, who owed him a hundred pence'--some three
   pounds, ten shillings--and with the hands that a minute before had been
   wrung in agony, and extended in entreaty, he throttled him; and with
   the voice that had been plaintively pleading for mercy a minute before,
   he gruffly growled, Pay me that thou owest.' He had just come through
   an agony of experience that might have made him tender. He had just
   received a blessing that might have made his heart glow. But even the
   repetition of his own petition does not touch him, and when the poor
   fellow-servant, with his paltry debt, says, Have patience with me, and
   I will pay thee all,' it avails nothing. He durst not sell his
   fellow-servant. God's rights over a man are more than any man's over
   another. But he does what he can. He will not do much towards recouping
   himself of his loan by flinging the poor debtor into prison, but if he
   cannot get his ducats he will gloat over his pound of flesh.' So he
   hurries him off to gaol.

   Could a man have done like that? Ah! brethren, the things that would be
   monstrous in our relations to one another are common in our relations
   to God. Every day we see, and, alas! do, the very same thing, in our
   measure and degree. Do you never treasure up somebody's slights? Do you
   never put away in a pigeon-hole for safe-keeping, endorsed with the
   doer's name on the back of it, the record of some trivial offence
   against you? It is but as a penny against a talent, for the worst that
   any of us can do to another is nothing as compared with what many of us
   have been doing all our lives toward God. I dare say that some of us
   will go out from this place, and the next man that we meet that rubs us
   the wrong way,' or does us any harm, we shall score down his act
   against him with as implacable and unmerciful an unforgivingness as
   that of this servant in the parable. Do not believe that he was a
   monster of iniquity. He was just like us. We all of us have one human
   heart, and this man's crime is but too natural to us all. The essence
   of it was that having been forgiven, he did not forgive.

   So, then, our Lord here implies the principle that God's mercy to us is
   to set the example to which our dealings with others is to be
   conformed. Even as I had mercy on thee' plainly proposes that miracle
   of divine forgiveness as our pattern as well as our hope. The world's
   morality recognises the duty of forgiveness. Christ shows us God's
   forgiveness as at once the model which is the perfect realisation of
   the idea in its completeness and inexhaustibleness, and also the motive
   which, brought into our experience, inclines and enables us to forgive.

   III. And now I come to the last point of the text--the debtor who had
   been forgiven falling back into the ranks of the unforgiven, because he
   does not forgive.

   The fellow-servants were very much disgusted, no doubt. Our consciences
   work a great deal more rapidly, and rigidly, about other people's
   faults than they do about our own. And nine out of ten of these
   fellow-servants that were very sorry, and ran and told the king, would
   have done exactly the same thing themselves. The king, for the first
   time, is wroth. We do not read that he was so before, when the debt
   only was in question; but such unforgiving harshness, after the
   experience of such merciful forgiveness, rouses his righteous
   indignation. The unmercifulness of Christian people is a worse sin than
   many a deed that goes by very ugly names amongst men. And so the
   judgment that falls upon this evil-doer, who, by his truculence to his
   fellow-servant, had betrayed the baseness of his nature and the
   ingratitude of his heart, is, Put him back where he was! Tie the two
   and a quarter millions round his neck again! Let us see what he will do
   by way of discharging it now!' Now, do not let any theological systems
   prevent you from recognising the solemn truth that underlies that
   representation, that there may be things in the hearts and conduct of
   forgiven Christians which may cancel the cancelling of their debt, and
   bring it all back again. No man can cherish the malicious disposition
   that treasures up offences against himself, and at the same moment feel
   that the divine love is wrapping him round in its warm folds. If we are
   to retain our consciousness of having been forgiven by God, and
   received into the amplitude of His heart, we must, in our measure and
   degree, imitate that on which we trust, and be mirrors of the divine
   mercy which we say has saved us.

   Our parable lays equal stress on two things. First, that the foundation
   of all real mercifulness in men is the reception of forgiving mercy
   from God. We must have experienced it before we can exercise it. And,
   second, we must exercise it, if we desire to continue to experience it.
   Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.' That applies to
   Christian people. But behind that there lies the other truth, that in
   order to be merciful we must first of all have received the initial
   mercy of cancelled transgression.

   So, dear friends, here are the two lessons for every one of us. First,
   to recognise our debt, and go to Him in whom God is well pleased, for
   its abolishment and forgiveness; and then to go out into the world, and
   live like Him, and show to others love kindled by and kindred to that
   to which we trust for our own salvation. Be ye therefore imitators of
   God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as God also hath loved us.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE KING

   And, behold, one came and said unto Him, Good Master, what good thing
   shall I do, that I may have eternal life? 17. And He said unto him, Why
   callest thou Me good? there is none good but One, that is, God: but if
   thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. 18. He saith unto
   Him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit
   adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, 19.
   Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
   thyself. 20. The young man saith unto Him, All these things have I kept
   from my youth up: what lack I yet? 21. Jesus said unto him, If thou
   wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and
   thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow Me. 22. But
   when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he
   had great possessions. 23. Then said Jesus unto His disciples, Verily I
   say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of
   heaven. 24. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go
   through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the
   kingdom of God. 25. When His disciples heard it, they were exceedingly
   amazed, saying, Who then can be saved? 26. But Jesus beheld them, and
   said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things
   are possible.'--MATT. xix. 16-26.

   We have here one of the saddest stories in the gospels. It is a true
   soul's tragedy. The young man is in earnest, but his earnestness has
   not volume and force enough to float him over the bar. He wishes to
   have some great thing bidden him to do, but he recoils from the sharp
   test which Christ imposes. He truly wants the prize, but the cost is
   too great; and yet he wishes it so much that he goes away without it in
   deep sorrow, which perhaps, at another day, ripened into the resolve
   which then was too high for him. There is a certain severity in our
   Lord's tone, an absence of recognition of the much good in the young
   man, and a naked stringency in His demand from him, which sound almost
   harsh, but which are set in their true light by Mark's note, that Jesus
   loved him,' and therefore treated him thus. The truest way to draw
   ingenuous souls is not to flatter, nor to make entrance easy by
   dropping the standard or hiding the requirements, but to call out all
   their energy by setting before them the lofty ideal. Easy-going
   disciples are easily made--and lost. Thorough-going ones are most
   surely won by calling for entire surrender.

   I. We may gather together the earlier part of the conversation, as
   introductory to the Lord's requirement (vs. 16-20), in which we have
   the picture of a real though imperfect moral earnestness, and may note
   how Christ deals with it. Matthew tells us that the questioner was
   young and rich. Luke adds that he was a ruler'--a synagogue official,
   that is--which was unusual for a young man, and indicates that his
   legal blamelessness was recognised. Mark adds one of his touches, which
   are not only picturesque, but character-revealing, by the information
   that he came running' to Jesus in the way, so eager was he, and fell at
   His feet, so reverential was he. His first question is singularly
   compacted of good and error. The fact that he came to Christ for a
   purely religious purpose, not seeking personal advantage for himself or
   for others, like the crowds who followed for loaves and cures, nor
   laying traps for Him with puzzles which might entangle Him with the
   authorities, nor asking theological questions for curiosity, but
   honestly and earnestly desiring to be helped to lay hold of eternal
   life, is to be put down to his credit. He is right in counting it the
   highest blessing.

   Where had he got hold of the thought of eternal life'? It was miles
   above the dusty speculations and casuistries of the rabbis. Probably
   from Christ Himself. He was right in recognising that the conditions of
   possessing it were moral, but his conception of good' was superficial,
   and he thought more of doing good than of being good, and of the
   desired life as payment for meritorious actions. In a word, he stood at
   the point of view of the old dispensation. This do, and thou shalt
   live,' was his belief; and what he wished was further instruction as to
   what this' was. He was to be praised in that he docilely brought his
   question to Jesus, even though, as Christ's answer shows, there was
   error mingling in his docility. Such is the character--a young man,
   rich, influential, touched with real longings for the highest life,
   ready, so far as he knows himself, to do whatever he is bidden, in
   order to secure it.

   We might have expected Christ, who opened His arms wide for publicans
   and harlots, to have welcomed this fair, ingenuous seeker with some
   kindly word. But He has none for him. We adopt the reading of the
   Revised Version, in which our Lord's first word is repellent. It is in
   effect--There is no need for your question, which answers itself. There
   is one good Being, the source and type of every good thing, and
   therefore the good, which you ask about, can only be conformity to His
   will. You need not come to Me to know what you are to do.' He relegates
   the questioner, not to his own conscience, but to the authoritative
   revealed will of God in the law. Modern views of Christ's work, which
   put all its stress on the perfection of His moral character, and His
   office as a pattern of righteousness, may well be rebuked by the fact
   that He expressly disclaimed this character, and declared that, if He
   was only to be regarded as republishing the law of human conduct, His
   work was needless. Men have enough knowledge of what they must do to
   enter into life, without Jesus Christ. No doubt, Christ's moral
   teaching transcends that given of old; but His special work was not to
   tell men what to do, but to make it possible for them to do it; to
   give, not the law, but the power, both the motive and the impulse,
   which will fulfil the law. On another occasion He answered a similar
   question in a different manner. When the Jews asked Him, What must we
   do, that we may work the works of God?' He replied by the plain
   evangelical statement: This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him
   whom He hath sent.' Why did He not answer the young ruler thus? Only
   because He knew that he needed to be led to that thought by having his
   own self-complacency shattered, and the clinging of his soul to earth
   laid bare. The whole treatment of him here is meant to bring him to the
   apprehension of faith as preceding all truly good work.

   The young man's second question says a great deal in its one word. It
   indicates astonishment at being remanded to these old, well-worn
   precepts, and might be rendered, What sort of commandments?' as if
   taking it for granted that they must be new and peculiar. It is the
   same spirit as that which in all ages has led men who with partial
   insight longed after eternal life, to seek it by fantastic and unusual
   roads of extraordinary sacrifices or services--the spirit which filled
   monasteries, and invented hair shirts, and fastings, and swinging with
   hooks in your back at Hindoo festivals. The craving for more than
   ordinary good works' shows a profound mistake in the estimate of the
   ordinary, and a fatal blunder as to the relation between goodness' and
   eternal life.'

   So Christ answers the question by quoting the second half of the
   Decalogue, which deals with the homeliest duties, and appending to it
   the summary of the law, which requires love to our neighbour as to
   ourselves. Why does He omit the earlier half? Probably because He would
   meet the error of the question, by presenting only the plainest, most
   familiar commandments, and because He desired to excite the
   consciousness of deficiency, which could be most easily done in
   connection with these.

   There is a touch of impatience in the rejoinder, All these have I
   kept,' and more than a touch of self-satisfaction. The law has failed
   to accomplish one of its chief purposes in the young man, in that it
   has not taught him his sinfulness. No doubt he had a right to say that
   his outward life had been free from breaches of such very elementary
   morality which any old woman could have taught him. He had never gone
   below the surface of the commandments, nor below the surface of his
   acts, or he would not have answered so jauntily. He had yet to learn
   that the height of goodness' is reached, not by adding some strange new
   performances to the threadbare precepts of everyday duty, but by
   digging deep into these, and bottoming the fabric of our lives on their
   inmost spirit. He had yet to learn that whoever says, All these have I
   kept,' thereby convicts himself of understanding neither them nor
   himself.

   Still he was not at rest, although he had, as he fancied, kept them
   all. His last question is a plaintive, honest acknowledgment of the
   hungry void within, which no round of outward obediences can ever fill.
   He knows that he has not the inner fountain springing up into eternal
   life. He is dimly aware of something wanting, whether in his obedience
   or no, at all events in his peace; and he is right in believing that
   the reason for that conscious void is something wanting in his conduct.
   But he will not learn what Christ has been trying to teach him, that he
   needs no new commandment, but a deeper understanding and keeping of the
   old. Hence his question, half a wail of a hungry heart, half petulant
   impatience with Christ's reiteration of obvious duties. There are
   multitudes of this kind in all ages, honestly wishing to lay hold of
   eternal life, able to point to virtuous conduct, anxious to know and do
   anything lacking, and yet painfully certain that something is wanting
   somewhere.

   II. Now comes the sharp-pointed test, which pricks the brilliant
   bubble. Mark tells us that Jesus accompanied His word with one of those
   looks which searched a soul, and bore His love into it. If thou
   wouldest be perfect,' takes up the confession of something lacking,'
   and shows what that is. It is unnecessary to remark that this
   commandment to sell all and give to the poor is intended only for the
   individual case. No other would-be disciple was called upon to do so.
   It cannot be meant for others; for, if all were sellers, where would
   the buyers be? Nor need we do more than point out that the command of
   renunciation is only half of Christ's answer, the other being, Come,
   follow Me.' But we are not to slide easily over the precept with the
   comfortable thought that it was special treatment for a special case.
   The principle involved in it is medicine for all, and the only way of
   healing for any. This man was tied to earth by the cords of his wealth.
   They did not hinder him from keeping the commandments, for he had no
   temptations to murder, or adultery, or theft, or neglect of parents.
   But they did hinder him from giving his whole self up, and from
   regarding eternal life as the most precious of all things. Therefore
   for him there was no safety short of entire outward denuding himself of
   them; and, if he was in earnest out and out in his questions, here was
   a new thing for him to do. Others are hindered by other things, and
   they are called to abandon these. The one thing needful for entrance
   into life is at bottom self-surrender, and the casting away of all else
   for its sovereign sake. I do count them but dung' must be the language
   of every one who will win Christ. The hands must be emptied of
   treasures, and the heart swept clear of lesser loves, if He is to be
   grasped by our hands, and to dwell in our hearts. More of us than we
   are willing to believe are kept from entire surrender to Jesus Christ,
   by money and worldly possessions; and many professing Christians are
   kept shrivelled and weak and joyless because they love their wealth
   more than their Lord, and would think it madness to do as this man was
   bidden to do. When ballast is thrown out, the balloon shoots up. A
   general unlading of the thick clay' which weighs down the Christian
   life of England, would let thousands soar to heights which they will
   never reach as long as they love money and what it buys as much as they
   do. The letter of this commandment may be only applicable in a special
   case (though, perhaps, this one young man was not the only human being
   that ever needed this treatment), but the spirit is of universal
   application. No man enters into life who does not count all things but
   loss, and does not die to them all, that he may follow Christ.

   III. Then comes the collapse of all the enthusiasm. The questioner's
   earnestness chills at the touch of the test. What has become of the
   eagerness which brought him running to Jesus, and of the willingness to
   do any hard task to which he was set? It was real, but shallow. It
   deceived himself. But Christ's words cut down to the inner man, and
   laid bare for his own inspection the hard core of selfish worldliness
   which lay beneath. How many radiant enthusiasms, which cheat their
   subjects quite as much as their beholders, disappear like tinted mist
   when the hard facts of self-sacrifice strike against them! How much
   sheer worldliness disguises itself from itself and from others in
   glistering garments of noble sentiments, which fall at a touch when
   real giving up is called for, and show the ugly thing below! How much
   religion' goes about the world, and gets made a ruler' of the synagogue
   in recognition of its excellence, which needs but this Ithuriel's spear
   to start up in its own shape! The completeness and immediateness of the
   collapse are noticeable. The young man seems to speak no word, and to
   take no time for reflection. He stands for a moment as if stunned, and
   then silently turns away. What a moment! his fate hung on it. Once more
   we see the awful mystery enacted before our eyes, of a soul gathering
   up its power to put away life. Who will say that the decision of a
   moment, which is the outcome of all the past, may not fix the whole
   future? This man had never before been consciously brought to the fork
   in the road; but now the two ways are before him, and, knowingly, he
   chooses the worse. Christ did not desire him to do so; but He did
   desire that he should choose, and should know that he did. It was the
   truest kindness to tear away the veil of surface goodness which hid him
   from himself, and to force him to a conscious decision.

   One sign of grace he does give, in that he went away sorrowful.' He is
   not angry nor careless. He cannot see the fair prospect of the eternal
   life, which he had in some real fashion desired, fade away, without a
   pang. If he goes back to the world, he goes back feeling more acutely
   than ever that it cannot satisfy him. He loves it too well to give it
   up, but not enough to feel that it is enough. Surely, in coming days,
   that godly sorrow would work a change of the foolish choice, and we may
   hope that he found no rest till he cast away all else to make Christ
   his own. A soul which has travelled as far on the road to life eternal
   as this man had done, can scarcely thereafter walk the broad road of
   selfishness and death with entire satisfaction.

   IV. The section closes with Christ's comment on the sad incident. He
   speaks no word of condemnation, but passes at once from the individual
   to the general lesson of the difficulty which rich men (or, as He
   explains it in Mark, men who trust in riches') have in entering the
   kingdom. The reflection breathes a tone of pity, and is not so much
   blame as a merciful recognition of special temptations which affect His
   judgment, and should modify ours. A camel with its great body, long
   neck, and hump, struggling to get through a needle's eye, is their
   emblem. It is a new thing to pity rich men, or to think of their wealth
   as disqualifying them for anything. The disciples, with childish naïvté
   wonder. We may wonder that they wondered. They could not understand
   what sort of a kingdom it was into which capitalists would find
   entrance difficult. All doors fly open for them to-day, as then. They
   do not find much difficulty in getting into the church, however hard it
   may be to get into the kingdom. But it still remains true that the man
   who has wealth has a hindrance to his religious character, which, like
   all hindrances, may be made a help by the use he makes of it; and that
   the man who trusts in riches, which he who possesses them is wofully
   likely to do, has made the hindrance into a barrier which he cannot
   pass.

   That is a lesson which commercial nations, like England, have need to
   lay to heart, not as a worn-out saying of the Bible, which means very
   little for us, but as heavy with significance, and pointing to the
   special dangers which beset Christian perfection.

   So real is the peril of riches, that Christ would have His disciples
   regard the victory over it as beyond our human power, and beckons us
   away from the effort to overcome the love of the world in our strength,
   pointing us to God, in whose mighty grace, breathed into our feeble
   wills and treacherous hearts, is the only force which can overcome the
   attraction of perishable riches, and make any of us willing or able to
   renounce them all that we may win Christ. The young ruler had just
   shown that with men this is impossible.' Perhaps he still lingered near
   enough to catch the assurance that the surrender, which had been too
   much for him to achieve, might yet be joyfully made, since with God all
   things are possible.'
     __________________________________________________________________

NEAREST TO CHRIST

   To sit on My right hand, and on My left, is not Mine to give, but it
   shall be given to them for whom it is prepared of My Father.'--MATT.
   xx. 23.

   You will observe that an unusually long supplement is inserted by our
   translators in this verse. That supplement is quite unnecessary, and,
   as is sometimes the case, is even worse than unnecessary. It positively
   obscures the true meaning of the words before us.

   As they stand in our Bibles, the impression that they leave upon one's
   mind is that Christ in them abjures the power of giving to His
   disciples their places in the kingdom of heaven, and declares that it
   belongs not to His function, but relegates it, to His own exclusion, to
   the Father; whereas what He says is the very opposite of this. He does
   not put aside the granting of places at His right hand or His left as
   not being within His province, but He states the principles and
   conditions on which He does make such a grant, and so is really
   claiming it as in His province. All that would have been a great deal
   clearer if our translators had been contented to render the words that
   they found before them in the Book, without addition, and to read, To
   sit on My right hand, and on My left, is not Mine to give, but to them
   for whom it is prepared of My Father.'

   Another introductory remark may be made, to the effect that our Lord
   does not put aside this prayer of His apostles as if they were seeking
   an impossible thing. It is never safe, I know, to argue from the
   silence of Scripture. There may be many reasons for that silence beyond
   our ken in any given case; but still it does strike one as noteworthy
   that, when this fond mother and her ambitious sons came with their
   prayer for pre-eminence in His kingdom, our Lord did not answer what
   would have been so obvious to answer if it had been true, You are
   asking a thing which cannot be granted to anybody, for they are all
   upon one level in that kingdom of the heavens.' He says by implication
   the very opposite. Not only does His silence confirm their belief that
   when He came in His glory, some would be closer to His side than
   others; but the plain statement of the text is that, in the depth of
   the eternal counsels, and by the preparation of divine grace, there
   were thrones nearest to His own which some men should fill. He does not
   say, You are asking what cannot be.' He does say, There are men for
   whom it is prepared of My Father.'

   And then, still further, Jesus does not condemn the prayer as
   indicating a wrong state of mind on the part of James and John, though
   good and bad were strangely mingled in it. We are told nowadays that it
   is a very selfish thing, far below the lofty height to which our
   transcendental teachers have attained, to be heartened and encouraged,
   strengthened and quickened, by the prospect of the crown and the rest
   that remain for the people of God. If so, Christ ought to have turned
   round to these men, and have rebuked the passion for reward, which,
   according to this new light, is so unworthy and so low. But, instead of
   that, He confines Himself to explaining the conditions on which the
   fulfilment of the desire is possible, and by implication permits and
   approves the desire. You want to sit on My right hand and on My left,
   do you? Then be it so. You may do so if you like. Are you ready to
   accept the conditions? It is well that you should want it,--not for the
   sake of being above your brethren, but for the sake of being nearest to
   Me. Hearken! Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?'
   They say unto Him (and I do not know that there are anywhere grander
   words than the calm, swift, unhesitating, modest, and yet confident
   answer of these two men), We are able.' You shall have your desire if
   you fulfil the conditions. It is given to them for whom it is prepared
   of My Father.'

   I. So, then, if we rightly understand these words, and take them
   without the unfortunate comment which our translators have inserted,
   they contain, first, the principle that some will be nearer Christ than
   others in that heavenly kingdom.

   As I have said, the words of our Lord do not merely imply, by the
   absence of all hint that these disciples' petition was impossible, the
   existence of degrees among the subjects of His heavenly kingdom, but
   articulately affirm that such variety is provided for by the
   preparation of the Father. Probably the two brothers thought that they
   were only asking for preeminence in an earthly kingdom, and had no idea
   that their prayer pointed beyond the grave; but that confusion of
   thought could not be cured in their then stage of growth, and our Lord
   therefore leaves it untouched. But the other error, if it were an
   error, was of a different kind, and might, for aught that one sees,
   have been set right in a moment. Instead of which the answer adopts it,
   and seems to set Christ's own confirmation on it, as being no Jewish
   dream, but a truth.

   They were asking for earth. He answers--for heaven. He leaves them to
   learn in after days--when the one was slain with the sword, first
   martyr among the apostles, and the other lived to see them all pass to
   their thrones, while he remained the companion in tribulation' of the
   second generation of the Church--how far off was the fulfilment which
   they fancied so near.

   We need not he surprised that so large a truth should be spoken by
   Christ so quietly, and as it were incidentally. For that is in keeping
   with His whole tone when speaking of the unseen world. One knows not
   whether to wonder more at the decisive authority with which He tells us
   of that mysterious region, or at the small space which such revelations
   occupy in His words. There is an air of simplicity and unconsciousness,
   and withal of authority, and withal of divine reticence about them all,
   which are in full harmony with the belief that Christ speaking of
   heaven speaks of that He knows, and testifies that He hath seen.

   That truth to which, as we think, our Lord's words here inevitably
   lead, is distinctly taught in many other places of Scripture. We should
   have had less difficulty about it, and should have felt more what a
   solemn and stimulating thought it is, if we had tried a little more
   than most of us do to keep clear before us what really is the essential
   of that future life, what is the lustre of its light, the heaven of
   heaven, the glory of the glory. Men talk about physical theories of
   another life. I suppose they are possible. They seem to me infinitely
   unimportant. Warm imaginations, working by sense, write books about a
   future state which wonderfully succeed in making it real by making it
   earthly. Some of them read more like a book of travels in this world
   than forecastings of the next. They may be true or not. It does not
   matter one whit. I believe that heaven is a place. I believe that the
   corporeity of our future life is essential to the perfection of it. I
   believe that Christ wears, and will wear for ever, a glorified human
   body. I believe that that involves locality, circumstance, external
   occupations; and I say, all that being so, and in its own place very
   important, yet if we stop there, we have no vision of the real light
   that makes the lustre, no true idea of the glory that makes the
   blessedness.

   For what is heaven? Likeness to God, love, purity, fellowship with Him;
   the condition of the spirit and the relation of the soul to Him. The
   noblest truth about the future world flows from the words of our
   Master--This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and
   Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.' Not this brings'; not this will lead
   up to'; not this will draw after it'; but this is'; and whosoever
   possesses that eternal life hath already in him the germ of all the
   glories that are round the throne, and the blessedness that fills the
   hearts of perfected spirits.

   If so, if already eternal life in the bud standeth in the knowledge of
   God in Christ, what makes its fruitage and completeness? Surely, not
   physical changes or the circumstances of heaven, at least not these
   primarily, however much such changes and circumstances may subserve our
   blessedness there, and the anticipation of them may help our
   sense-bound hopes here. But the completeness of heaven is the
   completion of our knowledge of God and Christ, with all the perfecting
   of spirit which that implies and produces. The faith, and love, and
   happy obedience, and consecration which is calm, that partially
   occupied and ruled the soul here, are to be thought of as enlarged,
   perfected, delivered from the interruption of opposing thoughts, of
   sensuous desires, of selfish purposes, of earthly and sinful
   occupations. And that perfect knowledge and perfect union and perfect
   likeness are perfect bliss. And that bliss is heaven. And if, whilst
   heaven is a place, the heaven of heaven be a state, then no more words
   are needed to show that, then, heaven can be no dead level, nor can all
   stand at the same stage of attainments, though all be perfect; but that
   in that solemn company of the blessed, the spirits of just men made
   perfect,' there are indefinitely numerous degrees of approximation to
   the unattainable Perfection, which stretches above them all, and draws
   them all to itself. We have not to think of that future life as
   oppressed, if I may so say, with the unbroken monotony of perfect
   identity in character and attainments. All indeed are like one another,
   because all are like Jesus, but that basis of similarity does not
   exclude infinite variety. The same glory belongs to each, but it is
   reflected at differing angles and received in divers measures. Perfect
   blessedness will belong to each, but the capacity to receive it will
   differ. There will be the same crown on each head, the same song on
   each lip, the same fulness of joy filling each heart; but star
   differeth from star, and the great condition of happy intercourse on
   earth will not be wanting in heaven--a deep-seated similarity and a
   superficial diversity.

   Does not the very idea of an endless progress in that kingdom involve
   such variety? We do not think of men passing into the heavens, and
   being perfected by a bound so as that there shall be no growth. We
   think of them indeed as being perfected up to the height of their then
   capacity, from the beginning of that celestial life, so as that there
   shall be no sin, nor any conscious incompleteness, but not so as that
   there shall be no progress. And, if they each grow through all the
   ages, and are ever coming nearer and nearer to Christ, that seems
   necessarily to lead to the thought that this endless progress, carried
   on in every spirit, will place them at different points of
   approximation to the one centre. As in the heavens there are planets
   that roll nearer the central sun, and others that circle farther out
   from its rays, yet each keeps its course, and makes music as it moves,
   as well as planets whose broader disc can receive and reflect more of
   the light than smaller sister spheres, and yet each blazes over its
   whole surface and is full to its very rim with white light; so round
   that throne the spirits of the just made perfect shall move in order
   and peace--every one blessed, every one perfect, every one like Christ
   at first, and becoming liker through every moment of the eternities.
   Each perfected soul looking on his brother shall see there another
   phase of the one perfectness that blesses and adorns him too, and all
   taken together shall make up, in so far as finite creatures can make
   up, the reflection and manifestation of the fulness of Christ. Having
   then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us' is the
   law for the incompleteness of earth. Having then gifts differing
   according to the glory that is given to us' will be the law for the
   perfection of the heavens. There are those for whom it is prepared of
   His Father, that they shall sit in special nearness to Him.

   II. Still further, these words rightly understood assert that truth
   which, at first sight, our Authorised Version's rendering seems to make
   them contradict, viz. that Christ is the giver to each of these various
   degrees of glory and blessedness. It is not Mine to give, save to them
   for whom it is prepared.' Then it is Thine to give it to them. To deny
   or to doubt that Christ is the giver of the blessedness, whatsoever the
   blessedness may be, that fills the hearts and souls of the redeemed, is
   to destroy His whole work, to destroy all the relations upon which our
   hopes rest, and to introduce confusion and contradiction into the whole
   matter.

   For Scripture teaches us that He is God's unspeakable gift; that in Him
   is given to us everything; that He is the bestower of all which we
   need; that out of His fulness,' as one of those two disciples long
   afterwards said, all we have received, and grace for grace.' There is
   nothing within the compass of God's love to bestow of which Christ is
   not the giver. There is nothing divine that is done in the heavens and
   the earth, as I believe, of which Christ is not the doer. The
   representation of Scripture is uniformly that He is the medium of the
   activity of the divine nature; that he is the energy of the divine
   will; that He is, to use the metaphor of the Old Testament, the arm of
   the Lord'--the forthputting of God's power; that He is, to use the
   profound expression of the New Testament, the Word of the Lord, cognate
   with, and the utterance of, the eternal nature, the light that streams
   from the central brightness, the river that flows from the else sealed
   fountain. As the arm is to the body, and as is the word to the soul, so
   is Christ to God--the eternal divine utterance and manifestation of the
   divine nature. And, therefore, to speak of anything that a man can need
   and anything that God can give as not being given by Christ, is to
   strike at the very foundation, not only of our hopes, but at the whole
   scheme of revealed truth. He is the giver of heaven and everything else
   which the soul requires.

   And then, again, let me remind you that on this matter we are not left
   to such general considerations as those that I have been suggesting,
   but that the plain statements of Scripture do confirm the assertion
   that Christ is the determiner and the bestower of all the differing
   grades of glory and blessedness yonder. For do we not read of Him that
   He is the Judge of the whole earth? Do we not read of Him that His word
   is acquittal and His frown condemnation--that to be accepted of Him' is
   the highest aim and end of the Christian life? Do we not read that it
   is He who says, Come, ye blessed of My Father, enter into the kingdom
   prepared for you'? Do we not read that the apostle, dying, solaced
   himself with the thought that there was laid up for him a crown of
   glory, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, would give him at that
   day'? And do we not read in the very last book of Scripture, written by
   one of those two brothers, and containing almost verbal reference to
   the words of my text, the promise seven times spoken from the immortal
   lips of the glorified Son of Man, walking in the midst of the
   candlesticks, To him that overcometh will I give'? The fruit of the
   tree of life is plucked by His hands for the wearied conquerors. The
   crown of life is set by Him on the faithful witnesses' brows. The
   hidden manna and the new name are bestowed by Him on those who hold
   fast His name. It is He who gives the victors kingly power over the
   nations. He clothes in white garments those who have not defiled their
   robes. His hand writes upon the triumphant foreheads the name of God.
   And highest of all, beyond which there is no bliss conceivable, To him
   that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne.'

   Christ is the bestower of the royalties of the heavens as of the
   redemptions of earth, and it is His to give that which we crave at His
   hands, when we ask pardon here and glory hereafter. To him that is
   athirst will He give of the water of life freely,' and to him that
   overcometh will He give the crown of glory.

   III. These words lead us, in the third place, to the further thought,
   that these glorious places are not given to mere wishing, nor by mere
   arbitrary will.

   You would sit on My right hand and on My left? You think of that
   pre-eminence as conferred because you chose to ask it--as given by a
   piece of favouritism. Not so. I cannot make a man foremost in my
   kingdom in that fashion. There are conditions which must precede such
   an elevation.'

   And there are people who think thus still, as if the mere desire,
   without anything more, were enough--or as if the felicities of the
   heavenly world were dependent solely on Christ's arbitrary will, and
   could be bestowed by an exercise of mere power, as an Eastern prince
   may make this man his vizier and that other one his water-carrier. The
   same principles which we have already applied to the elucidation of the
   idea of varieties and stages of nearness to Christ in His heavenly
   kingdom have a bearing on this matter. If we rightly understand that
   the essential blessedness of heaven is likeness to Christ, we shall
   feel that mere wishing carries no man thither, and that mere sovereign
   will and power do not avail to set us there. There are conditions
   indispensable, from the very nature of the case, and unless they are
   realised it is as impossible for us to receive, as for Him to give, a
   place at His side. If, indeed, the future blessedness consisted in mere
   external circumstances and happier conditions of life, it might be so
   bestowed. But if place and surroundings, and a more exquisite and
   ethereal frame, are but subordinate sources of it, and its real
   fountain is union with Jesus and assimilation to Him, then something
   else than idle desires must wing the soul that soars thither, and His
   transforming grace, not His arbitrary will, must set us at His own
   right hand in the heavenly places.'

   Of all the profitless occupations with which men waste their lives,
   none are more utterly useless than wishing without acting. Our wishes
   are meant to impel us to the appropriate forms of energy by which they
   can be realised. When a pauper becomes a millionaire by sitting and
   vehemently wishing that he were rich, when ignorance becomes learning
   by standing in a library and wishing that the contents of all these
   books were in its head, there will be some hope that the gates of
   heaven will fly open to your desire. But till then, many, I say unto
   you, shall seek to enter in and not be able.' Many shall seek; you must
   strive. For wishing is one thing, and willing is another, and doing is
   yet another. And in regard to entrance into Christ's kingdom, our
   doing' is trusting in Him who has done all for us. This is the work of
   God, that ye should believe on Him whom He hath sent.' Does our wish
   lead us to the acceptance of the condition? Then it will be fulfilled.
   If not, it will remain fruitless, will die into apathy, or will live as
   a pang and a curse.

   You wish, or fancy you wish, to pass into heaven when you die, I
   suppose. Some of its characteristics attract you. You believe in
   punishment for sin, and you would willingly escape that. You believe in
   a place of rest after toil, of happiness after sorrow, where nipping
   frosts of disappointment, and wild blasts of calamity, and slow,
   gnawing decay no more harm and kill your joys--and you would like that.
   But do you wish to be pure and stainless, to have your hearts fixed on
   God alone, to have your whole being filled with Him, and emptied of
   self and sense and sin? The peace of heaven attracts you--but its
   praise repels, does it not? Its happiness draws your wishes--does its
   holiness seem inviting? It would be joyful to be far away from
   punishment--would it be as joyful to be near Christ? Ah! no; the wishes
   lead to no resolve, and therefore to no result, for this among other
   reasons, because they are only kindled by a part of the whole, and are
   exchanged for positive aversion when the real heaven of heaven is
   presented to your thoughts. Many a man who, by the set of his whole
   life, is drifting daily nearer and nearer to that region of outer
   darkness, is conscious of an idle wish for peace and joy beyond the
   grave. In common matters a man may be devoured by vain desires all his
   lifetime, because he will not pass beyond wishing to acting
   accordingly. The desire of the slothful killeth him; because his hands
   refused to labour, he coveteth greedily all the day long.' And with
   like but infinitely more tragical issues do these vain wishes for a
   place in that calm world, where nothing but holiness enters, gnaw at
   many a soul. Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end
   be like his,' was the aspiration of that Gentile prophet, whose love of
   the world obscured even the prophetic illumination which he
   possessed--and his epitaph is a stern comment on the uselessness of
   such empty wishes, Balaam, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword.'
   It needs more than a wish to set us at Christ's right hand in His
   kingdom.

   Nor can such a place be given by mere arbitrary will. Christ could not,
   if He would, set a man at His right hand whose heart was not the home
   of simple trust and thankful love, whose nature and desires were
   unprepared for that blessed world. It would be like taking one of those
   creatures--if there be such--that live on the planet whose orbit is
   farthest from the sun, accustomed to cold, organised for darkness, and
   carrying it to that great central blaze, with all its fierce flames and
   tongues of fiery gas that shoot up a thousand miles in a moment. It
   would crumble and disappear before its blackness could be seen against
   the blaze.

   His loving will embraces us all, and is the foundation of all our
   hopes. But it had to reach its purpose by a bitter road which He did
   not shrink from travelling. He desires to save us, and to realise the
   desire He had to die. It became Him for whom are all things, in
   bringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation
   perfect through suffering.' What He had to do, we have to accept.
   Unless we accept the mercy of God in Christ, no wish on our parts, nor
   any exercise of power on His, will carry us to the heaven which He has
   died to open, and of which He is at once the giver and the gift.

   IV. These glorious places are given as the result of a divine
   preparation.

   To them for whom it is prepared of My Father.' We have seen that Christ
   is not to be regarded as abjuring the office, with which His disciples'
   confidence led them to invest Him--that of allotting to His servants
   their place in His kingdom. He neither refers it to the Father without
   Himself, nor claims it for Himself without the Father. The living unity
   of will and work which subsists between the Father and the Son forbids
   such a separation and distribution of office. And that unity is set
   forth on both its sides in His own deep words, The Son can do nothing
   of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do: for whatsoever things He
   doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.'

   So, then, while the gift of thrones at His side is His act and the
   Father's, in like manner the preparation of the royal seats for their
   occupants, and of the kings for their thrones, is the Father's act and
   His.

   Our text does not tell us directly what that preparation is, any more
   than it tells us directly what the principles are on which entrance
   into and pre-eminence in the kingdom are granted. But we know enough in
   regard to both, for our practical guidance, for the vigour of our hope,
   and the grasp of our faith.

   There is a twofold divine preparation of the heavens for men. One is
   from of old. The kingdom is prepared for you before the foundation of
   the world.' That preparation is in the eternal counsel of the divine
   love, which calleth the things that are not as though they were, and
   before which all that is evolved in the generations of men and the
   epochs of time, lies on one plane, equally near to dim from whose
   throne diverge far beneath the triple streams of past, present, and
   future.

   And beside that preparation, the counsel of pardoning mercy and
   redeeming grace, there is the other preparation--the realisation of
   that eternal purpose in time through the work of Jesus Christ our Lord.
   His consolation to His disciples in the parting hour was, I go to
   prepare a place for you.' How much was included in these words we shall
   never know till we, like Him, see of the travail of His soul, and like
   Him are satisfied. But we can dimly see that on the one hand His death,
   and on the other hand His entrance into that holiest of all, make ready
   for us the many mansions of the Father's house. He was crucified for
   our offences, He was raised again for our justification, He is passed
   through the heavens to stand our Forerunner in the presence of God--and
   by all these mighty acts He prepares the heavenly places for us. As the
   sun behind a cloud, which hides it from us, is still pouring out its
   rays on far-off lands, so He, veiled in dark, sunset clouds of Calvary,
   sent the energy of His passion and cross into the unseen world and made
   it possible that we should enter there. When Thou didst overcome the
   sharpness of death, Thou didst open the gates of the kingdom of heaven
   to all believers.' As one who precedes a mighty host provides and
   prepares rest for their weariness, and food for their hunger, in some
   city on their line of march, and having made all things ready, is at
   the gates to welcome their travel-stained ranks when they arrive, and
   guide them to their repose; so He has gone before, our Forerunner, to
   order all things for us there. It may be that unless Christ were in
   heaven, our brother as well as our Lord, it were no place for mortals.
   It may be that we need to have His glorified bodily presence in order
   that it should be possible for human spirits to bear the light, and be
   at home with God. Be that as it may, this we know, that the Father
   prepares a place for us by the eternal counsel of His love, and by the
   all-sufficient work of Christ, by whom we have access to the Father.

   And as His work is the Father's preparation of the place for us by the
   Son, the issue of His work is the Father's preparation of us for the
   place, through the Son, by the Spirit. He that hath wrought us for the
   self-same thing is God.'

   If so, then what follows? This, among other things, that wishes are
   vain, for heaven is no gift of arbitrary favouritism, but that faith in
   Christ, and faith alone, leads us to His right hand--and the measure of
   our faith and growing Christlikeness here, will be the measure of our
   glory hereafter, and of our nearness to Him. It is possible to be
   saved, yet so as by fire.' It is possible to have an entrance
   ministered unto us abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord
   and Saviour Jesus Christ.' If we would be near Him then, we must be
   near Him now. If we would share His throne, we must bear His cross. If
   we would be found in the likeness of His resurrection, we must be
   conformable unto His death.' Then such desires as these true-hearted,
   and yet mistaken, disciples expressed will not be the voice of selfish
   ambition, but of dependent love. They will not be vain wishes, but be
   fulfilled by Him, who, stooping from amid the royalties of heaven, with
   love upon His face and pity in His heart, will give more than we ask.
   Seekest thou a place at My right hand? Nay, I give thee a more wondrous
   dignity. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My
   throne.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE SERVANT-LORD AND HIS SERVANTS

   Even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
   minister.'--MATT. xx. 28.

   It seems at first sight strangely unsympathetic and irrelevant that the
   ambitious request of James and John and their foolish mother, that they
   should sit at Christ's right hand and His left in His kingdom, should
   have been occasioned by, and have followed immediately upon, our Lord's
   solemn and pathetic announcement of His sufferings. But the connection
   is not difficult to trace. The disciples believed that, in some
   inexplicable way, the sufferings which our Lord was shadowing forth
   were to be the immediate precursors of His assuming His regal dignity.
   And so they took time by the forelock, as they thought, and made haste
   to ensure their places in the kingdom, which they believed was now
   ready to burst upon them. Other occasions in the Gospels in which we
   find similar quarrelling among the disciples as to pre-eminence are
   similarly associated with references made by our Lord to His
   approaching crucifixion. On a former occasion He cured these misplaced
   ambitions by setting a child in the midst of them. On this He cures
   them by a still more pathetic and wonderful example, His own; and He
   says, I, in My lowliness and service, am to be your Pattern. In Me see
   the basis of all true greatness, and the right use of all influence and
   authority. The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
   minister.'

   I. So, then, let us look first at the perfect life of service of the
   Servant-Lord.

   Now, in order to appreciate the significance of that life of service,
   we must take into account the introductory words, The Son of Man came.'
   They declare His pre-existence, His voluntary entrance into the
   conditions of humanity, and His denuding Himself of the glory which He
   had with the Father before the world was.' We shall never understand
   the Servant-Christ until we understand that He is the Eternal Son of
   the Father. His service began long before any of His acts of
   sympathetic and self-forgetting lowliness rendered help to the
   miserable here upon earth. His service began when He laid aside, not
   the garments of earth, but the vesture of the heavens, and girded
   Himself, not with the cincture woven in man's looms, but with the flesh
   of our humanity, and being found in fashion as a man,' bowed Himself to
   enter into the conditions of earth. This was the first, the chiefest of
   all His acts of service, and the sanctity and awfulness of it run
   through the list of all His deeds and make them unspeakably great. It
   was much that His hands should heal, that His lips should comfort, that
   His heart should bleed with sympathy for sorrow. But, oh! it was more
   that He had hands to touch, lips to speak to human hearts, and the
   heart of a man and a brother to feel with as well as for us. The Son of
   Man came'--there is the transcendent example of the true use of
   greatness; there is the conspicuous instance of the true basis of
   authority and rule. For it was because He was found in fashion as a
   Man' that He has won a name that is above every name,' and that there
   have accrued to Him the many crowns' which He wears at the Father's
   side.

   But then, passing beyond this, we may dwell, though all imperfectly,
   upon the features, familiar as they are, of that wonderful life of
   self-oblivious and self-sacrificing ministration to others. Think of
   the purity of the source from all which these wonders and blessednesses
   of service for man flowed. The life of Jesus Christ is self-forgetting
   love made visible. Scientists tell us that, by the arrangement of
   particles of sand upon plates of glass, there can be made, as it were,
   perceptible to the eye, the sweetness of musical sounds; and each note
   when struck will fling the particles into varying forms of beauty. The
   life of Jesus Christ presents in shapes of loveliness and symmetry the
   else invisible music of a divine love. He lets us see the rhythm of the
   Father's heart. The source from which His ministrations have flowed is
   the pure source of a perfect love. Ancient legends consolidated the
   sunbeams into the bright figure of the far-darting god of light. And so
   the sunbeams of the divine love have, as it were, drawn themselves
   together and shaped themselves into the human form of the Son of Man
   who came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.'

   No taint of bye-ends was in that service; no sidelong glances at
   possible advantages of influence or reputation or the like, which so
   often deform men's philanthropies and services to one another. No more
   than the sunbeam shines for the sake of collateral issues which may
   benefit itself, did Jesus Christ seek His own advantage in ministering
   to men. There was no speck of black in that lustrous white robe, but
   all was perfectly unselfish love. Like the clear sea, weedless and
   stainless, that laves the marble steps of the palaces of Venice, the
   deep ocean of Christ's service to man was pure to the depths
   throughout.

   That perfect ministry of the Servant-Lord was rendered with strange
   spontaneity and cheerfulness. One of the evangelists says, in a very
   striking and beautiful phrase, that He healed them that had need of
   healing,' as if the presence of the necessity evoked the supply, by the
   instinctive action of a perfect love. There was never in Him one trace
   of reluctance to have leisure broken in upon, repose disturbed, or even
   communion with God abbreviated. All men could come always; they never
   came inopportunely. We often cheerfully take up a burden of service,
   but find it very hard to continue bearing it. But He was willing to
   come down from the mountain of Transfiguration because there was a
   demoniac boy in the plain; and therefore He put aside the
   temptation--Let us build here three tabernacles.' He was willing to
   abandon His desert seclusion because the multitude sought Him.
   Interrupted in His communion with the Father by His disciples, He had
   no impatient word to say, but Let us go into other cities also, for
   therefore am I sent.' When He stepped from the fishing-boat on the
   other side of the lake to which He had fled for a moment of repose, He
   was glad when He saw the multitude who had pertinaciously outrun Him,
   and were waiting for Him on the beach. On His Cross He had leisure to
   turn from His own physical sufferings and the weight of a world's sin,
   which lay upon Him, to look at that penitent by His side, and He ended
   His life in the ministry of mercy to a brigand. And thus cheerfully,
   and always without a thought of self, He came to minister.'

   Think, too, of the sweep of His ministrations. They took in all men;
   they were equally open to enemies and to friends, to mockers and to
   sympathisers. Think of the variety of the gifts which He brought in His
   ministry--caring for body and for soul; alleviating sorrow, binding up
   wounds, purifying hearts; dealing with sin, the fountain, and with
   miseries, its waters, with equal helpfulness and equal love.

   And think of how that ministering was always ministration by the LORD.'
   For there is nothing to me more remarkable in the Gospel narrative than
   the way in which, side by side, there lie in Christ's life the two
   elements, so difficult to harmonise in fact, and so impossible to have
   been harmonised in a legend, the consciousness of authority and the
   humility of a servant. The paradox with which John introduces his sweet
   pathetic story of our Lord's washing the disciples' feet is true of,
   and is illustrated by, every instance of more than ordinary lowliness
   and self-oblivion which the Gospel contains. Jesus, knowing that He had
   come from God, and went to God, and that the Father had given all
   things into His hand'--did what? Laid aside His garments and took a
   towel and girded Himself.' The two things ever go together. And thus,
   in His lowliest abasement, as in a star entangled in a cloud, there
   shine out, all the more broad and conspicuous for the environment which
   wraps them, the beams of His uncreated lustre.

   That ministration was a service that never shrank from stern rebuke.
   His service was no mere soft and pliant, sympathetic helpfulness, but
   it could smite and stab, and be severe, and knit its brow, and speak
   stern words, as all true service must. For it is not service but
   cruelty to sympathise with the sinner, and say nothing in condemnation
   of his sin. And yet no sternness is blessed which is not plainly
   prompted by desire to help.

   Now, I know far better than you do how wretchedly inadequate all these
   poor words of mine have been to the great theme that I have been trying
   to speak of, but they may at least--like a little water poured into a
   pump--have set your minds working upon the theme, and, I hope, to
   better purpose. The Son of Man came . . . to minister.'

   II. Now, secondly, note the service that should be modelled on His.

   Oh! brethren, if we, however imperfectly, have taken into mind and
   heart that picture of Him who was and is amongst us as One that
   serveth,' how sharp a test, and how stringent, and, as it seems to us
   sometimes, impossible, a commandment are involved in the even as' of my
   text. When we think of our grudging services; when we think of how much
   more apt we are to insist upon what men owe to us than of what we owe
   to them; how ready we are to demand, how slow we are to give; how we
   flame up in what we think is warranted indignation if we do not get the
   observance, or the sympathy, or the attention that we require, and yet
   how little we give of these, we may well say, Thou hast set a pattern
   that can only drive us to despair.' If we would read our Gospels more
   than we do with the feeling, as we trace that Master through each of
   His phases of sympathy and self-oblivion and self-sacrifice and
   service, that is what I should be,' what a different book the New
   Testament would be to us, and what different people you and I would be!

   There is no ground on which we can rest greatness or superiority in
   Christ's kingdom except this ground of service. And there is no use
   that we can make either of money or of talents, of acquirements or
   opportunities, except the use of helping our fellows with them, which
   will stand the test of this model and example. It is more blessed to
   give than to receive.' The servant who serves for love is highest in
   the hierarchy of Heaven. God, who is supreme, has stooped lower than
   any that are beneath Him, and His true rule follows, not because He is
   infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, or any of those other
   pompous Latin words which describe what men call His attributes, but
   because He loves best, and does most for the most. And that is what you
   and I ought to be. We may well take the lesson to ourselves. I have no
   space, and, I hope, no need to enlarge upon it; but be sure of this,
   that if we are ever to be near the right and the left of the Master in
   His kingdom, there is one way, and only one way, to come thither, and
   that is to make self abdicate its authority as the centre of our lives,
   and to enthrone there Christ, and for His sake all our brethren. Be
   ambitious to be first, but remember, Noblesse oblige. He that is first
   must become last. He that is Servant of all is Master of all. That is
   the only mastery that is worth anything, the devotion of hearts that
   circle round the source from which they draw light and warmth. What is
   it that makes a mother the queen of her children? Simply that all her
   life she has been their servant, and never thought about herself, but
   always about them.

   Now much might be said as to the application of these threadbare
   principles in the Church and in society, but I do not enlarge on that;
   only let me say in a word--that here is the one law on which
   preeminence in the Church is to be allocated.

   What becomes of sacerdotal hierarchies, what becomes of the lords over
   God's heritage,' if the one ground of pre-eminence is service? I know,
   of course, that there may be different forms embodying one principle,
   but it seems to me that that form of Church polity is nearest the mind
   of Christ in which the only dignity is dignity of service, and the only
   use of place is the privilege of stooping and helping.

   This fruitful principle will one day shape civil as well as
   ecclesiastical societies. For the present, our Lord draws a contrast
   between the worldly and the Christian notions of rank and dignity. It
   shall not be so among you,' says He. And the nobler conception of
   eminence and service set forth in His disciples, if they are true to
   their Lord and their duty, will leaven, and we may hope finally
   transform society, sweeping away all vulgar notions of greatness as
   depending on birth, or wealth, or ruder forms of powers, and
   marshalling men according to Christ's order of precedence, in which
   helpfulness is preeminence and service is supremacy, while conversely
   pre-eminence is used to help and superiority stoops to serve.

   One remark will close my sermon. You have to take the last words of
   this verse if you are ever going to put in practice its first words.
   Even as the Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto, but to
   minister,'--if Jesus Christ had stopped there He would only have been
   one more of the long roll of ineffectual preachers and prophets who
   show men the better way, and leave them struggling in the mire. But He
   did not stop there: Even as the Son of Man came . . . to give His life
   a ransom for many.'

   Ah! the Cross, with its burden of the sacrifice for the world's sin, is
   the only power which will supply us with a sufficient motive for the
   loftiness of Christlike service. I know that there is plenty of
   entirely irreligious and Christless beneficence in the world. And God
   forbid that I should say a word to seem to depreciate that. But sure I
   am that for the noblest, purest, most widely diffused and blessedly
   operative kinds of service of man, there is no motive and spring
   anywhere except He loved me, and gave Himself for me.' And, bought by
   that service and that blood, it will be possible, and it is obligatory
   upon all of us, to do unto others,' as He Himself said, as I have done
   to you.' The servant is not greater than his Lord.'
     __________________________________________________________________

WHAT THE HISTORIC CHRIST TAUGHT ABOUT HIS DEATH

   The Son of Man came. . . to give His life a ransom for many.'--MATT.
   xx. 28.

   We hear a great deal at present about going back to the Christ of the
   Gospels.' In so far as that phrase and the movement of thought which it
   describes are a protest against the substitution of doctrines for the
   Person whom the doctrines represent, I, for one, rejoice in it. But I
   believe that the antithesis suggested by the phrase, and by some of its
   advocates avowed, between the Christ of the Gospels and the Christ of
   the Epistles, is false. The Christ of the Gospels is the Christ of the
   Epistles, as I humbly venture to believe. And I cannot but see that
   there is a possibility of a movement which, carried out legitimately,
   should command the fullest sympathy of every Christian heart,
   degenerating into the rejection of all the supernatural elements in the
   nature and work of our Lord, and leaving us with a meagre human Christ,
   shrunken and impotent. The Christ of the Gospels, by all means; but let
   it be the whole Christ of all the Gospels, the Christ over whose cradle
   angels sang, by whose empty grave angels watched, whose ascending form
   angels beheld and proclaimed that He should come again to be our Judge.
   Go back to that Christ, and all will be well.

   Now it seems to me that one direction in which there is a possibility
   of such movement as I have referred to being one-sided and harmful is
   in reference to the conception which we form of the death of Jesus
   Christ. And therefore I ask you to listen for a few moments to me at
   this time whilst I try to bring out what is plain in the words before
   us; and is, as I humbly believe, interwoven in the whole texture of all
   the Gospels--viz., the conception which Jesus Christ Himself formed of
   the meaning of His death.

   I. The first thing that I notice is that the Christ of the Gospels
   thought and taught that His death was to be His own act.

   I do not think that it is an undue or pedantic pressing of the
   significance of the words before us, if I ask you to notice two of the
   significant expressions in this text. The Son of Man came,' and came to
   give His life.' The one word refers to the act of entrance into, the
   other to the act of departure from, this earthly life. They correspond
   in so far as that both bring into prominence Christ's own consent,
   volition, and action in the very two things about which men are least
   consulted, their being born and their dying.

   The Son of Man came.' Now if that expression occurred but once it might
   be minimised as being only a synonym for birth, having no special
   force. But if you will notice that it is our Lord's habitual word about
   Himself, only varied occasionally by another one equally significant
   when he says that He was sent'; and if you will further notice that all
   through the Gospels He never but once speaks of Himself as being born,'
   I think you will admit that I am not making too much of a word when I
   say that when Christ, out of the depths of His consciousness, said the
   Son of Man came,' He was teaching us that He lived before He was born,
   and that behind the natural fact of birth there lay the supernatural
   fact of His choosing to be incarnated for man's redemption. The one
   instance in which He does speak of Himself as being born' is most
   instructive in this connection. For it was before the Roman governor;
   and He accompanied the clause in which He said, To this end was I
   born'--which was adapted to Pilate's level of intelligence--with
   another one which seemed to be inserted to satisfy His own sense of
   fitness, rather than for any light that it would give to its first
   hearer, And for this cause came I into the world.' The two things were
   not synonymous; but before the birth there was the coming, and Jesus
   was born because the Eternal Word willed to come. So says the Christ of
   the Gospels; and the Christ of the Epistles is represented as taking
   upon Him the form of a servant, and being found in fashion as a man.'
   Do you accept that as true of the historic Christ'?

   With precise correspondence, if we turn to the other end of His life,
   we find the equally significant expression in my text which asserts for
   it, too, that the other necessity to which men necessarily and without
   their own volition bow was to Christ a matter of choice. The Son of Man
   came to give.' No man taketh it from Me,' as He said on another
   occasion. I lay it down of Myself.' The Good Shepherd giveth His life
   for the sheep.' My flesh . . . I give for the world's life.' Now,
   brethren, we are not to regard these words as mere vague expressions
   for a willing surrender to the necessity of death, but as expressing
   what I believe is taught us all through Scripture, and is fundamental
   to any real grasp of the real Christ, that He died because He chose,
   and chose because He loved. What meant that loud voice' with which He
   said It is finished,' but that there was no physical exhaustion, such
   as was usually the immediate occasion of death by crucifixion? What
   meant that surprising rapidity with which the last moment came in His
   case, to the astonishment of the stolid bystanders? They meant the same
   thing as I believe that the Evangelists meant when they, with one
   consent, employed expressions to describe Christ's death, which may
   indeed be only euphemisms, but are apparently declarations of its
   voluntary character. He gave up the ghost.' He yielded His Spirit.' He
   breathed forth His life, and so He died.

   As one of the old fathers said, Who is this that thus falls asleep when
   He wills? To die is weakness, but thus to die is power.' The weakness
   of God is stronger than man.' The desperate king of Israel bade his
   slave kill him, and when the menial shrunk from such sacrilege he fell
   upon his own sword. Christ bade His servant Death, Do this,' and he did
   it; and dying, our Lord and Master declared Himself the Lord and Master
   of Death. This is a part of the history of the historic Christ. Do you
   believe it?

   II. Then, secondly, the Christ of the Gospels thought and taught that
   His death was one chief aim of His coming.

   I have omitted words from my text which intervene between its first and
   its last ones; not because I regard them as unimportant, but because
   they would lead us into too wide a field to cover in one sermon. But I
   would pray you to observe how the re-insertion of them throws immense
   light upon the significance of the words which I have chosen. The Son
   of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.' That covers
   the whole ground of His gracious and gentle dealings here on earth, His
   tenderness, self-abnegation, sympathy, healing, and helpfulness. Then,
   side by side with that, and as the crowning manifestation of His work
   of service, without which His life--gracious, radiant, sweet as it
   is--would still want something of its power, He sets His death.

   Surely that is an altogether unexampled phenomenon; altogether a unique
   and unparalleled thing, that a man should regard that which for all
   workers, thinkers, speakers, poets, philanthropists, is the sad term of
   their activity, as being a part of His work; and not only a part, but
   so conspicuous a part that it was a purpose which He had in view from
   the very beginning, and before the beginning, of His earthly life. So
   Calvary was to Jesus Christ no interruption, tragic and premature, of
   His life's activities. His death was no mere alternative set before
   Him, which He chose rather than be unfaithful or dumb. He did not die
   because He was hounded by hostile priests, but He came on purpose that
   He might so end His career.

   I need not remind you of, and space would not permit me to dwell upon,
   other instances in the Gospels in which our Lord speaks the same
   language. At the very beginning of His public ministry He told the
   inquiring rabbi, who came to Him with the notion that He would be
   somewhat flattered by His recognition by one of the authoritative and
   wise pundits of the nation, that the Son of Man must be lifted up.' The
   necessity was before Him, but it was no unwelcome necessity, for it
   sprung from His own love. It was the very aim of His coming, to live a
   Servant and to die a Ransom.

   Dear brethren, let me press upon you this plain truth, that no
   conception of Christ's death which looks upon it merely as the close,
   by pathetic sufferings, of a life to the activities of which it adds
   nothing but pathos, approaches the signification of it which inheres in
   the thought that this was the aim and purpose with which Jesus Christ
   was incarnate, that He should live indeed the pure and sweet life which
   He lived, but equally that He should die the painful and bitter death
   which He died. He was not merely a martyr, though the first of them,
   but something far more, as we shall see presently. If to you the death
   of Jesus Christ is the same in kind, however superior in degree, as
   those of patriots and reformers and witnesses for the truth and martyrs
   for righteousness, then I humbly venture to represent that, instead of
   going back to, you have gone away from, the Christ of the Gospels, who
   said, The Son of Man came . . . to give His life'; and that such a
   Christ is not a historic but an imaginary one.

   III. So, thirdly, notice that the Christ of the Gospels thought and
   taught that His death was a ransom.

   A ransom is a price paid in exchange for captives that they may be
   liberated; or for culprits that they may be set free. And that was
   Christ's thought of what He had to die for. There lay the must.'

   I do not dwell upon the conception of our condition involved in that
   word. We are all bound and held by the chain of our sins. We all stand
   guilty before God, and, as I believe, there is a necessity in that
   loving divine nature whereby it is impossible that without a ransom
   there can be, in the interests of mankind and in the interests of
   righteousness, forgiveness of sins. I do not mean that in the words
   before us there is a developed theory of atonement, but I do mean that
   no man, dealing with them fairly, can strike out of them the notion of
   vicarious suffering in exchange for, or instead of, the many.' This is
   no occasion for theological discussion, nor am I careful now to set
   forth a fully developed doctrine; but I am declaring, as God helps me,
   what is to me, and I pray may be to you, the central thought about that
   Cross of Calvary, that on it there is made the sacrifice for the
   world's sins.

   And, dear brethren, I beseech you to consider, how can we save the
   character of Jesus Christ, accepting these Gospels, which on the
   hypothesis about which I am now speaking are valid sources of
   knowledge, without recognising that He deliberately led His disciples
   to believe that He died for--that is, instead of--them that put their
   trust in Him? For remember that not only such words as these of my text
   are to be taken into account. Remember that it was the Christ of the
   Gospels who established that last rite of the Lord's Supper, in which
   the broken bread, and the separation between the bread and the wine,
   both indicated a violent death, and who said about both the one and the
   other of the double symbols, For you.' I do not understand how any body
   of professing believers, rejecting Christ's death as the sacrifice for
   sin, can find a place in their beliefs or in their practice for that
   institution of the Lord's Supper, or can rightly interpret the sacred
   words then spoken. This is why the Cross was Christ's aim. This is why
   He said, with His dying breath, It is finished.' This truth is the
   explanation of His words, The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the
   sheep.'

   And this truth of a ransom-price lies at the basis of all vigorous
   Christianity. A Christianity without a dying Christ is a dying
   Christianity. And history shows us that the expansiveness and elevating
   power of the Gospel depend on the prominence given to the sacrifice on
   the Cross. An old fable says that the only thing that melts adamant is
   the blood of a lamb. The Gospel reveals the precious blood of Jesus
   Christ, His death for us as a ransom, as the one power which subdues
   hostility and binds hearts to Him. The Christ of the Gospels is the
   Christ who taught that He died for us.

   IV. Lastly, the Christ of the Gospels thought and taught that His death
   had world-wide power.

   He says here, A ransom for many.' Now that word is not used in this
   instance in contradistinction to all,' nor in contradistinction to
   few.' It is distinctly employed as emphasising the contrast between the
   single death and the wide extent of its benefits; and in terms which,
   rigidly taken, simply express indefiniteness, it expresses
   universality. That that is so seems to me to be plain enough, if we
   notice other places of Scripture to which, at this stage of my sermon,
   I can but allude. For instance, in Romans v. the two expressions, the
   many' and the all,' alternate in reference to the extent of the power
   of Christ's sacrifice for men. And the Apostle in another place, where
   probably there may be an allusion to the words of the text, so varies
   them as that he declares that Jesus Christ in His death was the ransom
   instead of all.' But I do not need to dwell upon these. Many' is a
   vague word, and in it we see dim crowds stretching away beyond our
   vision, for whom that death was to be the means of salvation. I take it
   that the words of our text have an allusion to those in the great
   prophecy in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, in which we read, By His
   knowledge shall My righteous Servant' (mark the allusion in our text,
   Who came to minister' ) justify many, for He shall bear their
   iniquities.'

   So, brethren, I believe that I am not guilty of unduly widening out our
   Lord's thought when I say that the indefinite many' is practically
   all.' And, brother, if all,' then you; if all, then me; if all, then
   each. Think of a man, nineteen centuries ago, away in a little
   insignificant corner of the world, standing up and saying, My death is
   the price paid in exchange for the world!' That is meekness and
   lowliness of heart, is it? That is humility, so beautiful in a teacher,
   is it? How any man can accept the veracity of these narratives, believe
   that Jesus Christ said anything the least like this, not believe that
   He was the Divine Son of the Father, the Sacrifice for the world's sin,
   and yet profess--and honestly profess, I doubt not, in many cases--to
   retain reverence and admiration, all but adoration, for Him, I confess
   that I, for my poor part, cannot understand.

   But I ask you, what you are going to do with these thoughts and
   teachings of the Christ of the Gospels. Are you going to take them for
   true? Are, you going to trust your salvation to Him? Are you going to
   accept the ransom and say, O Lord, truly I am Thy servant; Thou hast
   loosed my bonds'? Brethren, the Christ of the Gospels, by all means;
   but the Christ that said, The Son of Man came to . . . give His life a
   ransom for many.' My Christ, and your Christ, and the world's Christ is
   the Christ that died; yea, rather, that is risen again; who is even at
   the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE COMING OF THE KING TO HIS PALACE

   And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to Bethphage,
   unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples, 2. Saying unto
   them, Go into the village over against you, and straightway ye shall
   find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose them, and bring them unto
   Me. 3. And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath
   need of them; and straightway he will send them. 4. All this was done,
   that it might he fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, 5.
   Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy King cometh unto thee, meek,
   and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. 6. And the
   disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, 7. And brought the
   ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they set Him
   thereon. 8. And a very great multitude spread their garments in the
   way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the
   way. 9. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried,
   saying, Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the
   name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest. 10. And when He was come into
   Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this? 11. And the
   multitude said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee. 12.
   And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold
   and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the
   moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, 13. And said unto
   them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but
   ye have made it a den of thieves. 14. And the blind and the lame came
   to Him in the temple; and He healed them. 15. And when the chief
   priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that He did, and the
   children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to the Son of David,
   they were sore displeased, 16. And said unto Him, Hearest Thou what
   these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of
   the mouth of babes and sucklings Thou hast perfected praise?' --MATT.
   xxi. 1-16.

   Jesus spent His last Sabbath in the quiet home at Bethany with Lazarus
   and his sisters. Some sense of His approaching death tinged the modest
   festivities of that evening with sadness, and spoke in Mary's anointing
   of His body for the burying.' The pause was brief, and, with the dawn
   of Sunday, He set Himself again to tread the road to the cross. Who can
   doubt that He felt the relief of that momentary relaxation of the
   strain on His spirit, and the corresponding pressure of its renewed
   tightening? This passage shows Him putting out from the quiet haven and
   facing the storm again. It is in two main sections, dealing
   respectively with the royal procession, and the acts of the King in the
   temple.

   I. The procession of the King. The first noteworthy point is that our
   Lord initiates the whole incident, and deliberately sets Himself to
   evoke the popular enthusiasm, by a distinct voluntary fulfilment of a
   Messianic prophecy. The allusion to the prophecy, in His sending for
   the colt and mounting it, may have escaped the disciples and the crowds
   of pilgrims; but they rightly caught His intention to make a solemn
   triumphal entry into the city, and responded with a burst of
   enthusiasm, which He expected and wished. The poor garments flung
   hastily on the animals, the travel-stained cloaks cast on the rocky
   path, the branches of olive and palm waved in the hands, and the tumult
   of acclaim, which shrilly echoed the words of the psalm, and proclaimed
   Him to be the Son of David, are all tokens that the crowds hailed Him
   as their King, and were all permitted and welcomed by Him. All this is
   in absolute opposition to His usual action, which had been one long
   effort to damp down inflammable and unspiritual Messianic hopes, and to
   avoid the very enthusiasm which now surges round Him unchecked.
   Certainly that calm figure, sitting on the slow-pacing ass, with the
   noisy multitude pressing round Him, is strangely unlike Him, who hid
   Himself among the hills when they sought to make Him a King. His action
   is the more remarkable, if it be remembered that the roads were alive
   with pilgrims, most of whom passing through Bethany would be Galileans;
   that they had seen Lazarus walking about the village, and knew who had
   raised him; that the Passover festival was the time in all the year
   when popular tumults were to be expected; and that the crowds going to
   Jerusalem were met by a crowd coming from it, bent on seeing the doer
   and the subject of the great miracle. Into this heap of combustibles
   our Lord puts a light. He must have meant that it should blaze as it
   did.

   What is the reason for this contrast? The need for the former reticence
   no longer existed. There was no fear now of His teaching and ministry
   being interrupted by popular outburst. He knew that it was finished,
   and that His hour had come. Therefore, the same motive of filial
   obedience which had led Him to avoid what would prevent His discharging
   His Father's commission, now impelled Him to draw the attention of the
   nation and its rulers to the full extent of His claims, and to put the
   plain issue of their acceptance or rejection in the most unmistakable
   manner. A certain divine decorum, if we may so call it, required that
   once He should enter the city as its King. Some among the shouting
   crowds might have their enthusiasm purified and spiritualised, if once
   it were directed to Him. It was for us, no less than for them, that
   this one interruption of His ordinary method was adopted by Him, that
   we too might ponder the fact that He laid His hand on that magnificent
   prophecy, and said, It is mine. I am the King.'

   The royal procession is also a revelation of the character of the King
   and the nature of His kingdom. A strange King this, indeed, who has not
   even an ass of His own, and for followers, peasants with palm branches
   instead of swords! What would a Roman soldier or one of Herod's men
   have thought of that rustic procession of a pauper prince on an ass,
   and a hundred or two of weaponless, penniless men? Christ's one moment
   of royal pomp is as eloquent of His humiliation as the long stretch of
   His lowly life is. And yet, as is always the case, side by side with
   the lowliness there gleams the veiled splendour. He had to borrow the
   colt, and the message in which He asks for it is a strange paradox. The
   Lord hath need of him'--so great was the poverty of so great a King.
   But it spoke, too, of a more than human knowledge, and of an authority
   which had only to require in order to receive. Some farming villager,
   no doubt, who was a disciple but secretly, gladly yielded his beasts.
   The prophecy which Matthew quotes, with the omission of some words,
   from Zechariah, and the addition of the first clause from Isaiah, is
   symbolic, and would have been amply fulfilled in the mission and
   character of Christ, though this event had never taken place. But just
   as it is symbolic, so this external fulfilment, which is intended to
   point to the real fulfilment, is also symbolic. The chariot and the
   horse are the emblems of conquerors. It is fitting that the Prince of
   Peace should make His state entry on a colt, unridden before, and
   saddled only with a garment. Zechariah meant that Zion's King should
   not reign by the right of the strongest, and that all His triumphs
   should be won by lowly meekness. Christ meant the same by His
   remarkable act. And has not the picture of Him, throned thus, stamped
   for ever on the imagination of the world a profounder sense of the
   inmost nature of His kingdom than many words would have done? Have we
   learned the lesson of the gentleness which belongs to His kingdom, and
   of the unchristian character of war and violence? Do we understand what
   the Psalmist meant when he sang, In thy majesty ride on prosperously,
   because of . . . meekness'? Let us not forget the other picture,
   Behold, a white horse, and He that sat thereon, called Faithful and
   True; and in righteousness He doth judge and make war.'

   The entry may remind us also of the worthlessness of mere enthusiastic
   feeling in reference to Jesus Christ. The day was the Sunday. How many
   of that crowd were shouting as loudly, Crucify Him!' and Not this man,
   but Barabbas!' on the Friday? The palm-branches had not faded, where
   they had been tossed, before the fickle crowd had swung round to the
   opposite mood. Perhaps the very exuberance of feeling at the beginning,
   had something to do with the bitterness of the execrations at the end,
   of the week. He had not answered their expectations, but, instead of
   heading a revolt, had simply taught in the temple, and meekly let
   Himself be laid hold of. Nothing succeeds like success, and no idol is
   so quickly forsaken as the idol of a popular rising. All were eager to
   disclaim connection with Him, and to efface the remembrance of their
   Sunday's hosannas by their groans round His gibbet. But there is a
   wider lesson here. No enthusiasm can be too intense which is based upon
   a true sense of our need of Christ, and of His work for us; but it is
   easy to excite apparently religious emotion by partial presentations of
   Him, and such excitement foams itself away by its very violence, like
   some Eastern river that in winter time dashes down the wady with
   irresistible force, and in summer is bone dry. Unless we know Christ to
   be the Saviour of our souls and the Lamb of God, we shall soon tire of
   singing hosannas in His train, and want a king with more pretensions;
   but if we have learned who and what He is to us, then let us open our
   mouths wide, and not be afraid of letting the world hear our shout of
   praise.

   II. The coming of the King in the temple. The discussion of the
   accuracy of Matthew's arrangement of events here is unnecessary. He has
   evidently grouped, as usual, incidents which have a common bearing, and
   wishes to put these three, of the cleansing, the healing, and the
   pleasure in the children's praise, as the characteristic acts of the
   King in the temple. We can scarcely avoid seeing in the first of the
   three a reference to Malachi's prophecy, The Lord, whom ye seek, shall
   suddenly come to His temple . . . And He shall purify the sons of
   Levi.' His first act, when in manhood He visited the temple, had been
   to cleanse. His first act when He enters it as its Lord is the same.
   The abuse had grown again apace. Much could be said in its vindication,
   as convenient and harmless, and it was too profitable to be lightly
   abandoned. But the altar of Mammon so near the altar of God was
   sacrilege in His eyes, and though He had passed the traders unmolested
   many times since that first driving out, now that He solemnly comes to
   claim His rights, He cannot but repeat it. It is perhaps significant
   that His words now have both a more sovereign and a more severe tone
   than before. Then He had spoken of My Father's house,' now it is My
   house,' which are a part of His quotation indeed, but not therefore
   necessarily void of reference to Himself. He is exercising the
   authority of a son over His own house, and bears Himself as Lord of the
   temple. Before, He charged them with making it a house of merchandise';
   now, with turning it into a robber's cave. Evil rebuked and done again
   is worse than before. Trafficking in things pertaining to the altar is
   even more likely than other trading to cross the not always very well
   defined line which separates trade from trickery and commerce from
   theft. That lesson needs to be laid to heart in many quarters now.
   There is always a fringe of moneyed interests round Christ's Church,
   seeking gain out of religious institutions; and their stands have a
   wonderful tendency to creep inwards from the court of the Gentiles to
   holier places. The parasite grows very quickly, and Christ had to deal
   with it more than once to keep down its growth. The sellers of doves
   and changers of money into the sacred shekel were venial offenders
   compared with many in the Church, and the race is not extinct. If
   Christ were to come to His house to-day, in bodily form, who doubts
   that He would begin, as He did before, by driving the traders out of
   His temple? How many most respectable' usages and people would have to
   go, if He did!

   The second characteristic, or we might say symbolical, act is the
   healing of the blind and lame. Royal state and cleansing severity are
   wonderfully blended with tender pity and the gentle hand of sovereign
   virtue to heal. The very manifestation of the former drew the needy to
   Him; and the blind, though they could not see, and the lame, though
   they could not walk, managed to grope and hobble their way to Him, not
   afraid of His severity, nor daunted by His royalty. No doubt they
   haunted the temple precincts as beggars, with perhaps as little sense
   of its sacredness as the money-changers; but their misery kindled a
   flicker of confidence and desire, to which He who tends the dimmest
   wick till it breaks into clear flame could not but respond. Though in
   His house He casts out the traders, He will heal the cripples and the
   blind, who know their need, and faintly trust His heart and power. Such
   a trait could not be wanting in this typical representation of the acts
   of the King.

   Finally, He encourages and casts the shield of His approval round the
   children's praises. How natural it is that the children, pleased with
   the stir and not yet drilled into conventionalism, should have kept up
   their glad shouts, even inside the temple enclosure! How their fresh
   treble voices ring yet through all these centuries! The priests had, no
   doubt, been nursing their wrath at all that had been going on, but they
   had not dared to interfere with the cleansing, nor, for very shame,
   with the healings; but now they see their opportunity. This is a clear
   breach of all propriety, and that is the crime of crimes in the eyes of
   such people. They had kept quite cool and serenely contemptuous, amid
   the stir of the glad procession, and they did not much care though He
   healed some beggars; but to have this unseemly noise, though it was
   praise, was more than they could stand. Ecclesiastical martinets, and
   men whose religion is mostly ceremony, are, of course, more moved with
   indignation' at any breach of ceremonial regulations than at holes made
   in graver laws. Nothing makes men more insensitive to the ring of real
   worship than being accustomed to the dull decorum of formal worship.
   Christ answers their hearest thou?' with a did ye never read?' and
   shuts their mouths with words so apposite in their plainest meaning
   that even they are silenced. To Him these young ringing hosannas are
   perfect praise,' and worth any quantity of rabbis' preachments. In
   their deeper sense, His words declare that the ears of God and of His
   Son, the Lord of the temple, are more gladly filled with the praises of
   the little ones,' who know their weakness, and hymn His goodness with
   simple tongue, than with heartless eloquence of words or pomp of
   worship. The psalm from which the words are taken declares man's
   superiority over the highest works of God's hands, and the perfecting
   of the divine praise from his lips. We are but as the little children
   of creation, but because we know sin and redemption, we lead the chorus
   of heaven. As St. Bernard says, Something is wanting to the praise of
   heaven, if those be wanting who can say, "We went through fire and
   through water; and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place."' In
   like manner, those praise Him most acceptably among men who know their
   feebleness, and with stammering lips humbly try to breathe their love,
   their need, and their trust.
     __________________________________________________________________

A NEW KIND OF KING

   All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the
   prophet, saying, Tell ye the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy King cometh
   unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass.'--MATT. xxi. 4, 5.

   Our Lord's entrance into Jerusalem is one of the comparatively few
   events which are recorded in all the four Gospels. Its singular
   unlikeness to the rest of His life, and its powerful influence in
   bringing about the Crucifixion, may account for its prominence in the
   narratives. It took place probably on the Sunday of Passion Week.
   Before the palm branches were withered the enthusiasm had died away,
   and the shouting crowd had found out that this was not the sort of king
   that they wanted. They might have found that out, even by the very
   circumstances of the entrance, for they were profoundly significant;
   though their meaning, like so much of the rest of Christ's life, was
   less clear to the partakers and spectators than it is to us. These
   things understood not the disciples at the first,' says John in closing
   his narrative of the entrance, but when Jesus was glorified, then they
   remembered that they had done these things unto Him.'

   My object in this sermon is not at all to attempt a pictorial treatment
   of this narrative, for these Gospels tell it us a great deal better
   than any of us can tell it after them; but to seek to bring out, if it
   may be, two or three aspects of its significance.

   I. First, then, I ask you to consider its significance as an altogether
   exceptional fact in Christ's life.

   Throughout the whole of the preceding period, He had had two aims
   distinctly in view. One was to shun publicity; and the other was to
   damp down the heated, vulgar anticipations of the multitude, who
   expected a temporal king. And now here He deliberately, and of set
   purpose, takes a step which is like flinging a spark into a powder
   barrel. The nation was assembled in crowds, full of the unwholesome
   excitement which attended their meeting for the annual feast. All were
   in a quiver of expectation; and knowing that, Jesus Christ originates
   this scene by His act of sending the two disciples into the village
   over against them, to bring the ass, and the colt the foal of an ass.'
   The reasons for a course so entirely opposed to all the preceding must
   have been strong. Let us try to see what they were.

   First, He did it in order to precipitate the conflict which was to end
   in His death. Now, had He any right to do that? Knowing as He did the
   ferment of expectation into which He was thrusting this new element of
   disturbance, and foreseeing, as He must have done, that it would
   sharpen the hostility of the rulers of the people to a murderous
   degree, how can He be acquitted of one of two things--either singular
   shortsightedness or rash foolhardiness in taking such a step? Was He
   justified, or was He not?

   If we are to look at His conduct from ordinary points of view, the
   answer must certainly be that He was not. And we can only understand
   this, and all the rest of His actions during the fateful three or four
   days that followed it, if we recognise in them the fixed resolve of One
   who knew that His mission was not only to live and to teach by word and
   life, but to die, and by death to deliver the world. I take it that it
   is very hard to save the character of Jesus Christ for our reverence if
   we refuse to regard His death as for our redemption. But if He came,
   and knew that He came, not only to minister' but to give His life a
   ransom for many,' then we can understand how He hastened to the Cross,
   and deliberately set a light to the train which was to end in that
   great explosion. On any other hypothesis it seems to me immensely hard
   to account for His act here.

   Then, still further, looking at this distinctly exceptional fact in our
   Lord's life, we see in it a very emphatic claim to very singular
   prerogative and position. He not only thereby presented Himself before
   the nation in their collective capacity as being the King of Israel,
   but He also did a very strange thing. He dressed Himself, so to speak,
   in order to fulfil a prophecy. He posed before the world as being the
   Person who was meant by sacred old words. And His Entrance upon the
   slow-pacing colt was His voluntary and solemn assertion that He was the
   Person of whom the whole stream and current of divinely sent
   premonitions and forecasts had been witnessing from the beginning. He
   claimed thereby to be the King of Israel and the Fulfiller of the
   divine promises that were of old.

   Now again, I have to ask the question, Was He right, or was He wrong?
   If He was right, then He is a great deal more than a wise Teacher, and
   a perfect Example of excellence. If He was wrong, He is a great deal
   less. There is no escape from that alternative, as it seems to me, but
   by the desperate expedient of denying that He ever did this thing which
   this narrative tells us that He did. At all events I beseech you all,
   dear friends, to take fairly into your account of the character of
   Jesus Christ, this fact, that He, the meek, the gentle, said that He
   was meek, and everybody has believed Him; and that once, in the very
   crisis of His life, and in circumstances which make the act most
   conspicuous, He who always shunned publicity, nor caused His voice to
   be heard in the streets,' and steadfastly put away from Himself the
   vulgar homage that would have degraded Him into a mere temporal
   monarch, did assert that He was the King of Israel and the Fulfiller of
   prophecy. Ask yourselves, What does that fact mean?

   And then, still further, looking at the act as exceptional in our
   Lord's life, note that it was done in order to make one final, solemn
   appeal and offer to the men who beheld Him. It was the last bolt in His
   quiver. All else had failed, perhaps this might succeed. We know not
   the depths of the mysteries of that divine foreknowledge which, even
   though it foresees failure, ceases not to plead and to woo obstinate
   hearts. But this we may thankfully learn, that, just as with despairing
   hope, but with unremitting energy, Jesus Christ, often rejected,
   offered Himself once more if perchance He might win men to repentance,
   so the loving patience and long-suffering of our God cease not to plead
   ever with us. Last of all He sent unto them His Son, saying, They will
   reverence My Son when they see Him'; and yet the expectation was
   disappointed, and the Son was slain. We touch deep mysteries, but the
   persistence of the pleading and rejected love and pity of our God shine
   through this strange fact.

   II. And now, secondly, let me ask you to note its significance as a
   symbol.

   The prophecy which two out of the four evangelists--viz., Matthew and
   John--regard as having been, in some sense, fulfilled by the Entrance
   into Jerusalem, would have been fulfilled quite as truly if there had
   been no Entrance. For the mere detail of the prophecy is but a
   picturesque way of setting forth its central and essential point--viz.,
   the meekness of the King. So our Lord's fulfilment is only an external,
   altogether subsidiary, accomplishment of the prophecy; and in fact,
   like some other of the external correspondences between His life and
   the outward details of Old Testament prophecy, is intended for little
   more than a picture or a signpost which may direct our thoughts to the
   inward correspondence, which is the true fulfilment.

   So then, the deed, like the prophecy after which it is moulded, is
   wholly and entirely of importance in its symbolical aspect.

   The symbolism is clear enough. This is a new kind of King. He comes,
   not mounted on a warhorse, or thundering across the battlefield in a
   scythe-armed chariot, like the Pharaohs and the Assyrian monarchs, who
   have left us their vainglorious monuments, but mounted on the emblem of
   meekness, patience, gentleness, and peace. And He is a pauper King, for
   He has to borrow the beast on which He rides, and His throne is draped
   with the poor, perhaps ragged, robes of a handful of fishermen. And His
   attendants are not warriors bearing spears, but peasants with palm
   branches. And the salutation of His royalty is not the blare of
   trumpets, but the Hosanna!' from a thousand throats. That is not the
   sort of King that the world calls a King. The Roman soldiers might well
   have thought they were perpetrating an exquisite jest when they thrust
   the reed into His unresisting hand, and crushed down the crown of
   thorns on His bleeding brows.

   But the symbol discloses the very secret of His Kingdom, the innermost
   mysteries of His own character and of the forces to which He intrusts
   the further progress of His word. Gentleness is royal and omnipotent;
   force and violence are feeble. The Lord is in the still, small voice,
   not in the earthquake, nor the fire, nor the mighty wind. The dove's
   light pinion will fly further than the wings of Rome's eagles, with
   their strong talons and blood-dyed beaks. And the kingdom that is
   established in meekness, and rules by gentleness and for gentleness,
   and has for its only weapons the power of love and the omnipotence of
   patience, that is the kingdom which shall be eternal and universal.

   Now all that is a great deal more than pretty sentiment; it has the
   closest practical bearing upon our lives. How slow God's Church has
   been to believe that the strength of Christ's kingdom is meekness!
   Professing Christian men have sought to win the world to their side,
   and by wealth or force or persecution, or this, that, or the other of
   the weapons out of the world's armoury, to promote the kingdom of
   Christ. But it has all been in vain. There is only one power that
   conquers hate, and that is meek love. There is only one way by which
   Christ's kingdom can stand firm, and that is its unworldly contrast to
   all the manner of human dominion. Wheresoever God's Church has allied
   itself with secular sovereignties, and trusted in the arm of flesh,
   there has the fine gold become dimmed. Endurance wears out persecution,
   patient submission paralyses hostile violence, for you cannot keep on
   striking down unresisting crowds with the sword. The Church of Christ
   is an anvil that has been beaten upon by many hammers, and it has worn
   them all out. Meekness is victorious, and the kingdom of Christ can
   only be advanced by the faithful proclamation of His gentle love, from
   lips that are moved by hearts which themselves are conformed to His
   patient image.

   Then, still further, let me remind you that this symbol carries in it,
   as it seems to me, the lesson of the radical incompatibility of war
   with Christ's kingdom and dominion. It has taken the world all these
   centuries to begin to learn that lesson. But slowly men are coming to
   it, and the day will dawn when all the pomp of warfare, and the hell of
   evil passions from which it comes, and which it stimulates, will be
   felt to be as utterly incompatible with the spirit of Christianity as
   slavery is felt to-day. The prophecy which underlies our symbol is very
   significant in this respect. Immediately upon that vision of the meek
   King throned on the colt the foal of an ass, follows this: And I will
   cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horses from Jerusalem; and
   the battle bow shall be cut off, and He shall speak peace unto the
   heathen.'

   Let me beseech you, Christian men and women, to lay to heart the duty
   of Christ's followers in reference to the influence and leavening of
   public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that, in so far as we
   can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against that devilish spirit
   which still oppresses with an incubus almost intolerable, the nations
   of so-called Christendom. Lift up your voices be not afraid, but cry,
   We are the followers of the Prince of Peace, and we war against the war
   that is blasphemy against His dominion.'

   And so, still further, note the practical force of this symbol as
   influencing our own conduct. We are the followers of the meek Christ.
   It becomes us to walk in all meekness and gentleness. Spirited conduct'
   is the world's euphemism for unchristian conduct, in ninety-nine cases
   out of the hundred. The perspective of virtue has altered since Jesus
   Christ taught us how to love. The old heathen virtues of magnanimity,
   fortitude, and the like have with shame to take a lower room.' There is
   something better than these. The saint has all the virtues of the old
   heathen hero, and some more besides, which are higher than these, and
   those which he has in common, he has in different proportion. The
   flaunting tulips and peonies of the garden of the world seem to
   outshine the white snowdrops and the glowing, modest little violets
   below their leaves, but the former are vulgar, and they drop very soon,
   and the latter, if paler and more delicate, are refined in their
   celestial beauty. The slow-pacing steed on which Jesus Christ rides
   will out-travel the fiery warhorse, and will pursue its patient,
   steadfast path till He bring forth righteousness unto judgment,' and
   all the upright in heart shall follow Him.'

   III. Lastly, notice the significance of this fact as a prophecy. It
   was, as I have pointed out, the last solemn appeal to the nation, and
   in a very real sense it was Christ's coming to judgment. It is
   impossible to look at it without seeing, besides all its other
   meanings, gleaming dimly through it, the anticipations of that other
   coming, when the Lord Himself shall descend with a shout, with the
   voice of the Archangel, and the trump of God.'

   Let me bring into connection with the scene of my text three others,
   gathered from various parts of Scripture. In the forty-fifth Psalm we
   find, side by side with the great words, Ride on prosperously because
   of truth and meekness and righteousness,' the others, Thine arrows are
   sharp in the hearts of the king's enemies; the people shall fall under
   Thee.' Now, though it is possible that that later warlike figure may be
   merely the carrying out of the thought which is more gently put before
   us in the former words, still it looks as if there were two sides to
   the conquering manifestation of the king--one being in meekness and
   truth and righteousness,' and the other in some sense destructive and
   punitive.

   But, however that may be, my second scene is drawn from the last book
   of Scripture, where we read that, when the first seal was opened, there
   rode forth a Figure, crowned, mounted upon a white steed, bearing bow
   and arrow, conquering and to conquer.' And, though that again may be
   but an image of the victorious progress of the gentle Gospel of Jesus
   Christ throughout the whole earth, still it comes as one in a series of
   judgments, and may rather be taken to express the punitive effects
   which follow its proclamation even here and now.

   But there can be no doubt with regard to the third of the scenes which
   I connect with the incident of which we are discoursing: And I saw
   heaven opened, and beheld a white horse; and He that sat upon Him was
   called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth He judge and make
   war. . .. And out of His mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it He
   should smite the nations; and He shall rule them with a rod of iron;
   and He treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty
   God.' That is the Christ who came into Jerusalem on the colt the foal
   of an ass. That is the Christ who is meek and long-suffering. There is
   a reserve of punitive and destructive power in the meek King. And oh I
   what can be so terrible as the anger of meekness, the wrath of infinite
   gentleness? In the triumphal entry, we find that, when the procession
   turned the rocky shoulder of Olivet, and the long line of the white
   city walls, with the gilding of the Temple glittering in the sunshine,
   burst upon their view, the multitude lifted up their voices in
   gladness. But Christ sat there, and as He looked across the valley, and
   beheld, with His divine prescience, the city, now so joyous and full of
   stir, sitting solitary and desolate, He lifted up His voice in loud
   wailing. The Christ wept because He must punish, but He punished though
   He wept.

   Our Judge is the gentle Jesus, therefore we can hope. The gentle Jesus
   is our Judge, therefore let us not presume. I beseech you, brethren,
   lay, as these poor people did their garments, your lusts and proud
   wills in His way, and join the welcoming shout that hails the King,
   meek and having salvation.' And then, when He comes forth to judge and
   to destroy, you will not be amongst the ranks of the enemies, whom He
   will ride down and scatter, but amongst the armies that follow Him,
   . . . clothed in fine linen, clean and pure.'

   Kiss the Son lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way when His
   wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their
   trust in Him.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE VINEYARD AND ITS KEEPERS

   Hear another parable: There was a certain householder, which planted a
   vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and
   built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far
   country: 34. And when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his
   servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it.
   35. And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed
   another, and stoned another. 36. Again, he sent other servants more
   than the first: and they did unto them likewise. 37. But last of all he
   sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. 38. But
   when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is
   the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance.
   39. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew
   him. 40. When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh what will he do
   unto those husbandmen? 41. They say unto him, He will miserably destroy
   those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen,
   which shall render him the fruits in their seasons. 42. Jesus saith
   unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the
   builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is
   the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? 43. Therefore say I
   unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a
   nation bringing forth the fruits thereof. 44. And whosoever shall fall
   on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will
   grind him to powder. 45. And when the chief priests and Pharisees had
   heard His parables, they perceived that He spake of them. 46. But when
   they sought to lay hands on Him, they feared the multitude, because
   they took Him for a prophet.'--MATT. xxi. 33-46.

   This parable was apparently spoken on the Tuesday of the Passion Week.
   It was a day of hand-to-hand conflict with the Jewish authorities and
   of exhausting toil, as the bare enumeration of its incidents shows. It
   included all that Matthew records between verse 20 of this chapter and
   the end of the twenty-fifth chapter--the answer to the deputation from
   the Sanhedrin; the three parables occasioned by it, namely, those of
   the two sons, this one, and that of the marriage of the king's son; the
   three answers to the traps of the Pharisees and Herodians about the
   tribute, of the Sadducees about the resurrection, and of the ruler
   about the chief commandment; Christ's question to His questioners about
   the Son and Lord of David; the stern woes hurled at the unmasked
   hypocrites; to which must be added, from other gospels, the sweet
   eulogium on the widow's mite, and the deep saying to the Greeks about
   the corn of wheat, with, possibly, the incident of the woman taken in
   adultery; and then, following all these, the solemn prophecies of the
   end contained in Matthew xxiv. and xxv., spoken on the way to Bethany,
   as the evening shadows were falling. What a day! What a fountain of
   wisdom and love which poured out such streams! The pungent severity of
   this parable, with its transparent veil of narrative, is only
   appreciated by keeping clearly in view the circumstances and the
   listeners. They had struck at Jesus with their question as to His
   authority, and He parries the blow. Now it is His turn, and the sharp
   point goes home.

   I. The first stage is the preparation of the vineyard, in which three
   steps are marked. It is planted and furnished with all appliances
   needful for making wine, which is its great end. The direct divine
   origin of the religious ideas and observances of Judaism' is thus
   asserted by Christ. The only explanation of them is that God enclosed
   that bit of the wilderness, and with His own hands set growing there
   these exotics. Neither the theology nor the ritual is of man's
   establishing. We need not seek for special meanings for wall,
   wine-press, and tower. They simply express the completeness of the
   equipment of the vineyard, as in Isaiah's song, which lies at the
   foundation of the parable, and suggest his question, What could have
   been done more?' Thus furnished, the vineyard is next handed over to
   the husbandmen, who, in Matthew, are exclusively the rulers, while in
   Luke they are the people. No doubt it was like people, like priest.'
   The strange dominion of the Pharisees rested entirely on popular
   consent, and their temper accurately indexed that of the nation. The
   Sanhedrin was the chief object at which Christ aimed the parable. But
   it only gave form and voice to the national spirit, and the people
   loved to have it so.' National responsibilities are not to be slipped
   out of by being shifted on to the broad shoulders of governments or
   influential men. Who lets them be governments and influential?


     Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,

     God will send the bill to you.'

   Christ here teaches both rulers and ruled the ground and purpose of
   their privileges. They prided themselves on these as their own, but
   they were only tenants. They made their boast of the law'; but they
   forgot that fruit was the end of the divine planting and equipment.
   Holiness and glad obedience were what God sought, and when He found
   them, He was refreshed as with grapes in the wilderness.'

   Having installed the husbandmen, the owner goes into another country.
   The cluster of miracles which inaugurate an epoch of revelation are not
   continued beyond its beginning. Centuries of comparative divine silence
   followed the planting of the vineyard. Having given us our charge, God,
   as it were, steps aside to leave us room to work as we will, and so to
   display what we are made of. He is absent in so far as conspicuous
   oversight and retribution are concerned. He is present to help, love,
   and bless. The faithful husbandman has Him always near, a joy and a
   strength, else no fruit would grow; but the sin and misery of the
   unfaithful are that they think of Him as far off.

   II. Then comes the habitual ill-treatment of the messengers. These are,
   of course, the prophets, whose office was not only to foretell, but to
   plead for obedience and trust, the fruits sought by God. The whole
   history of the nation is summed up in this dark picture. Generation
   after generation of princes, priests, and people had done the same
   thing. There is no more remarkable historical fact than that of the
   uniform hostility of the Jews to the prophets. That a nation of such a
   sort as always to hate and generally to murder them should have had
   them in long succession, throughout its history, is surely inexplicable
   on any naturalistic hypothesis. Such men were not the natural product
   of the race, nor of its circumstances, as their fate shows. How did
   they spring up? No philosophy of Jewish history' explains the anomaly
   except the one stated here,--He sent His servants.' We are told
   nowadays that the Jews had a natural genius for religion, just as the
   Greeks for art and thought, and the Romans for law and order, and that
   that explains the origin of the prophets. Does it explain their
   treatment?

   The hostility of the husbandmen grows with indulgence. From beating
   they go on to killing, and stoning is a specially savage form of
   killing. The opposition which began, as the former parable tells us,
   with polite hypocrisy and lip obedience, changed, under the stimulus of
   prophetic appeals, to honest refusal, and from that to violence which
   did not hesitate to slay. The more God pleads with men, the more
   self-conscious and bitter becomes their hatred; and the more bitter
   their hatred, the more does He plead, sending other messengers, more
   perhaps in number, or possibly of more weight, with larger commission
   and clearer light. Thus both the antagonistic forces grow, and the
   worse men become, the louder and more beseeching is the call of God to
   them. That is always true; and it is also ever true that he who begins
   with I go, sir, and goes not, is in a fair way to end with stoning the
   prophets.

   Christ treats the whole long series of violent rejections as the acts
   of the same set of husbandmen. The class or nation was one, as a stream
   is one, though all its particles are different; and the Pharisees and
   scribes, who stood with frowning hatred before Him as He spoke, were
   the living embodiment of the spirit which had animated all the past. In
   so far as they inherited their taint, and repeated their conduct, the
   guilt of all the former generations was laid at their door. They
   declared themselves their predecessors' heirs; and as they reproduced
   their actions, they would have to bear the accumulated weight of the
   consequences.

   III. Verses 37-39 tell of the mission of the Son and of its fatal
   issue. Three points are prominent in them. The first is the unique
   position which Christ here claims, with unwonted openness and
   decisiveness, as apart from and far above all the prophets. They
   constitute one order, but He stands alone, sustaining a closer relation
   to God. They were faithful as servants,' but He as a Son,' or, as Mark
   has it, the only and beloved Son.' The listeners understood Him well
   enough. The assertion, which seemed audacious blasphemy to them, fitted
   in with all His acts in that last week, which was not only the crisis
   of His life, but of the nation's fate. Rulers and people must decide
   whether they will own or reject their King, and they must do it with
   their eyes open. Jesus claimed to fill a unique position. Was He right
   or wrong in His claim? If He was wrong, what becomes of His wisdom, His
   meekness, His religion? Is a religious teacher, who made the mistake of
   thinking that He was the Son of God in a sense in which no other man is
   so, worthy of admiration? If He was right, what becomes of a
   Christianity which sees in Him only the foremost of the prophets?

   The next point marked is the owner's vain hope, in sending his Son. He
   thought that He would be welcomed, and He was disappointed. It was His
   last attempt. Christ knew Himself to be God's last appeal, as He is to
   all men, as well as to that generation. He is the last arrow in God's
   quiver. When it has shot that bolt, the resources even of divine love
   are exhausted, and no more can be done for the vineyard than He has
   done for it. We need not wonder at unfulfilled hopes being here
   ascribed to God. The startling thought only puts into language the
   great mystery which besets all His pleadings with men, which are
   carried on, though they often fail, and which must, therefore, in view
   of His foreknowledge, be regarded as carried on with the knowledge that
   they will fail. That is the long-suffering patience of God. The
   difficulty is common to the words of the parable and to the facts of
   God's unwearied pleading with impenitent men. Its surface is a
   difficulty, its heart is an abyss of all-hoping charity.

   The last point is the vain calculation of the husbandmen. Christ puts
   hidden motives into plain words, and reveals to these rulers what they
   scarcely knew of their own hearts. Did they, in their secret conclaves,
   look each other in the face, and confess that He was the Heir? Did He
   not Himself ground His prayer for their pardon on their ignorance? But
   their ignorance was not entire, else they had had no sin; neither was
   their knowledge complete, else they had had no pardon. Beneath many an
   obstinate denial of Him lies a secret confession, or misgiving, which
   more truly speaks the man than does the loud negation. And such strange
   contradictions are men, that the secret conviction is often the very
   thing which gives bitterness and eagerness to the hostility. So it was
   with some of those whose hidden suspicions are here set in the light.
   How was the rulers' or the people's wish to seize on His inheritance'
   their motive for killing Jesus? Their great sin was their desire to
   have their national prerogatives, and yet to give no true obedience.
   The ruling class clung to their privileges and forgot their
   responsibilities, while the people were proud of their standing as
   Jews, and careless of God's service. Neither wished to be reminded of
   their debt to the Lord of the vineyard, and their hostility to Jesus
   was mainly because He would call on them for fruits. If they could get
   this unwelcome and persistent voice silenced, they could go on in the
   comfortable old fashion of lip-service and real selfishness. It is an
   account, in vividly parabolic language, not only of their hostility,
   but of that of many men who are against Him. They wish to possess life
   and its good, without being for ever pestered with reminders of the
   terms on which they hold it, and of God's desire for their love and
   obedience. They have a secret feeling that Christ has the right to ask
   for their hearts, and so they often turn from Him angrily, and
   sometimes hate Him.

   With what sad calmness does Jesus tell the fate of the son, so certain
   that it is already as good as done! It was done in their counsels, and
   yet He does not cease to plead, if perchance some hearts may be touched
   and withdraw themselves from the confederacy of murder.

   IV. We have next the self-condemnation from unwilling lips. Our Lord
   turns to the rulers with startling and dramatic suddenness, which may
   have thrown them off their guard, so that their answer leaped out
   before they had time to think whom it hit. His solemn earnestness laid
   a spell on them, which drew their own condemnation from them, though
   they had penetrated the thin veil of the parable, and knew full well
   who the husbandmen were. Nor could they refuse to answer a question
   about legal punishments for dishonesty, which was put to them, the
   fountains of law, without incurring a second time the humiliation just
   inflicted when He had forced them to acknowledge that they, the
   fountains of knowledge, did not know where John came from. So from all
   these motives, and perhaps from a mingling of audacity, which would
   brazen it out and pretend not to see the bearing of the question, they
   answer. Like Caiaphas in his counsel, and Pilate with his writing on
   the Cross, and many another, they spoke deeper things than they knew,
   and confessed beforehand how just the judgments were, which followed
   the very lines marked out by their own words.

   V. Then come the solemn application and naked truth of the parable. We
   have no need to dwell on the cycle of prophecies concerning the
   corner-stone, nor on the original application of the psalm. We must be
   content with remarking that our Lord, in this last portion of His
   address, throws away even the thin veil of parable, and speaks the
   sternest truth in the nakedest words. He puts His own claim in the
   plainest fashion, as the corner-stone on which the true kingdom of God
   was to be built. He brands the men who stood before Him as incompetent
   builders, who did not know the stone needed for their edifice when they
   saw it. He declares, with triumphant confidence, the futility of
   opposition to Himself--even though it kill Him. He is sure that God
   will build on Him, and that His place in the building, which shall rise
   through the ages, will be, to even careless eyes, the crown of the
   manifest wonders of God's hand. Strange words from a Man who knew that
   in three days He would be crucified! Stranger still that they have come
   true! He is the foundation of the best part of the best men; the basis
   of thought, the motive for action, the pattern of life, the ground of
   hope, for countless individuals; and on Him stands firm the society of
   His Church, and is hung all the glory of His Father's house.

   Christ confirms the sentence just spoken by the rulers on themselves,
   but with the inversion of its clauses. All disguise is at an end. The
   fatal you' is pronounced. The husbandmen's calculation had been that
   killing the heir would make them lords of the vineyard; the grim fact
   was that they cast themselves out when they cast him out. He is the
   heir. If we desire the inheritance, we must get it through Him, and not
   kill or reject, but trust and obey Him. The sentence declares the two
   truths, that possession of the vineyard depends on honouring the Son,
   and on bringing forth the fruits. The kingdom has been taken from the
   churches of Asia Minor, Africa, and Syria, because they bore no fruit.
   It is not held by us on other conditions. Who can venture to speak of
   the awful doom set forth in the last words here? It has two stages: one
   a lesser misery, which is the lot of him who stumbles against the
   stone, while it lies passive to be built on; one more dreadful, when it
   has acquired motion and comes down with irresistible impetus. To
   stumble at Christ, or to refuse His grace, and not to base our lives
   and hopes on Him is maiming and damage, in many ways, here and now. But
   suppose the stone endowed with motion, what can stand against it? And
   suppose that the Christ, who is now offered for the rock on which we
   may pile our hopes and never be confounded, comes to judge, will He not
   crush the mightiest opponent as the dust of the summer threshing-floor?
     __________________________________________________________________

THE STONE OF STUMBLING

   Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever
   it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.'--MATT. xxi. 44.

   As Christ's ministry drew to its close, its severity and its gentleness
   both increased; its severity to the class to whom it was always severe,
   and its gentleness to the class from whom it never turned away. Side by
   side, through all His manifestation of Himself, there were the two
   aspects: He showed Himself froward' (if I may quote the word) to the
   self-righteous and the Pharisee; and He bent with more than a woman's
   tenderness of yearning love over the darkness and sinfulness, which in
   its great darkness dimly knew itself blind, and in its sinfulness
   stretched out a lame hand of faith, and groped after a divine
   deliverer. Here, in my text, there are only words of severity and awful
   foreboding. Christ has been telling those Pharisees and priests that
   the kingdom is to be taken from them, and given to a nation that brings
   forth the fruits thereof. He interprets for them an Old Testament
   figure, often recurring, which we read in the 118th Psalm (and I may
   just say, in passing, that we get here His interpretation of that
   psalm, and the vindication of our application of it, and other similar
   ones, to Him and His office); The stone which the builders rejected,'
   said He, is become the head of the corner'; and then, falling back on
   other Old Testament uses of the same figure, He weaves into one the
   whole of them--that in Isaiah about the sure foundation,' and that in
   Daniel about the stone cut out without hands, which became a great
   mountain,' crushing down all opposition,--and centres them all in
   Himself; as fulfilled in Himself, in His person and His work.

   The two clauses of my text figuratively point to two different classes
   of operation on the rejecters of the Gospel. What are these two
   classes? Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on
   whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.' In the one
   case, the stone is represented as passive, lying quiet; in the other,
   it has acquired motion. In the one case, the man stumbles and hurts
   himself; a remediable injury, a self-inflicted injury, a natural
   injury, without the active operation of Christ to produce it at all; in
   the other case the injury is worse than remediable, it is utter,
   absolute, grinding destruction, and it comes from the active operation
   of the stone of stumbling.' That is to say, the one class represents
   the present hurts and harms which, by the natural operation of things,
   without the action of Christ judicially at all, every man receives in
   the very act of rejecting the Gospel; and the other represents the
   ultimate issue of that rejection, which rejection is darkened into
   opposition and fixed hostility, when the stone that was laid for a
   foundation' has got wings (if I may so say), and comes down in
   judgment, crushing and destroying the antagonist utterly. Whosoever
   falls on this stone is broken,' here and now; and on whomsoever it
   shall fall, it will grind him to powder,' hereafter and yonder.

   Taking, then, into account the weaving together in this passage of the
   three figures from the Old Testament to which I have already
   referred,--the rejected stone, the foundation, and the mountain-stone
   of Daniel, and looking in the light of these, at the twofold issues,
   one present and one future, which the text distinctly brings before
   us,--we have just three points to which I ask your attention now.
   First, Every man has some kind of contact with Christ. Secondly,
   Rejection of Him, here and now, is harm and maiming. And, lastly,
   Rejection of Him, hereafter and yonder, is hopeless, endless, utter
   destruction.

   I. In the first place, every man has some kind of connection with
   Christ.

   I am not going to enter at all now upon any question about the
   condition of the dark places of the earth' where the Gospel has not
   come as a well-known preached message; we have nothing to do with that;
   the principles on which they are judged is not the question before us
   now. I am speaking exclusively about persons who have heard the word of
   salvation, and are dwelling in the midst of what we call a Christian
   land. Christ is offered to each of us, in good faith on God's part, as
   a means of salvation, a foundation on which we may build. A man is free
   to accept or to reject that offer. If he reject it, he has not thereby
   cut himself off from all contact and connection with that rejected
   Saviour, but he still sustains a relation to Him; and the message that
   he has refused to believe, is exercising an influence upon his
   character and his destiny.

   Christ comes, I say, offered to us all in good faith on the part of
   God, as a foundation upon which we may build. And then comes in that
   strange mystery, that a man, consciously free, turns away from the
   offered mercy, and makes Him that was intended to be the basis of his
   life, the foundation of his hope, the rock on which, steadfast and
   serene, he should build up a temple-home for his soul to dwell
   in,--makes Him a stumbling-stone against which, by rejection and
   unbelief, he breaks himself!

   My friend, will you let me lay this one thing upon your heart,--you
   cannot hinder the Gospel from influencing you somehow. Taking it in its
   lowest aspects, it is one of the forces of modern society, an element
   in our present civilisation. It is everywhere, it obtrudes itself on
   you at every turn, the air is saturated with its influence. To be
   unaffected by such an all-pervading phenomenon is impossible. To no
   individual member of the great whole of a nation is it given to isolate
   himself utterly from the community. Whether he oppose or whether he
   acquiesce in current opinions, to denude himself of the possessions
   which belong in common to his age and state of society is in either
   case impracticable. That which cometh into your mind,' said one of the
   prophets to the Jews who were trying to cut themselves loose from their
   national faith and their ancestral prerogatives, That which cometh into
   your mind shall not be at all, that ye say, We will be as the heathen,
   as the families of the countries to serve wood and stone.' Vain dream!
   You can no more say, I will pass the Gospel by, and it shall be nothing
   to me, I will simply let it alone, than you can say, I will shut myself
   up from other influences proper to my time and nation. You cannot go
   back to the old naked barbarism, and you cannot reduce the influence of
   Christianity, even considered merely as one of the characteristics of
   the times, to zero. You may fancy you are letting it alone, but it does
   not let you alone; it is here, and you cannot shut yourself off from
   it.

   But it is not merely as a subtle and diffused influence that the Gospel
   exercises a permanent effect upon us. It is presented to each of us
   here individually, in the definite form of an actual offer of salvation
   for each, and of an actual demand of trust from each. The words pass
   into our souls, and thenceforward we can never be the same as if they
   had not been there. The smallest ray of light falling on a sensitive
   plate produces a chemical change that can never be undone again, and
   the light of Christ's love, once brought to the knowledge and presented
   for the acceptance of a soul, stamps on it an ineffaceable sign of its
   having been there. The Gospel once heard, is always the Gospel which
   has been heard. Nothing can alter that. Once heard, it is henceforward
   a perpetual element in the whole condition, character, and destiny of
   the hearer.

   Christ does something to every one of us. His Gospel will tell upon
   you, it is telling upon you. If you disbelieve it, you are not the same
   as if you had never heard it. Never is the box of ointment opened
   without some savour from it abiding in every nostril to which its odour
   is wafted. Only the alternative, the awful either, or,' is open for
   each--the savour of life unto life, or the savour of death unto death.'
   To come back to the illustration of the text, Christ is something, and
   does something to every one of us. He is either the rock on which I
   build, poor, weak, sinful creature as I am, getting security, and
   sanctity, and strength from Him, I being a living stone' built upon the
   living stone,' and partaking of the vitality of the foundation; or else
   He is the other thing, a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to
   them which stumble at the word.' Christ stands for ever in some kind of
   relation to, and exercises for ever some kind of influence on, every
   man who has heard the Gospel.

   II. The immediate issue of rejection of Him is loss and maiming.

   Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken.' Just think for a
   moment, by way of illustrating this principle, first of all, of the
   positive harm which you do to yourself in the act of turning away from
   the mercy offered you in Christ; and then think for a moment of the
   negative loss which you sustain by the same act.

   Note the positive harm. Am I uncharitable when I say that no man ever
   yet passively neglected the message of love in God's Son; but that
   always this is the rude outline of the experience of people who know
   what it is to have a Saviour offered to them, and know what it is to
   put Him away,--that there is a feeble and transitory movement of heart
   and will; that Conscience says, Thou oughtest'; that Will says, I
   would'; that the heart is touched by some sense of that great and
   gentle vision of light and love which passes before the eye; that the
   man, as it were, like some fever-ridden patient, lifts himself up for
   an instant from the bed on which he is lying, and puts out a hand, and
   then falls back again, the vacillating, fevered, paralysed will
   recoiling from the resolution, and the conscience having power to say,
   Thou oughtest,' but no power to enforce the execution of its decrees,
   and the heart turning away from the salvation that it would have found
   in the love of love, to the loss that it finds in the love of self and
   earth? Or in other words, is it not true that every man who rejects
   Christ does in simple verity reject Him, and not merely neglect Him;
   that there is always an effort, that there is a struggle, feeble,
   perhaps, but real, which ends in the turning away? It is not that you
   stand there, and simply let Him go past. That were bad enough; but the
   fact is worse than that. It is that you turn your back upon Him. It is
   not that His hand is laid on yours, and yours remains dead and cold,
   and does not open to clasp it; but it is that His hand being laid on
   yours, you clench yours the tighter, and will not have it. And so every
   man (I believe) who rejects Christ does these things thereby--wounds
   his own conscience, hardens his own heart, makes himself a worse man,
   just because he has had a glimpse, and has willingly, and almost
   consciously, loved darkness rather than light.' Oh, brethren, the
   message of love can never come into a human soul, and pass away from it
   unreceived, without leaving that spirit worse, with all its lowest
   characteristics strengthened, and all its best ones depressed, by the
   fact of rejection. I have nothing to do now with pursuing that process
   to its end; but the natural result--if there were no future Judgment at
   all, if there were no movement ever given to the stone that you ought
   to build on--the natural result of the simple rejection of the Gospel
   is that, bit by bit, all the lingering remains of nobleness that hover
   about the man, like scent about a broken vase, pass away; and that,
   step by step, through the simple process of saying, I will not have
   Christ to rule over me,' the whole being degenerates, until manhood
   becomes devil-hood, and the soul is lost by its own want of faith.
   Unbelief is its own judgment; unbelief is its own condemnation;
   unbelief, as sin, is punished, like all other sins, by the perpetuation
   of deeper and darker forms of itself. Every time that you stifle a
   conviction, fight down a conviction, or drive away a conviction; and
   every time that you feebly move towards the decision, I will trust Him,
   and love Him, and be His,' yet fail to realise it, you have harmed your
   soul, you have made yourself a worse man, you have lowered the tone of
   your conscience, you have enfeebled your will, you have made your heart
   harder against love, you have drawn another horny scale over the eye,
   that will prevent you from seeing the light that is yonder; you have,
   as much as in you is, withdrawn from God, and approximated to the other
   pole of the universe (if I may say that), to the dark and deadly
   antagonist of mercy, and goodness, and truth, and grace. Whosoever
   falls on this stone,' by the natural result of his unbelief, shall be
   broken' and maimed, and shall mar his own nature.

   I need not dwell on the negative evil results of unbelief; the loss of
   that which is the only guide for a man, the taking away, or rather the
   failing to possess, that great love above us, that divine Spirit in us,
   by which only we are ever made what we ought to be. This only I would
   leave with you, in this part of my subject, Whoever is not in Christ is
   maimed. Only he that is a man in Christ' has come to the measure of the
   stature of a perfect man.' There, and there alone, do we get the power
   which will make us full-grown. There alone is the soul planted in that
   good soil in which, growing, it becomes as a rounded, perfect tree,
   with leaves and fruits in their season. All other men are half-men,
   quarter-men, fragments of men, parts of humanity exaggerated and
   contorted and distorted from the reconciling whole which the Christian
   ought to be, and in proportion to his Christianity is on the road to
   be, and one day will assuredly and actually be, a complete and entire
   man, wanting nothing'; nothing maimed, nothing broken, the realisation
   of the ideal of humanity, the renewed copy of the second Adam, the Lord
   from heaven.'

   There is another consideration closely connected with this second part
   of my subject, that I just mention and pass on. Not only by the act of
   rejection of Christ do we harm and maim ourselves, but also all
   attempts at opposition--formal opposition--to the Gospel as a system,
   stand self-convicted and self-condemned to speedy decay. What a
   commentary upon that word, Whosoever falls on this stone shall be
   broken,' is the whole history of the heresies of the Church and the
   assaults of unbelief! Man after man, rich in gifts, endowed often with
   far larger and nobler faculties than the people who oppose him, with
   indomitable perseverance, a martyr to his error, sets himself up
   against the truth that is sphered in Jesus Christ; and the great divine
   message simply goes on its way, and all the babblement and noise are
   like so many bats flying against a light, or like the sea-birds that
   come sweeping up in the tempest and the night, to the hospitable Pharos
   that is upon the rock, and smite themselves dead against it. Sceptics
   well known in their generation, who made people's hearts tremble for
   the ark of God, what has become of them? Their books lie dusty and
   undisturbed on the top shelf of libraries; whilst there the Bible
   stands, with all the scribblings wiped off the page, as though they had
   never been! Opponents fire their small shot against the great Rock of
   Ages, and the little pellets fall flattened, and only scale off a bit
   of the moss that has gathered there! My brother, let the history of the
   past teach you and me, with other deeper thoughts, a very calm and
   triumphant confidence about all that opponents say nowadays; for all
   the modern opposition to this Gospel will go as all the past has done,
   and the newest systems which cut and carve at Christianity, will go to
   the tomb where all the rest have gone; and dead old infidelities will
   rise up from their thrones, and say to the bran-new ones of this
   generation, when their day is worked out, Are ye also become weak as
   we? art thou also become like one of us?' Whosoever shall fall on this
   stone shall be broken': personally, he will be harmed; and his
   opinions, and his books, and his talk, and all his argumentation, will
   come to nothing, like the waves that break into impotent foam against
   the rocky cliffs.

   III. Last of all, the issue, the ultimate issue, of unbelief is
   irremediable destruction when Christ begins to move.

   The former clause has spoken about the harm that naturally follows
   unbelief whilst the Gospel is being preached; the latter clause speaks
   about the active agency of Christ when the end shall have come, and the
   preaching of the Gospel shall have merged into the act of judgment. I
   do not mean to dwell, brethren, upon that thought; it seems to me far
   too awful a one to be handled by my hands, at any rate. Let us leave it
   in the vagueness and dreadfulness of the words of Him who never spoke
   exaggerated words, and who, when He said, It shall grind him to
   powder,' meant (as it seems to me) nothing less than a destruction
   which, contrasted with the former remediable wounding and breaking, was
   a destruction utter, and hopeless, and everlasting, and without remedy.
   Ground--ground to powder! Any life left in that? any gathering up of
   that, and making a man of it again? All the humanity battered out of
   it, and the life clean gone from it! Does not that sound very much like
   everlasting destruction from the presence of God and from the glory of
   His power'? Christ, silent now, will begin to speak; passive now, will
   begin to act. The stone comes down, and the fall of it will be awful. I
   remember, away up in a lonely Highland valley, where beneath a tall
   black cliff, all weather-worn, and cracked, and seamed, there lies at
   the foot, resting on the greensward that creeps round its base, a huge
   rock, that has fallen from the face of the precipice. A shepherd was
   passing beneath it; and suddenly, when the finger of God's will touched
   it, and rent it from its ancient bed in the everlasting rock, it came
   down, leaping and bounding from pinnacle to pinnacle--and it fell; and
   the man that was beneath it is there now! Ground to powder.' Ah, my
   brethren, that is not my illustration--that is Christ's. Therefore I
   say to you, since all that stand against Him shall become as the chaff
   of the summer threshing-floor,' and be swept utterly away, make Him the
   foundation on which you build; and when the storm sweeps away every
   refuge of lies,' you will be safe and serene, builded upon the Rock of
   Ages.
     __________________________________________________________________

TWO WAYS OF DESPISING GOD'S FEAST

   And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by parables, and said, 2.
   The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a
   marriage for his son, 3. And sent forth his servants to call them that
   were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come. 4. Again, he sent
   forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are bidden, Behold, I
   have prepared my dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are killed, and all
   things are ready: come unto the marriage. 6. But they made light of it,
   and went their ways, one to his farm, another to his merchandise; 6.
   And the remnant took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and
   slew them. 7. But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he
   sent forth his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up
   their city. & Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but
   they which were bidden were not worthy. 9. Go ye therefore into the
   highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage. 10. So
   those servants went out into the highways, and gathered together all as
   many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding was furnished
   with guests. 11. And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw
   there a man which had not on a wedding-garment: 12. And he saith unto
   him, Friend, how earnest thou in hither not having a wedding-garment?
   And he was speechless. 13. Then said the king to the servants, Bind him
   hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness;
   there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 14. For many are called,
   but few are chosen.'--MATT. xxii. 1-14.

   This parable, and the preceding one of the vine-dressers, make a pair.
   They are closely connected in time, as well as subject. Jesus
   answered.' What? Obviously, the unspoken murderous hate, restrained by
   fear, which had been raised in the rulers' minds, and flashed in their
   eyes, and moved in their gestures. Christ answers it by repeating His
   blow; for the present parable is, in outline, identical with the
   preceding, though differing in colouring, and carrying its thoughts
   farther. That stopped with the transference of the kingdom to the
   Gentiles; this passes on to speak also of the development among the
   Gentiles, and ends with the law many called, few chosen,' which is
   exemplified in Jew and Gentile. There are, then, two parts in it:
   verses 1-9 covering the same ground as the former; verses 10-14 adding
   new matter.

   I. The judgment on those who refuse the offered joys of the kingdom. In
   the previous parable, the kingdom was presented on the side of duty and
   service. The call was to render obedience. The vineyard was a sphere
   for toil. The owner had given it indeed, but, having given, he
   required. That is only half the truth, and the least joyful half. So
   this parable dismisses all ideas of work, duty, service, requirement,
   and instead gives the emblem of a marriage feast as the picture of the
   kingdom. It therein unites two familiar prophetic images for the
   Messianic times--those of a festival and of a marriage. As Luther says,
   He calls it a marriage feast, not a time of toil or a time of sorrow,
   but a time of holiday and a time of joy; in which we make ourselves
   fine, sing, play, dance, eat, drink, are glad, and have a good time;
   else it would not be a wedding feast, if people were to be working,
   mourning, or crying. Therefore, Christ calls His Christianity and
   gospel by the name of the highest joy on earth; namely, by the name of
   a marriage feast.' How pathetic this designation of His kingdom is on
   Christ's lips, when we remember how near His bitter agony He stood, and
   that He tasted its bitterness already! It is not the whole truth any
   more than the vineyard emblem is. Both must be united in our idea of
   the kingdom, as both may be in experience. It is possible to be at once
   toiling among the vines in the hot sunshine, and feasting at the table.
   The Christian life is not all grinding at heavy tasks, nor all
   enjoyment of spiritual refreshment; but our work may be so done as to
   be our meat'--as it was His--and our glad repose may be unbroken even
   in the midst of toil. We are, at one and the same time, labourers in
   the king's vineyard, and guests at the king's table; and the same
   duality will, in some unknown fashion, continue in the perfect kingdom,
   where there will be both work and feasting, and all the life shall be
   both in one.

   The second point to be noticed is the invitations of the king. There
   had been an invitation before the point at which the parable begins,
   for the servants are sent to summon those who had already been called.'
   That calling, which lies beyond the horizon of our parable, is the
   whole series of agencies in Old Testament times. So this parable begins
   almost where the former leaves off. They only slightly overlap. The
   first servants here are Christ Himself, and His followers in their
   ministry during His life; and the second set are the apostles and
   preachers of the gospel during the period between the completion of the
   preparation of the feast (that is, the death of Christ) and the
   destruction of Jerusalem. The characteristic difference of their
   message from that of the servants in the former parable, embodies the
   whole difference between the preaching of the prophets, as messengers
   demanding the fruit of righteousness, and the glad tidings of a gospel
   of free grace which does not demand, but offers, and does not say obey'
   until it has said eat, and be glad.' The reiterated invitations not
   only correspond to the actual facts, but, like the facts, set the
   miracle of God's patience in a still brighter light than the former
   story did; for while it is wonderful that the lord of the vineyard
   should stoop to ask so often for fruit, it is far more wonderful that
   the founder of the feast, who is king too, should stoop to offer over
   and over again the refused abundance of his table.

   Mark, further, the refusal of the invitations: They would not (or "did
   not wish to") come.' That is Christ's gentle way of describing the
   unbelief of His generation. It is the second set of refusers who are
   painted in darker colours. We are accustomed to think that the sin of
   His contemporaries was great beyond parallel, but he seems here to hint
   that the sin of those who reject Him after the Cross and the
   Resurrection, is blacker than theirs. At any rate, it clearly is so.
   But note that the parable speaks as if the refusers were the same
   persons throughout, thus taking the same point of view as the former
   one did, and regarding the generations of the Jews as one whole. There
   is a real unity, though the individuals be different, if the spirit
   actuating successive generations be the same.

   Note the two classes of rejecters. The first simply pay no attention,
   because their heads are full of business. They do not even speak more
   or less lame excuses, as the refusers in Luke's similar parable had the
   decency to do. The king's messenger addresses a group, who pause on
   their road for a moment, to listen listlessly to what he has to say,
   and, when he has done, disperse without a word, each man going on his
   road, as if nothing had happened. The ground of their indifference lies
   in their absorption with this world's good, and their belief that it is
   best. His own farm,' as the original puts it emphatically, holds one
   man by the solid delight of possessing acres that he can walk over and
   till; his merchandise draws another, by the excitement of speculation
   and the lust of acquiring. It is not only the hurry and fever of a
   great commercial city, but the quiet and leisure of country life, which
   shut out taste for God's feast. Strange preference of toil and risk of
   loss to abundance, repose, and joy! Savages barter gold for glass
   beads. We choose lives of weary work and hunting after uncertain
   riches, rather than listen to His call, despising the open-handed
   housekeeping of our Father's house, and trying to fill our hunger with
   the swine's husks. The suicidal madness of refusing the kingdom is set
   in a vivid light in these quiet words.

   But stranger still is the conduct of the rest. Why should they kill men
   whose only fault was bringing them a hospitable invitation? The
   incongruity of the representation has given offence to some
   interpreters, who are not slow to point out how Christ could have
   improved His parable. But the reality is more incongruous still, and
   the unmotived outburst of wrath against the innocent bearers of a
   kindly invitation is only too true to life. Mark the distinction drawn
   by our Lord between the bulk of the people who simply neglected, and
   the few who violently opposed. He does not charge the guilt on all. The
   murderers of Him and of His first followers were not the mass of the
   nation, who, left to themselves, would not have so acted, but the few
   who stirred up the many. But, though He does not lay the guilt at the
   doors of all, yet the punishment falls on all, and, when the city is
   burned, the houses of the negligent and of the slayers are equally
   consumed; for simple refusal of the message and slaying the messengers
   were but the positive and superlative degrees of the same
   crime--rebellion against the king, whose invitation was a command.

   The fatal issue is presented, as in the former parable, in two parts:
   the destruction of the rebels, and the passing over of the kingdom to
   others. But the differences are noteworthy. Here we read that the king
   was wroth.' Insult to a king is worse than dishonesty to a landlord.
   The refusal of God's proffered grace is even more certain to awake that
   awful reality, the wrath of God, than the failure to render the fruits
   of the good possessed. Love repelled and thrown back on itself cannot
   but become wrath. That refusal, which is rebellion, is fittingly
   described as punished by force of arms and the burning of the city. We
   can scarcely help seeing that our Lord here, in a very striking and
   unusual way, mingles prose prediction with parabolic imagery. Some
   commentators object to this, and take the armies and the burning to be
   only part of the imagery, but it is difficult to believe that. Note the
   forcible pronouns, His armies,' and their city.' The terrible Roman
   legions were His soldiers for the time being, the axe which He laid to
   the root of the tree. The city had ceased to be His, just as the temple
   ceased to be My house,' and became, by their sin, your house.' The
   legend told that, before their destruction, a mighty voice was heard
   saying, Let us depart,' and, with the sound of rushing wings, His
   presence left sanctuary and city. When He was no longer the glory in
   the midst,' He was no longer a wall of fire round about,' and the Roman
   torches worked their will on the city which was no longer the city of
   our God.'

   The command to gather in others to fill the vacant places follows on
   the destruction of the city. This may seem to be opposed to the facts
   of the transference of the kingdom to the Gentiles, which certainly was
   begun long before Jerusalem fell. But its fall was the final and
   complete severance of Christianity from Judaism, and not till then had
   the messengers to give up the summons to Israel as hopeless. Perhaps
   Paul had this parable floating in his memory when he said to the
   howling blasphemers at Antioch in Pisidia, Seeing ye . . . judge
   yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. For
   so hath the Lord commanded us.' They which were bidden were not
   worthy,' and their unworthiness consisted not in any other moral
   demerit, but solely in this, that they had refused the proffered
   blessings. That is the only thing which makes any of us unworthy. And
   that will make the best of us unworthy.

   II. Verses 10-14 carry us beyond the preceding parable, and show us the
   judgment on the unworthy accepters of the invitation. There are two
   ways of sinning against God's merciful gift: the one is refusing to
   accept it; the other is taking it in outward seeming, but continuing in
   sin. The former was the sin of the Jews; the latter is the sin of
   nominal Christians. We may briefly note the points of this appendix to
   the parable. The first is the indiscriminate invitation, which is more
   emphatically marked as being so, by the mention of the bad' before the
   good among the guests. God's offer is for all, and, in a very real
   sense, is specially sent to the worst, just as the doctor goes first to
   the most severely wounded. So the motley crew, without the least
   attempt at discrimination, are seated at the table. If the Church
   understands its business, it will have nothing to do in its message
   with distinctions of character any more than of class, but, if it makes
   any difference, will give the outcast and disreputable the first place
   in its efforts. Is that what it does?

   The next point is the king's inspection. The word rendered behold'
   implies a fixed and minute observation. When does that scrutiny take
   place? Obviously, from the sequel, the final judgment is referred to,
   and it is remarkable that here there is no mention of the king's son as
   the judge. No parable can shadow forth all truth, and though the Father
   has committed all judgment to the Son,' the Son's judgment is the
   Father's, and the exigencies of the parable required that the son as
   bridegroom should not be brought into view as judge. Note that there is
   only one guest without the dress needed. That may be an instance of the
   lenity of Christ's charity, which hopeth all things; or it may rather
   be intended to suggest the keenness of the king's glance, which, in all
   the crowded tables, picks out the one ragged losel who had found his
   way there--so individual is his knowledge, so impossible for us to hide
   in the crowd.

   Mark that the feast has not begun, though the guests are seated. The
   judgment stands at the threshold of the heavenly kingdom. The king
   speaks with a certain coldness, very unlike the welcome fit for a
   guest; and his question is one of astonishment at the rude boldness of
   the man who came there, knowing that he had not the proper dress. (That
   knowledge is implied in the form of the sentence in the Greek.) What,
   then, is the wedding garment? It can be nothing else than
   righteousness, moral purity, which fits for sitting at His table in His
   kingdom. And the man who has it not, is the nominal Christian, who says
   that he has accepted God's invitation, and lives in sin, not putting
   off the old man with his deeds,' nor putting on the new man, which is
   created in righteousness.' How that garment was to be obtained is no
   part of this parable. We know that it is only to be received by faith
   in Jesus Christ, and that if we are to pass the scrutiny of the king,
   it must be as not having our own righteousness,' but His made ours by
   faith which makes us righteous, and then by all holy effort, and toil
   in His strength, we must clothe our souls in the dress which befits the
   banqueting hall; for only they who are washed and clothed in fine
   linen, clean and white, shall sit there. But Christ's purpose here was
   not to explain how the robe was to be procured, but to insist that it
   must be worn.

   He was speechless,'--or, as the word means, muzzled.' The man is
   self-condemned, and, having nothing to say in extenuation, the solemn
   promise is pronounced of ejection from the lighted hall, with limbs
   bound so that he cannot struggle, and consignment to the blackness
   outside, of which our Lord adds, in words not put into the king's
   mouth, but which we have heard from Him before, There shall be the
   [well-known and terrible] weeping and gnashing of teeth--awful though
   figurative expressions for despair and passion.

   Both parts of the parable come under one law, and exemplify one
   principle of the kingdom, that its invitations extend more widely than
   the real possession of its gifts. The unbelieving Jew, in one
   direction, and the unrighteous Christian in another, are instances of
   this.

   This is not the place to discuss that wide and well-worn question of
   the ground of God's choice. That does not enter into the scope of the
   parable. For it, the choice is proved by the actual participation in
   the feast. They who do not choose to receive the invitation, or to put
   on the wedding garment, do, in different ways, show that they are not
   chosen' though called.' The lesson is, not of interminable and
   insoluble questionings about God's secrets, but of earnest heed to His
   gracious call, and earnest, believing effort to make the fair garment
   our very own, if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked.'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE TABLES TURNED: THE QUESTIONERS QUESTIONED

   But when the Pharisees had heard that He had put the Sadducees to
   silence, they were gathered together. 35. Then one of them, which was a
   lawyer, asked Him a question, tempting Him, and saying, 36. Master,
   which is the great commandment in the law? 37. Jesus said unto him,
   Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
   soul, and with all thy mind. 38. This is the first and great
   commandment. 39. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy
   neighbour as thyself. 40. On these two commandments hang all the law
   and the prophets. 41. While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus
   asked them, 42. Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose Son is He? They
   say unto Him, The son of David. 43. He saith unto them, How then doth
   David in spirit call Him Lord, saying, 44. The Lord said unto my Lord,
   Sit Thou on My right hand, till I make Thine enemies Thy footstool? 45.
   If David then call Him Lord, how is He his son? 46. And no man was able
   to answer Him a word; neither durst any man, from that day forth, ask
   Him any more questions.'--MATT.xxii. 34-46.

   Herodians, Sadducees, Pharisees, who were at daggers drawn with each
   other, patched up an alliance against Jesus, whom they all hated. Their
   questions were cunningly contrived to entangle Him in the cobwebs of
   casuistry and theological hair-splitting, but He walked through the
   fine-spun snares as a lion might stalk away with the nooses set for him
   dangling behind him. The last of the three questions put to Jesus, and
   the one question with which He turned the tables and silenced His
   questioners, are our subject. In the former, Jesus declares the essence
   of the law or of religion; in the latter, He brings to light the
   essential loftiness of the Messiah.

   I. The two preceding questions are represented to have been asked by
   deputations; this is specially noted as emanating from an individual.
   The lawyer' seems to have anticipated his colleagues, and possibly his
   question was not that which they had meant to put. His motive in asking
   it was that of tempting' Jesus, but we must not give that word too
   hostile a sense, for it may mean no more than testing' or trying. The
   legal expert wished to find out the attainments and standpoint of this
   would-be teacher, and so he proposed a question which would bring out
   the whereabouts of Jesus, and give opportunity for a theological
   wrangle. He did not ask the question for guidance, but as an inquisitor
   cross-examining a suspected heretic. Probably the question was a
   stereotyped one, and there are traces in the Gospels that the answer
   recognised as orthodox was that which Jesus gave (Luke x. 27). The two
   commandments are quoted from Deuteronomy vi. 5 and Leviticus xix. 18
   respectively. The lawyer probably only desired to raise a discussion as
   to the relative worth of isolated precepts. Jesus goes deep down below
   isolated precepts, and unifies, as well as transforms, the law. Supreme
   and undivided love to God is not only the great, but also the first,
   commandment. In more modern phrase, it is the sum of man's duty and the
   germ of all goodness. Note that Jesus shifts the centre from conduct to
   character, from deeds to affections. As a man thinketh in his heart, so
   is he,' said the sage of old; Christ says, As a man loves, so is he.'
   Two loves we have,--either the dark love of self and sense, or the
   white love of God, and all character and conduct are determined by
   which of these sways us. Note, further, that love to God must needs be
   undivided. God is one and all; man is one and finite. To love such an
   object with half a heart is not to love. True, our weakness leads
   astray, but the only real love corresponding to the natures of the
   lover and the loved is whole-hearted, whole-souled, whole-minded. It
   must be all in all, or not at all.'

   A second is like unto it,'--love to man is the under side, as it were,
   of love to God. The two commandments are alike, for both call for love,
   and the second is second because it is a consequence of the first. Each
   sets up a lofty standard; with all thy heart' and as thyself' sound
   equally impossible, but both result necessarily from the nature of the
   case. Religion is the parent of all morality, and especially of
   benevolent love to men. Innate self-regard will yield to no force but
   that of love to God. It is vain to try to create brotherhood among men
   unless the sense of God's fatherhood is its foundation. Love of
   neighbours is the second commandment, and to make it the first, as some
   do now, is to end all hope of fulfilling it. Still further, Jesus hangs
   law and prophets on these two precepts, which, at bottom, are one. Not
   only will all other duties be done in doing these, since love is the
   fulfilling of the law,' but all other precepts, and all the prophets'
   appeals and exhortations, are but deductions from, or helps to the
   attainment of, these. All our forms of worship, creeds, and the like,
   are of worth in so far as they are outcomes of love to God, or aid us
   in loving Him and our neighbours. Without love, they are as sounding
   brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'

   II. The Pharisees remained gathered together,' and may have been
   preparing another question, but Jesus had been long enough
   interrogated. It was not fitting that He should be catechised only. His
   questions teach. He does not seek to entangle' the Pharisees in their
   speech,' nor to make them contradict themselves, but brings them full
   up against a difficulty, that they may open their eyes to the great
   truth which is its only solution. His first question, What think ye of
   the Christ?' is simply preparatory to the second. The answer which He
   anticipated was given,--as, of course, it would be, for the Davidic
   descent of the Messiah was a commonplace universally accepted. One can
   fancy that the Pharisees smiled complacently at the attempt to puzzle
   them with such an elementary question, but the smile vanished when the
   next one came. They interpreted Psalm 110 as Messianic, and David in it
   called Messiah my Lord.' How can He be both? Jesus' question is in two
   forms,--If He is son, how does David call Him Lord?' or, if He is Lord,
   how then is He his son?' Take either designation, and the other lands
   you in inextricable difficulties.

   Now what was our Lord's purpose in thus driving the Pharisees into a
   corner? Not merely to muzzle' them, as the word in verse 34, rendered
   put to silence,' literally means, but to bring to light the inadequate
   conceptions of the Messiah and of the nature of His kingdom, to which
   exclusive recognition of his Davidic descent necessarily led. David's
   son would be but a king after the type of the Herods and C泡rs, and
   his kingdom as carnal' as the wildest zealot expected, but David's
   Lord, sitting at God's right hand, and having His foes made His
   footstool by Jehovah Himself,--what sort of a Messiah King would that
   be? The majestic image, that shapes itself dimly here, was a revelation
   that took the Pharisees' breath away, and made them dumb. Nor are the
   words without a half-disclosed claim on Christ's part to be that which
   He was so soon to avow Himself before the high priest as being. The
   first hearers of them probably caught that meaning partly, and were
   horrified; we hear it clearly in the words, and answer, Thou art the
   King of glory, O Christ! Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.'

   Jesus here says that Psalm 110 is Messianic, that David was the author,
   and that he wrote it by divine inspiration. The present writer cannot
   see how our Lord's argument can be saved from collapse if the psalm is
   not David's.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE KING'S FAREWELL

   Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto
   whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are
   within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. 28. Even so ye
   also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of
   hypocrisy and iniquity. 29. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees,
   hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the
   sepulchres of the righteous, 30. And say, If we had been in the days of
   our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of
   the prophets. 31. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye
   are the children of them which killed the prophets. 32. Fill ye up then
   the measure of your fathers. 33. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers,
   how can ye escape the damnation of hell! 34. Wherefore, behold, I send
   unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall
   kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues,
   and persecute them from city to city; 35. That upon you may come all
   the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous
   Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between
   the temple and the altar. 36. Verily I say unto you, All these things
   shall come upon this generation. 37. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that
   killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how
   often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen
   gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! 38. Behold,
   your house is left unto you desolate. 39. For I say unto you, Ye shall
   not see Me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is He that cometh in
   the name of the Lord.'--MATT. xxiii. 27-39.

   If, with the majority of authorities, we exclude verse 14 from the
   text, there are, in this chapter, seven woes, like seven thunders,
   launched against the rulers. They are scathing exposures, but, as the
   very word implies, full of sorrow as well as severity. They are not
   denunciations, but prophecies warning that the end of such tempers must
   be mournful. The wailing of an infinite compassion, rather than the
   accents of anger, sounds in them; and it alone is heard in the outburst
   of lamenting in which Christ's heart runs over, as in a passion of
   tears, at the close. The blending of sternness and pity, each perfect,
   is the characteristic of this wonderful climax of our Lord's appeals to
   His nation. Could such tones of love and righteous anger joined have
   been sent echoing through the ages in this Gospel, if they had not been
   heard?

   I. The woe of the whited sepulchres.' The first four woes are directed
   mainly to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees; the last three to
   their characters. The two first of these fasten on the same sin, of
   hypocritical holiness. There is, however, a difference between the
   representation of hypocrites under the metaphor of the clean outside of
   the cup and platter, and that of the whited sepulchre. In the former,
   the hidden sin is extortion and excess'; that is, sensual enjoyment
   wrongly procured, of which the emblems of cup and plate suggest that
   good eating and drinking are a chief part. In the latter, it is
   iniquity'--a more general and darker name for sin. In the former, the
   Pharisee is blind,' self-deceived in part or altogether; in the latter,
   stress is rather laid on his appearance unto men.' The repetition of
   the same charge in the two woes teaches us Christ's estimate of the
   gravity and frequency of the sin.

   The whitened tombs of Mohammedan saints still gleam in the strong
   sunlight on many a knoll in Palestine. If the Talmudical practice is as
   old as our Lord's time, the annual whitewashing was lately over. Its
   purpose was not to adorn the tombs, but to make them conspicuous, so
   that they might be avoided for fear of defilement. So He would say,
   with terrible irony, that the apparent holiness of the rulers was
   really a sign of corruption, and a warning to keep away from them. What
   a blow at their self-complacency! And how profoundly true it is that
   the more punctiliously white the hypocrite's outside, the more foul is
   he within, and the wider berth will all discerning people give him! The
   terrible force of the figure needs no dwelling on. In Christ's
   estimate, such a soul was the very dwelling-place of death; and foul
   odours and worms and corruption filled its sickening recesses. Terrible
   words to come from His lips into which grace was poured, and bold words
   to be flashed at listeners who held the life of the Speaker in their
   hands! There are two sorts of hypocrites, the conscious and the
   unconscious; and there are ten of the latter for one of the former, and
   each ten times more dangerous. Established religion breeds them, and
   they are specially likely to be found among those whose business is to
   study the documents in which it is embodied. These woes are not like
   thunder-peals rolling above our heads, while the lightning strikes the
   earth miles away. A religion which is mostly whitewash is as common
   among us as ever it was in Jerusalem; and its foul accompaniments of
   corruption becoming more rotten every year, as the whitewash is laid on
   thicker, may be smelt among us, and its fatal end is as sure.

   II. The woe of the sepulchre builders (vs. 29-36). In these verses we
   have, first, the specification of another form of hypocrisy, consisting
   in building the prophets' tombs, and disavowing the fathers' murder of
   them. Honouring dead prophets was right; but honouring dead ones and
   killing living ones was conscious or unconscious hypocrisy. The temper
   of mind which leads to glorifying the dead witnesses, also leads to
   supposing that all truth was given by them; and hence that the living
   teachers, who carry their message farther, are false prophets. A
   generation which was ready to kill Jesus in honour of Moses, would have
   killed Moses in honour of Abraham, and would not have had the faintest
   apprehension of the message of either.

   It is a great deal easier to build tombs than to accept teachings, and
   a good deal of the posthumous honour paid to God's messengers means,
   It's a good thing they are dead, and that we have nothing to do but to
   put up a monument.' Bi-centenaries and ter-centenaries and jubilees do
   not always imply either the understanding or the acceptance of the
   principles supposed to be glorified thereby. But the magnifiers of the
   past are often quite unconscious of the hollowness of their admiration,
   and honest in their horror of their fathers' acts; and we all need the
   probe of such words as Christ's to pierce the skin of our lazy
   reverence for our fathers' prophets, and let out the foul matter
   below--namely, our own blindness to God's messengers of to-day.

   The statement of the hypocrisy is followed, in verses 31-33, with its
   unmasking and condemnation. The words glow with righteous wrath at
   white heat, and end in a burst of indignation, most unfamiliar to His
   lips. Three sentences, like triple lightning flash from His pained
   heart. With almost scornful subtlety He lays hold of the words which He
   puts into the Pharisees' mouths, to convict them of kindred with those
   whose deeds they would disown. Our fathers, say you? Then you do belong
   to the same family, after all. You confess that you have their blood in
   your veins; and, in the very act of denying sympathy with their
   conduct, you own kindred. And, for all your protestations, spiritual
   kindred goes with bodily descent.' Christ here recognises that children
   probably take after their parents,' or, in modern scientific terms,
   that heredity' is the law, and that it works more surely in the
   transmission of evil than of good.

   Then come the awful words bidding that generation fill up the measure
   of the fathers.' They are like the other command to Judas to do his
   work quickly. They are more than permission, they are command; but such
   a command as, by its laying bare of the true character of the deed in
   view, is love's last effort at prevention. Mark the growing emotion of
   the language. Mark the conception of a nation's sins as one through
   successive generations, and the other, of these as having a definite
   measure, which being filled, judgment can no longer tarry. Generation
   after generation pours its contributions into the vessel, and when the
   last black drop which it can hold has been added, then comes the
   catastrophe. Mark the fatal necessity by which inherited sin becomes
   darker sin. The fathers' crimes are less than the sons'. This
   inheritance increases by each transmission. The cloak strikes one more
   at each revolution of the hands.

   It is hard to recognise Christ in the terrible words that follow. We
   have heard part of them from John the Baptist; and it sounded natural
   for him to call men serpents and the children of serpents, but it is
   somewhat of a shock to hear Jesus hurling such names at even the most
   sinful. But let us remember that He who sees hearts, has a right to
   tell harsh truths, and that it is truest kindness to strip off masks
   which hide from men their own real character, and that the revelation
   of the divine love in Jesus would be a partial and impotent revelation
   if it did not show us the righteous love which is wrath. There is
   nothing so terrible as the anger of gentle compassion, and the fiercest
   and most destructive wrath is the wrath of the Lamb.' Seldom, indeed,
   did He show that side of His character; but it is there, and the other
   side would not be so blessed as it is, unless that were there too.

   The woe ends with the double prophecy that that generation would repeat
   and surpass the fathers' guilt, and that on it would fall the
   accumulated penalties of past bloodshed. Note that solemn therefore,'
   which looks back to the whole preceding context, and forward to the
   whole subsequent. Because the rulers professed abhorrence of their
   fathers' deeds, and yet inherited their spirit, they too would have
   their prophets, and would slay them. God goes on sending His
   messengers, because we reject them; and the more deaf men are, the more
   does He peal His words into their ears. That is mercy and compassion,
   that all men may be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth; but
   it is judgment too, and its foreseen effect must be regarded as part of
   the divine purpose in it. Christ's desire is one thing, His purpose
   another. His desire is that all should find in His gospel the savour of
   life'; but His purpose is that, if it be not that to any, it shall be
   to them the savour of death. Mark, too, the authority with which He, in
   the face of these scowling Pharisees, assumes the distinct divine
   prerogative of sending forth inspired men, who, as His messengers,
   shall stand on a level with the prophets of old. Mark His silence as to
   His own fate, which is only obscurely hinted at in the command to fill
   up the measure of the fathers. Observe the detailed enumeration of His
   messengers' gifts,--prophets' under direct inspiration, like those of
   old, which may especially refer to the apostles; wise men,' like a
   Stephen or an Apollos; scribes,' such as Mark and Luke and many a
   faithful servant since, whose pen has loved to write the name above
   every name. Note the detailed prophecy of their treatment, which begins
   with slaying and goes down to the less severe scourging, and thence to
   the milder persecution. Do the three punishments belong to the three
   classes of messengers, the severest falling to the lot of the most
   highly endowed, and even the quiet penman being hunted from city to
   city?

   We need not wriggle and twist to try to avoid admitting that the
   calling of the martyred Zacharias, the son of Barachias,' is an error
   of some one who confused the author of the prophetic book with the
   person whose murder is narrated in 2 Chronicles xxiv. We do not know
   who made the mistake, or how it appears in our text, but it is not
   honest to try to slur it over. The punishment of long ages of sin,
   carried on from father to son, does in the course of that history of
   the world, which is a part of the judgment of the world, fall upon one
   generation. It takes long for the mass of heaped-up sin to become
   top-heavy; but when it is so, it buries one generation of those who
   have worked at piling it up, beneath its down-rushing avalanche.


     The mills of God grind slowly,

     But they grind exceeding small.'

   The catastrophes of national histories are prepared for by continuous
   centuries. The generation that laid the first powder-hornful of the
   train is dead and buried, long before the explosion which sends
   constituted order and institutions sky-high. The misery is that often
   the generation which has to pay the penalty has begun to awake to the
   sin, and would be glad to mend it, if it could. England in the
   seventeenth century, France in the eighteenth, America in the
   nineteenth, had to reap harvests from sins sown long before. Such is
   the law of the judgment wrought out by God's providence in history. But
   there is another judgment, begun here and perfected hereafter, in which
   fathers and sons shall each bear their own burden, and reap accurately
   the fruit of what they have sown. The soul that sinneth, it shall die.'

   III. The parting wail of rejected love. The lightning flashes of the
   sevenfold woes end in a rain of pity and tears. His full heart
   overflows in that sad cry of lamentation over the long-continued
   foiling of the efforts of a love that would fain have fondled and
   defended. What intensity of feeling is in the redoubled naming of the
   city! How yearningly and wistfully He calls, as if He might still win
   the faithless one, and how lingeringly unwilling He is to give up hope!
   How mournfully, rather than accusingly, He reiterates the acts which
   had run through the whole history, using a form of the verbs which
   suggests continuance. Mark, too, the matter-of-course way in which
   Christ assumes that He sent all the prophets whom, through the
   generations, Jerusalem had stoned.

   So the lament passes into the solemn final leave-taking, with which our
   Lord closes His ministry among the Jews, and departs from the temple.
   As, in the parable of the marriage-feast, the city was emphatically
   called their city,' so here the Temple, in whose courts He was
   standing, and which in a moment He was to quit for ever, is called your
   house,' because His departure is the withdrawing of the true Shechinah.
   It had been the house of God: now He casts it off, and leaves it to
   them to do as they will with it. The saddest punishment of
   long-continued rejection of His pleading love, is that it ceases at
   last to plead. The bitterest woe for those who refuse to render to Him
   the fruits of the vineyard, is to get the vineyard for their own,
   undisturbed. Christ's utmost retribution for obstinate blindness is to
   withdraw from our sight. All the woes that were yet to fall, in long,
   dreary succession on that nation, so long continued in its sin, so long
   continued in its misery, were hidden in that solemn departure of Christ
   from the henceforward empty temple. Let us fear lest our unfaithfulness
   meet the like penalty! But even the departure does not end His
   yearnings, nor close the long story of the conflict between God's
   beseeching love and their unbelief. The time shall come when the nation
   shall once more lift up, with deeper, truer adoration, the hosannas of
   the triumphal entry. And then a believing Israel shall see their King,
   and serve Him. Christ never takes final leave of any man in this world.
   It is ever possible that dumb lips may be opened to welcome Him, though
   long rejected; and His withdrawals are His efforts to bring about that
   opening. When it takes place, how gladly does He return to the heart
   which is now His temple, and unveil His beauty to the long-darkened
   eyes!
     __________________________________________________________________

TWO FORMS OF ONE SAYING

   He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.' --MATT. xxiv.
   13, R.V.

   In your patience possess ye your souls.'--Luke xxi. 19.

   These two sayings, different as they sound in our Version, are probably
   divergent representations of one original. The reasons for so supposing
   are manifold and obvious on a little consideration. In the first place,
   the two sayings occur in the Evangelists' reports of the same prophecy
   and at the same point therein. In the second place, the verbal
   resemblance is much greater than appears in our Authorised Version,
   because the word rendered patience' in Luke is derived from that
   translated endureth' in Matthew; and the true connection between the
   two versions of the saying would have been more obvious if we had had a
   similar word in both, reading in the one he that endureth,' and in the
   other in your endurance.' In the third place, the difference between
   these two sayings presented in our Version, in that the one is a
   promise and the other a command, is due to an incorrect reading of St.
   Luke's words. The Revised Version substitutes for the imperative
   possess' the promise ye shall possess,' and with that variation the two
   sayings are brought a good deal nearer each other. In both endurance is
   laid down as the condition, which in both is followed by a promise.
   Then, finally, there need be no difficulty in seeing that possessing,'
   or, more literally, gaining your souls,' is an exact equivalent of the
   other expression, ye shall be saved.' One cannot but remember our
   Lord's solemn antithetical phrase about a man losing his own soul.' To
   win one's soul' is to be saved; to be saved is to win one's soul.

   So I think I have made out my thesis that the two sayings are
   substantially one. They carry a great weight of warning, of
   exhortation, and of encouragement to us all. Let us try now to reap
   some of that harvest.

   I. First, then, notice the view of our condition which underlies these
   sayings.

   It is a sad and a somewhat stern one, but it is one to which, I think,
   most men's hearts will respond, if they give themselves leisure to
   think; and if they see life steadily, and see it whole.' For howsoever
   many days are bright, and howsoever all days are good, yet, on the
   whole, man is a soldier, and life is a fight.' For some of us it is
   simple endurance; for all of us it has sometimes been agony; for all of
   us, always, it presents resistance to every kind of high and noble
   career, and especially to the Christian one. Easy-going optimists try
   to skim over these facts, but they are not to be so lightly set aside.
   You have only to look at the faces that you meet in the street to be
   very sure that it is always a grave and sometimes a bitter thing to
   live. And so our two texts presuppose that life on the whole demands
   endurance, whatever may be included in that great word.

   Think of the inward resistance and outward hindrances to every lofty
   life. The scholar, the man of culture, the philanthropist--all who
   would live for anything else than the present, the low, and the
   sensual--find that there is a banded conspiracy, as it were, against
   them, and that they have to fight their way by continual antagonism, by
   continual persistence, as well as by continual endurance. Within,
   weakness, torpor, weariness, levity, inconstant wills, bright purposes
   clouding over, and all the cowardice and animalism of our nature war
   continually against the better, higher self. And without, there is a
   down-dragging, as persistent as the force of gravity, coming from the
   whole assemblage of external things that solicit, and would fain seduce
   us. The old legends used to tell us how, whensoever a knight set out
   upon any great and lofty quest, his path was beset on either side by
   voices, sometimes whispering seductions, and sometimes shrieking
   maledictions, but always seeking to withdraw him from his resolute
   march onwards to his goal. And every one of us, if we have taken on us
   the orders of any lofty chivalry, and especially if we have sworn
   ourselves knights of the Cross, have to meet the same antagonism. Then,
   too, there are golden apples rolled upon our path, seeking to draw us
   away from our steadfast endurance.

   Besides the hindrances in every noble path, the hindrances within and
   the hindrances without, the weight of self and the drawing of earth,
   there come to us all--in various degrees no doubt, and in various
   shapes--but to all of us there come the burdens of sorrows and cares,
   and anxieties and trials. Wherever two or three are gathered together,
   even if they gather for a feast, there will be some of them who carry a
   sorrow which they know well will never be lifted off their shoulders
   and their hearts, until they lay down all their burdens at the grave's
   mouth; and it is weary work to plod on the path of life with a weight
   that cannot be shifted, with a wound that can never be stanched.

   Oh, brethren, rosy-coloured optimism is all a dream. The recognition of
   the good that is in the evil is the devout man's talisman, but there is
   always need for the resistance and endurance which my texts prescribe.
   And the youngest of us, the gladdest of us, the least experienced of
   us, the most frivolous of us, if we will question our own hearts, will
   hear their Amen to the stern, sad view of the facts of earthly life
   which underlies this text.

   Though it has many other aspects, the world seems to me sometimes to be
   like that pool at Jerusalem in the five porches of which lay, groaning
   under various diseases, but none of them without an ache, a great
   multitude of impotent folk, halt and blind. Astronomers tell us that
   one, at any rate, of the planets rolls on its orbit swathed in clouds
   and moisture. The world moves wrapped in a mist of tears. God only
   knows them all, but each heart knows its own bitterness and responds to
   the words, Ye have need of patience.'

   II. Now, secondly, mark the victorious temper.

   That is referred to in the one saying by he that endureth,' and in the
   other in your endurance.' Now, it is very necessary for the
   understanding of many places in Scripture to remember that the notion
   either of patience or of endurance by no means exhausts the power of
   this noble Christian word. For these are passive virtues, and however
   excellent and needful they may be, they by no means sum up our duty in
   regard to the hindrances and sorrows, the burdens and weights, of which
   I have been trying to speak. For you know it is only what cannot be
   cured' that must be endured,' and even incurable things are not merely
   to be endured, but they ought to be utilised. It is not enough that we
   should build up a dam to keep the floods of sorrow and trial from
   overflowing our fields; we must turn the turbid waters into our
   sluices, and get them to drive our mills. It is not enough that we
   should screw ourselves up to lie unresistingly under the surgeon's
   knife; though God knows that it is as much as we can manage sometimes,
   and we have to do as convicts under the lash do, get a bit of lead or a
   bullet into our mouths, and bite at it to keep ourselves from crying
   out. But that is not all our duty in regard to our trials and
   difficulties. There is required something more than passive endurance.

   This noble word of my texts does mean a great deal more than that. It
   means active persistence as well as patient submission. It is not
   enough that we should stand and bear the pelting of the pitiless storm,
   unmurmuring and unbowed by it; but we are bound to go on our course,
   bearing up and steering right onwards. Persistent perseverance in the
   path that is marked out for us is especially the virtue that our Lord
   here enjoins. It is well to sit still unmurmuring; it is better to
   march on undiverted and unchecked. And when we are able to keep
   straight on in the path which is marked out for us, and especially in
   the path that leads us to God, notwithstanding all opposing voices, and
   all inward hindrances and reluctances; when we are able to go to our
   tasks of whatever sort they are and to do them, though our hearts are
   beating like sledge-hammers; when we say to ourselves, It does not
   matter a bit whether I am sad or glad, fresh or wearied, helped or
   hindered by circumstances, this one thing I do,' then we have come to
   understand and to practise the grace that our Master here enjoins. The
   endurance which wins the soul, and leads to salvation, is no mere
   passive submission, excellent and hard to attain as that often is; but
   it is brave perseverance in the face of all difficulties, and in spite
   of all enemies.

   Mark how emphatically our Lord here makes the space within which that
   virtue has to be exercised conterminous with the whole duration of our
   lives. I need not discuss what the end' was in the original application
   of the words; that would take us too far afield. But this I desire to
   insist upon, that right on to the very close of life we are to expect
   the necessity of putting forth the exercise of the very same
   persistence by which the earlier stages of any noble career must
   necessarily be marked. In other departments of life there may be
   relaxation, as a man goes on through the years; but in the culture of
   our characters, and in the deepening of our faith, and in the drawing
   near to our God, there must be no cessation or diminution of
   earnestness and of effort right up to the close.

   There are plenty of people, and I dare say that I address some of them
   now, who began their Christian career full of vigour and with a heat
   that was too hot to last. But, alas, in a year or two all the fervency
   was past, and they settled down into the average, easygoing,
   unprogressive Christian, who is a wet blanket to the devotion and work
   of a Christian church. I wonder how many of us would scarcely know our
   own former selves if we could see them. Christian people, to how many
   of us should the word be rung in our ears: Ye did run well; what did
   hinder you'? The answer is--Myself.

   But may I say that this emphatic to the end' has a special lesson for
   us older people, who, as natural strength abates and enthusiasm cools
   down, are apt to be but the shadows of our old selves in many things?
   But there should be fire within the mountain, though there may be snow
   on its crest. Many a ship has been lost on the harbour bar; and there
   is no excuse for the captain leaving the bridge, or the engineer coming
   up from the engine-room, stormy as the one position and stifling as the
   other may be, until the anchor is down, and the vessel is moored and
   quiet in the desired haven. The desert, with its wild beasts and its
   Bedouin, reaches right up to the city gates, and until we are within
   these we need to keep our hands on our sword-hilts and be ready for
   conflict. He that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved.'

   III. Lastly, note the crown which endurance wins.

   Now, I need not spend or waste your time in mere verbal criticism, but
   I wish to point out that that word soul' in one of our two texts means
   both the soul and the life of which it is the seat; and also to remark
   that the being saved and the winning of the life or the soul has
   distinct application, in our Lord's words, primarily to corporeal
   safety and preservation in the midst of dangers; and, still further, to
   note the emphatic in your patience,' as suggesting not only a future
   but a present acquisition of one's own soul, or life, as the result of
   such persevering endurance and enduring perseverance. All which things
   being kept in view, I may expand the great promise that lies in my
   text, as follows:-- First, by such persevering persistence in the
   Christian path, we gain ourselves. Self-surrender is self-possession.
   We never own ourselves till we have given up owning ourselves, and
   yielded ourselves to that Lord who gives us back saints to ourselves.
   Self-control is self-possession. We do not own ourselves as long as it
   is possible for any weakness in flesh, sense, or spirit to gain
   dominion over us and hinder us from doing what we know to be right. We
   are not our own masters then. Whilst they promise them liberty, they
   themselves are the bond-slaves of corruption.' It is only when we have
   the bit well into the jaws of the brutes, and the reins tight in our
   hands, so that a finger-touch can check or divert the course, that we
   are truly lords of the chariot in which we ride and of the animals that
   impel it.

   And such self-control which is the winning of ourselves is, as I
   believe, thoroughly realised only when, by self-surrender of ourselves
   to Jesus Christ, we get His help to govern ourselves and so become
   lords of ourselves. Some little petty Rajah, up in the hills, in a
   quasi-independent State in India, is troubled by mutineers whom he
   cannot subdue; what does he do? He sends a message down to Lahore or
   Calcutta, and up come English troops that consolidate his dominion, and
   he rules securely, when he has consented to become a feudatory, and
   recognise his overlord. And so you and I, by continual repetition, in
   the face of self and sin, of our acts of self-surrender, bring Christ
   into the field; and then, when we have said, Lord, take me; I live, yet
   not I, but Christ liveth in me'; and when we daily, in spite of
   hindrances, stand to the surrender and repeat the consecration, then in
   our perseverance we acquire our souls.'

   Again, such persistence wins even the bodily life, whether it preserves
   it or loses it. I have said that the words of our texts have an
   application to bodily preservation in the midst of the dreadful dangers
   of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. But so regarded they are a
   paradox. For hear how the Master introduces them: Some of you shall
   they cause to be put to death, but there shall not a hair of your heads
   perish. In your perseverance ye shall win your lives.' Some of you they
   will put to death,' but ye shall win your lives,'--a paradox which can
   only be solved by experience. Whether this bodily life be preserved or
   lost, it is gained when it is used as a means of attaining the higher
   life of union with God. Many a martyr had the promise, Not a hair of
   your head shall perish,' fulfilled at the very moment when the falling
   axe shore his locks in twain, and severed his head from his body.

   Finally, full salvation, the true possession of himself, and the
   acquisition of the life which really is life, comes to a man who
   perseveres to the end, and thus passes to the land where he will
   receive the recompense of the reward. The one moment the runner, with
   flushed cheek and forward swaying body, hot, with panting breath, and
   every muscle strained, is straining to the winning-post; and the next
   moment, in utter calm, he is wearing the crown.

   To the end,' and what a contrast the next moment will be! Brethren, may
   it be true of you and of me that we are not of them that draw back unto
   perdition, but of them that believe to the winning of their souls!'
     __________________________________________________________________

THE CARRION AND THE VULTURES

   Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered
   together.'--MATT. xxiv. 28.

   This grim parable has, of course, a strong Eastern colouring. It is
   best appreciated by dwellers in those lands. They tell us that no
   sooner is some sickly animal dead, or some piece of carrion thrown out
   by the way, than the vultures--for the eagle does not prey upon
   carrion--appear. There may not have been one visible a moment before in
   the hot blue sky, but, taught by scent or by sight that their banquet
   is prepared, they come flocking from all corners of the heavens, a
   hideous crowd round their hideous meal, fighting with flapping wings
   and tearing it with their strong talons. And so, says Christ, wherever
   there is a rotting, dead society, a carcase hopelessly corrupt and
   evil, down upon it, as if drawn by some unerring attraction, will come
   the angels, the vultures of the divine judgment.

   The words of my text were spoken, according to the version of them in
   Luke's Gospel, in answer to a question from the disciples. Our Lord had
   been discoursing, in very solemn words, which, starting from the
   historical event of the impending fall of Jerusalem, had gradually
   passed into a description of the greater event of His second coming.
   And all these solemn warnings had stirred nothing deeper in the bosoms
   of the disciples than a tepid and idle curiosity which expressed itself
   in the one almost irrelevant question, Where, Lord?' He answers--Not
   here, not there, but everywhere where there is a carcase. The great
   event which is referred to in our Lord's solemn words is a future
   judgment, which is to be universal. But the words are not exhausted in
   their reference to that event. There have been many comings of the
   Lord,' many days of the Lord,' which on a smaller scale have embodied
   the same principles as are to be displayed in world-wide splendour and
   awfulness at the last.

   I. The first thing, then, in these most true and solemn words is this,
   that they are to us a revelation of a law which operates with unerring
   certainty through all the course of the world's history.

   We cannot tell, but God can, when evil has become incurable; or when,
   in the language of my text, the mass of any community has become a
   carcase. There may be flickerings of life, all unseen by our eyes, or
   there may be death, all unsuspected by our shallow vision. So long as
   there is a possibility of amendment, 'sentence against an evil work is
   not executed speedily'; and God dams back, as it were, the flow of His
   retributive judgment, not willing that any should perish, but that all
   should come to the knowledge of the truth.' But when He sees that all
   is vain, that no longer is restoration or recovery possible, then He
   lets loose the flood; or, in the language of my text, when the thing
   has become a carcase, then the vultures, God's scavengers, come and
   clear it away from off the face of the earth.

   Now that is the law that has been working from the beginning, working
   as well in regard to the long delays as in regard to the swift
   execution. There is another metaphor, in the Old Testament, that puts
   the same idea in a very striking form. It speaks about God's
   awakening,' as if His judgment slumbered. All round that dial the hand
   goes creeping, creeping, creeping slowly, but when it comes to the
   appointed line, then the bell strikes. And so years and centuries go
   by, all chance of recovery departs, and then the crash! The ice palace,
   built upon the frozen blocks, stands for a while, but when the spring
   thaws come, it breaks up.

   Let me remind you of some instances and illustrations. Take that story
   which people stumble over in the early part of the Old Testament
   revelation--the sweeping away of those Canaanitish nations whose
   hideous immoralities had turned the land into a perfect sty of
   abominations. There they had been wallowing, and God's Spirit, which
   strives with men ever and always, had been striving with them, we know
   not for how long, but when the time came at which, according to the
   grim metaphor of the Old Testament, the measure of their iniquity was
   full,' then He hurled upon them the fierce hosts out of the desert, and
   in a whirlwind of fire and sword swept them off the face of the earth.

   Take another illustration. These very people, who had been the
   executioners of divine judgment, settled in the land, fell into the
   snare--and you know the story. The captivities of Israel and Judah were
   other illustrations of the same thing. The fall of Jerusalem, to which
   our Lord pointed in the solemn context of these words, was another. For
   millenniums God had been pleading with them, sending His prophets,
   rising early and sending, saying, Oh, do not do this abominable thing
   which I hate!' And last of all He sent His Son.' Christ being rejected,
   God had shot His last bolt. He had no more that He could do. Christ
   being refused, the nation's doom was fixed and sealed, and down came
   the eagles of Rome, again God's scavengers, to sweep away the nation on
   which had been lavished such wealth of divine love, but which had now
   come to be a rotting abomination, and to this day remains in a living
   death, a miraculously preserved monument of God's Judgments.

   Take another illustration how, once more, the executants of the law
   fall under its power. That nation which crushed the feeble resources of
   Judaea, as a giant might crush a mosquito in his grasp, in its turn
   became honeycombed with abominations and immoralities; and then down
   from the frozen north came the fierce Gothic tribes over the Roman
   territory. One of their captains called himself the 'Scourge of God,'
   and he was right. Another swooping down of the vultures flashed from
   the blue heavens, and the carrion was torn to fragments by their strong
   beaks.

   Take one more illustration--that French Revolution at the end of the
   eighteenth century. The fathers sowed the wind, and the children reaped
   the whirlwind. Generations of heartless luxury, selfishness,
   carelessness of the cry of the poor, immoral separation of class from
   class, and all the sins which a ruling caste could commit against a
   subject people, had prepared for the convulsion. Then, in a carnival of
   blood and deluges of fire and sulphur, the rotten thing was swept off
   the face of the earth, and the world breathed more freely for its
   destruction.

   Take another illustration, through which many of us have lived. The
   bitter legacy of negro slavery that England gave to her giant son
   across the Atlantic, which blasted and sucked the strength out of that
   great republic, went down amidst universal execration. It took
   centuries for the corpse to be ready, but when the vultures came they
   made quick work of it.

   And so, as I say, all over the world, and from the beginning of time,
   with delays according to the possibilities of restoration and recovery
   which the divine eye discerns, this law is working. Verily there is a
   God that judgeth in the earth. The wheels of God grind slowly, but they
   grind exceeding small.' Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the
   eagles be gathered together.'

   And has the law exhausted its force? Are there going to be no more
   applications of it? Are there no European societies at this day that in
   their godlessness and social iniquities are hurrying fast to the
   condition of carrion? Look around us--drunkenness, sensual immorality,
   commercial dishonesty, senseless luxury amongst the rich, heartless
   indifference to the wail of the poor, godlessness over all classes and
   ranks of the community. Surely, surely, if the body politic be not
   dead, it is sick nigh unto death. And I, for my part, have little
   hesitation in saying that as far as one can see, European society is
   driving as fast as it can, with its godlessness and immorality, to such
   another day of the Lord' as these words of my text suggest. Let us see
   to it that we do our little part to be the 'salt of the earth' which
   shall keep it from rotting, and so drive away the vultures of judgment.

   II. But let me turn to another point. We have here a law which is to
   have a far more tremendous accomplishment in the future.

   There have been many comings of the Lord, many days of the Lord, when,
   as Isaiah says in his magnificent vision of one such, the loftiness of
   man has been bowed down, and the haughtiness of man made low, and the
   Lord alone exalted in that day when He arises to shake terribly the
   earth. And all these days of the Lord' are prophecies, and distinctly
   point to a future day' when the same principles which have been
   disclosed as working on a small scale in them, shall be manifested in
   full embodiment. These days of the Lord' proclaim the day of the Lord.'
   In the prophecies both of the Old and New Testaments that universal
   future judgment is seen glimmering through the descriptions of the
   nearer partial judgments. So interpreters are puzzled to say at what
   point in a prophecy the transition is made from the smaller to the
   greater. The prophecies are like the diagrams in treatises on
   perspective, in which diverging lines are drawn from the eye, enclosing
   a square or other figure, and which, as they recede further from the
   point of view, enclose a figure, the same in shape but of greater
   dimensions. There is a historical event foretold, the fall of
   Jerusalem. It is close up to the eyes of the disciples, and is
   comparatively small. Carry out the lines that touch its corners and
   define its shape, and upon the far distant curtain of the dim future
   there is thrown a like figure immensely larger, the coming of Jesus
   Christ to judge the world. All these little premonitions and foretastes
   and anticipatory specimens point onwards to the assured termination of
   the world's history in that great and solemn day, when all men shall be
   gathered before Christ's throne, and He shall judge all nations--judge
   you and me amongst the rest. That future judgment is distinctly a part
   of the Christian revelation. Jesus Christ is to come in bodily form as
   He went away. All men are to be judged by Him. That judgment is to be
   the destruction of opposing forces, the sweeping away of the carrion of
   moral evil.

   It is therefore distinctly a part of the message that is to be preached
   by us, under penalty of the awful condemnation pronounced on the
   watchman who seeth the sword coming and gives no warning. It is not
   becoming to make such a solemn message the opportunity for pictorial
   rhetoric, which vulgarises its greatness and weakens its power. But it
   is worse than an offence against taste; it is unfaithfulness to the
   preaching which God bids us, treason to our King, and cruelty to our
   hearers, to suppress the warning--The day of the Lord cometh.' There
   are many temptations to put it in the background. Many of you do not
   want that kind of preaching. You want the gentle side of divine
   revelation. You say to us in fact, though not in words. Prophesy to us
   smooth things. Tell us about the infinite love which wraps all mankind
   in its embrace. Speak to us of the Father God, who "hateth nothing that
   He hath made." Magnify the mercy and gentleness and tenderness of
   Christ. Do not say anything about that other side. It is not in
   accordance with the tendencies of modern thought.'

   So much the worse, then, for the tendencies of modern thought. I yield
   to no man in the ardour of my belief that the centre of all revelation
   is the revelation of a God of infinite love, but I cannot forget that
   there is such a thing as the terror of the Lord,' and I dare not
   disguise my conviction that no preaching sounds every string in the
   manifold harp of God's truth, which does not strike that solemn note of
   warning of judgment to come.

   Such suppression is unfaithfulness. Surely, if we preachers believe
   that tremendous truth, we are bound to speak. It is cruel kindness to
   be silent. If a traveller is about to plunge into some gloomy jungle
   infested by wild beasts, he is a friend who sits by the wayside to warn
   him of his danger. Surely you would not call a signalman unfeeling
   because he held out a red lamp when he knew that just round the curve
   beyond his cabin the rails were up, and that any train that reached the
   place would go over in horrid ruin. Surely that preaching is not justly
   charged with harshness which rings out the wholesome proclamation of a
   day of judgment, when we shall each give account of ourselves to the
   divine-human Judge.

   Such suppression weakens the power of the Gospel, which is the
   proclamation of deliverance, not only from the power, but also from the
   future retribution of sin. In such a maimed gospel there is but an
   enfeebled meaning given to that idea of deliverance. And though the
   thing that breaks the heart and draws men to God is not terror, but
   love, the terror must often be evoked in order to lead to love. It is
   only judgment to come' which will make Felix tremble, and though his
   trembling may pass away, and he be none the nearer the kingdom, there
   will never any good be done to him unless he does tremble. So, for all
   these reasons, all faithful preaching of Christ's Gospel must include
   the proclamation of Christ as Judge.

   But, if I should be unfaithful, if I did not preach this truth, what
   shall we call you if you turn away from it? You would not think it a
   wise thing of the engine-driver to shut his eyes if the red lamp were
   shown, and to go along at full speed and to pay no heed to that? Do you
   think it would be right for a Christian minister to lock his lips and
   never say, There is a judgment to come'? And do you think it is wise of
   you not to think of that, and to shape your conduct accordingly?

   Oh, dear friends! I do not doubt that the centre of all divine
   revelation is the love of God, nor do I doubt that incomparably the
   highest representation of the power of Christ's Gospel is that it draws
   men away from the love and the practice of evil, and makes them pure
   and holy. But that is not all. There is not only the practice and the
   power of sin to be fought against, but there is the penalty of sin to
   be taken into account; and as sure as you are living, and as sure as
   there is a God above us, so sure is it that there is a Day of Judgment,
   when He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He hath
   ordained.' The believing of that is not salvation, but the belief of
   that seems to me to be indispensable for any vigorous grasp of the
   delivering love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

   III. And so the last thing that I have to say is that this is a law
   which need never touch you, nor you know anything about but by the
   hearing of the ear.

   It is told us that we may escape it. When Paul reasoned of
   righteousness, and temperance, and judgment to come, his hearer
   trembled as he listened, but there was an end. But the true effect of
   this message is the effect that Paul himself attached to it when he
   said in the hearing of Athenian wisdom, God hath commanded all men
   everywhere to repent, because He hath appointed a day in the which He
   will judge the world in righteousness.' Judgment faithfully preached is
   the preparation for preaching that there is no condemnation to them
   which are in Christ Jesus.' If we trust in that great Saviour, we shall
   be quickened from the death of sin, and so shall not be food for the
   vultures of judgment. Can these corpses live? Can this eating
   putrescence, which burrows its foul way through our souls, be
   sweetened? Is there any antiseptic for it? Yes, blessed be God, and the
   hand whose touch healed the leper will heal us, and our flesh will come
   again as the flesh of a little child.' Christ has bared His breast to
   the divine judgments against sin, and if by faith we shelter ourselves
   in Him, we shall never know the terrors of that awful day.

   Be sure that judgment to come is no mere figure dressed up to frighten
   children, nor the product of blind superstition, but that it is the
   inevitable issue of the righteousness of the All-ruling God. You and I
   and all the sons of men have to face it. Herein is our love made
   perfect, that we may have boldness before Him in the Day of Judgment.'
   Betake yourselves, as poor sinful creatures who know something of the
   corruption of your own hearts, to that dear Christ who has died on the
   Cross for you, and all that is obnoxious to the divine judgments will,
   by His transforming life breathed into you, be taken out of your
   hearts; and when that day of the Lord' shall dawn, you, trusting in the
   sacrifice of Him who is your Judge, will have a song as when a holy
   solemnity is kept.' Take Christ for your Saviour, and then, when the
   vultures of judgment, with their mighty black pinions, are wheeling and
   circling in the sky, ready to pounce upon their prey, He will gather
   you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,' and beneath their
   shadow you will be safe.
     __________________________________________________________________

WATCHING FOR THE KING

   Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. 43. But
   know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the
   thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered
   his house to be broken up. 44. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such
   an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh. 45. Who then is a
   faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made ruler over his
   household, to give them meat in due season! 46. Blessed is that
   servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. 47. Verily I
   say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his goods. 48. But
   and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord delayeth his
   coming; 49. And shall begin to smite his fellow- servants, and to eat
   and drink with the drunken; 50. The lord of that servant shall come in
   a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware
   of, 51. And shall out him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the
   hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'--MATT. xxiv.
   42-51.

   The long day's work was nearly done. Christ had left the temple, never
   to return. He took His way across the Mount of Olives to Bethany, and
   was stayed by the disciples' question as to the date of the destruction
   of the temple, which He had foretold, and of the end of the world,'
   which they attached to it. They could not fancy the world lasting
   without the temple! We often make a like mistake. So there, on the
   hillside, looking across to the city lying in the sad, fading evening
   light, He spoke the prophecies of this chapter, which begin with the
   destruction of Jerusalem, and insensibly merge into the final coming of
   the Son of Man, of which that was a prelude and a type. The difficulty
   of accurately apportioning the details of this prophecy to the future
   events which fulfil them is common to it with all prophecy, of which it
   is a characteristic to blend events which, in the fulfilment, are far
   apart. From the mountain top, the eye travels over great stretches of
   country, but does not see the gorges, separating points which seem
   close together, foreshortened by distance.

   There are many comings of the Son of Man before His final coming for
   final judgment, and the nearer and smaller ones are themselves
   prophecies. So, we do not need to settle the chronology of unfulfilled
   prophecy in order to get the full benefit of Christ's teachings here.
   In its moral and spiritual effect on us, the uncertainty of the time of
   our going to Christ is nearly identical with the uncertainty of the
   time of His coming to us.

   I. The command of watchfulness enforced by our ignorance of the time of
   His coming (vs. 42-44). The two commands at the beginning and end of
   the paragraph are not quite the same. Be ye ready' is the consequence
   of watchfulness. Nor are the two appended reasons the same; for the
   first command is grounded on His coming at a day when ye know not,' and
   the second on His coming in an hour that ye think not,' that is to say,
   it not only is uncertain, but unexpected and surprising. There may also
   be a difference worth noting in the different designations of Christ as
   your Lord,' standing in a special relation to you, and as the Son of
   Man,' of kindred with all men, and their Judge. What is this
   watchfulness'? It is literally wakefulness. We are beset by perpetual
   temptations to sleep, to spiritual drowsiness and torpor. An opium sky
   rains down soporifics.' And without continual effort, our perception of
   the unseen realities and our alertness for service will be lulled to
   sleep. The religion of multitudes is a sleepy religion. Further, it is
   a vivid and ever-present conviction of His certain coming, and
   consequently a habitual realising of the transience of the existing
   order of things, and of the fast-approaching realities of the future.
   Further, it is the keeping of our minds in an attitude of expectation
   and desire, our eyes ever travelling to the dim distance to mark the
   far-off shining of His coming. What a miserable contrast to this is the
   temper of professing Christendom as a whole! It is swallowed up in the
   present, wide awake to interests and hopes belonging to this bank and
   shoal of time,' but sunk in slumber as to that great future, or, if
   ever the thought of it intrudes, shrinking, rather than desire,
   accompanies it, and it is soon hustled out of mind.

   Christ bases His command on our ignorance of the time of His coming. It
   was no part of His purpose in this prophecy to remove that ignorance,
   and no calculations of the chronology of unfulfilled predictions have
   pierced the darkness. It was His purpose that from generation to
   generation His servants should be kept in the attitude of expectation,
   as of an event that may come at any time and must come at some time.
   The parallel uncertainty of the time of death, though not what is meant
   here, serves the same moral end if rightly used, and the fact of death
   is exposed to the same danger of being neglected because of the very
   uncertainty, which ought to be one chief reason for keeping it ever in
   view. Any future event, which combines these two things, absolute
   certainty that it will happen, and utter uncertainty when it will
   happen, ought to have power to insist on being remembered, at least,
   till it was prepared for, and would have it, if men were not such
   fools. Christ's coming would be oftener contemplated if it were more
   welcome. But what sort of a servant is he, who has no glow of gladness
   at the thought of meeting his lord? True Christians are all them that
   have loved His appearing.'

   The illustrative example which separates these two commands is
   remarkable. The householder's ignorance of the time when the thief
   would come is the reason why he does not watch. He cannot keep awake
   all night, and every night, to be ready for him; so he has to go to
   sleep, and is robbed. But our ignorance is a reason for wakefulness,
   because we can keep awake all the night of life. The householder
   watches to prevent, but we to share in, that for which the watch is
   kept. The figure of the thief is chosen to illustrate the one point of
   the unexpected stealthy approach. But is there not deep truth in it, to
   the effect that Christ's coming is like that of a robber to those who
   are asleep, depriving them of earthly treasures? The word rendered
   broken up' means literally dug through,' and points to a clay or mud
   house, common in the East, which is entered, not by bursting open doors
   or windows, but by digging through the wall. Death comes to men sunk in
   spiritual slumber, to strip them of good which they would fain keep,
   and makes his entrance by a breach in the earthly house of this
   tabernacle. So St. Paul, in his earliest Epistle, refers to this saying
   (a proof of the early diffusion of the gospel narrative), and says, Ye,
   brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a
   thief.'

   II. The picture and reward of watchfulness. The general exhortation to
   watch is followed by a pair of contrasted parable portraits, primarily
   applicable to the apostles and to those set over His household.' But if
   we remember what Christ taught as the condition of pre-eminence in His
   kingdom, we shall not confine their application to an order.


     The least flower with a brimming cup may stand,

     And share its dew-drop with another near,'

   and the most slenderly endowed Christian has some crumb of the bread of
   life intrusted to him to dispense. It is to be observed that
   watchfulness is not mentioned in this portraiture of the faithful
   servant. It is presupposed as the basis and motive of his service. So
   we learn the double lesson that the attitude of continual outlook for
   the Lord is needed, if we are to discharge the tasks which He has set
   us, and that the true effect of watchfulness is to harness us to the
   car of duty. Many other motives actuate Christian faithfulness, but all
   are reinforced by this, and where it is feeble they are more or less
   inoperative. We cannot afford to lose its influence. A Church or a soul
   which has ceased to be looking for Him will have let all its tasks drop
   from its drowsy hands, and will feel the power of other constraining
   motives of Christian service but faintly, as in a half-dream.

   On the other hand, true waiting for Him is best expressed in the quiet
   discharge of accustomed and appointed tasks. The right place for the
   servant to be found, when the Lord comes, is so doing' as He commands,
   however secular the task may be. That was a wise judge who, when sudden
   darkness came on, and people thought the end of the world was at hand,
   said, Bring lights, and let us go on with the case. We cannot be better
   employed, if the end has come, than in doing our duty.' Flighty
   impatience of common tasks is not watching for the King, as Paul had to
   teach the Thessalonians, who were shaken' in mind by the thought of the
   day of the Lord; but the proper attitude of the watchers is that ye
   study to be quiet, and to do your own business.'

   Observe, further, the interrogative form of the parable. The question
   is the sharp point which gives penetrating power, and suggests Christ's
   high estimate of the worth and difficulty of such conduct, and sets us
   to ask for ourselves, Lord, is it I?' The servant is faithful' inasmuch
   as he does his Lord's will, and rightly uses the goods intrusted to
   him, and wise' inasmuch as he is faithful.' For a single-hearted
   devotion to Christ is the parent of insight into duty, and the best
   guide to conduct; and whoever seeks only to be true to his Lord in the
   use of his gifts and possessions, will not lack prudence to guide him
   in giving to each his food, and that in due season. The two
   characteristics are connected in another way also; for, if the outcome
   of faithfulness be taken into account, its wisdom is plain, and he who
   has been faithful even unto death will be seen to have been wise though
   he gave up all, when the crown of eternal life sparkles on his
   forehead. Such faithfulness and wisdom (which are at bottom but two
   names for one course of conduct) find their motive in that
   watchfulness, which works as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye, and as
   ever keeping in view His coming, and the rendering of account to Him.

   The reward of the faithful servant is stated in language similar to
   that of the parable of the talents. Faithfulness in a narrower sphere
   leads to a wider. The reward for true work is more work, of nobler sort
   and on a grander scale. That is true for earth and for heaven. If we do
   His will here, we shall one day exchange the subordinate place of the
   steward for the authority of the ruler, and the toil of the servant for
   the joy of the Lord.' The soul that is joined to Christ and is one in
   will with Him has all things for its servants; and he who uses all
   things for his own and his brethren's highest good is lord of them all,
   while he walks amid the shadows of time, and will be lifted to loftier
   dominion over a grander world when he passes hence.

   III. The picture and doom of the unwatchful servant. This portrait
   presupposes that a long period will elapse before Christ comes. The
   secret thought of the evil servant is the thought of a time far down
   the ages from the moment of our Lord's speaking. It would take
   centuries for such a temper to be developed in the Church. What is the
   temper? A secret dismissal of the anticipation of the Lord's return,
   and that not merely because He has been long in coming, but as thinking
   that He has broken His word, and has not come when He said that He
   would. This unspoken dimming over of the expectation and unconfessed
   doubt of the firmness of the promise, is the natural product of the
   long time of apparent delay which the Church has had to encounter. It
   will cloud and depress the religion of later ages, unless there be
   constant effort to resist the tendency and to keep awake. The first
   generations were all aflame with the glad hope Maranatha'--The Lord is
   at hand.' Their successors gradually lost that keenness of expectation,
   and at most cried, Will not He come soon?' Their successors saw the
   starry hope through thickening mists of years; and now it scarcely
   shines for many, or at least is but a dim point, when it should blaze
   as a sun.

   He was an evil' servant who said so in his heart. He was evil because
   he said it, and he said it because he was evil; for the yielding to sin
   and the withdrawal of love from Jesus dim the desire for His coming,
   and make the whisper that He delays, a hope; while, on the other hand,
   the hope that He delays helps to open the sluices, and let sin flood
   the life. So an outburst of cruel masterfulness and of riotous
   sensuality is the consequence of the dimmed expectation. There would
   have been no usurpation of authority over Christ's heritage by priest
   or pope, or any other, if that hope had not become faint. If professing
   Christians lived with the great white throne and the heavens and earth
   fleeing away before Him that sits on it, ever burning before their
   inward eye, how could they wallow amid the mire of animal indulgence?
   The corruptions of the Church, especially of its official members, are
   traced with sad and prescient hand in these foreboding words, which are
   none the less a prophecy because cast by His forbearing gentleness into
   the milder form of a supposition.

   The dreadful doom of the unwatchful servant is couched in terms of
   awful severity. The cruel punishment of sawing asunder, which,
   tradition says, was suffered by Isaiah and was not unfamiliar in old
   times, is his. What concealed terror of retribution it signifies we do
   not know. Perhaps it points to a fate in which a man shall be, as it
   were, parted into two, each at enmity with the other. Perhaps it
   implies a retribution in kind for his sin, which consisted, as the next
   clause implies, in hypocrisy, which is the sundering in twain of inward
   conviction and practice, and is to be avenged by a like but worse
   rending apart of conscience and will. At all events, it shadows a
   fearful retribution, which is not extinction, inasmuch as, in the next
   clause, we read that his portion--his lot, or that condition which
   belongs to him by virtue of his character--is with the hypocrites.' He
   was one of them, because, while he said my lord,' he had ceased to love
   and obey, having ceased to desire and expect; and therefore whatever is
   their fate shall be his, even to the dividing asunder of soul and
   spirit,' and setting eternal discord among the thoughts and intents of
   the heart. That is not the punishment of unwatchfulness, but of what
   unwatchfulness leads to, if unawakened. Let these words of the King
   ring an alarum for us all, and rouse our sleepy souls to watch, as
   becomes the children of the day.
     __________________________________________________________________

THE WAITING MAIDENS

   Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which
   took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom. 2. And five of
   them were wise, and five were foolish. 3. They that were foolish took
   their lamps, and took no oil with them: 4. But the wise took oil in
   their vessels with their lamps. 5. While the bridegroom tarried, they
   all slumbered and slept. 6. And at midnight there was a cry made,
   Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him. 7. Then all those
   virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps. 8. And the foolish said unto
   the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out. 9. But the
   wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you:
   but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves. 10. And
   while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready
   went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut. 11 Afterward
   came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us. 12. But he
   answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not. 13. Watch
   therefore; for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of
   Man cometh.'--MATT. xxv. 1-13.

   We shall best understand this beautiful but difficult parable if we
   look on to its close. Our Lord appends to it the refrain of all this
   context, the exhortation to watch, based upon our ignorance of the time
   of His coming. But as in the former little parable of the wise servant
   it was his faithful, wise dispensing of his lord's goods, and not his
   watchfulness, which was the point of the eulogium passed on him, so
   here it is the readiness of the wise virgins to take their places in
   the wedding march which is commended. That readiness consists in their
   having their lamps burning and their oil in store. This, then, is the
   main thing in the parable. It is an exhibition, under another aspect,
   of what constitutes fitness for entrance into the festal chamber of the
   bridegroom, which had just been set forth as consisting in faithful
   stewardship. Here it is presented as being the possession of lamp and
   oil.

   I. The first consideration, then, must be, What is the meaning of these
   emblems? A great deal of fine-spun ingenuity has been expended on
   subordinate points in the parable, such as the significance of the
   number of maidens, the conclusions from the equal division into wise
   and foolish, the place from which they came to meet the bridegroom, the
   point in the marriage procession where they are supposed to join it,
   whether it was at going to fetch the bride, or at coming back with her;
   whether the feast is held in her house, or in his, and so on. But all
   these are unimportant questions, and as Christ has left them in the
   background, we only destroy the perspective by dragging them into the
   front. In no parable is it more important than in this to restrain the
   temptation to run out analogies into their last results. The
   remembrance that the virgins, as the emblem of the whole body of the
   visible Church, are the same as the bride, who does not appear in the
   parable, might warn against such an error. They were ten, as being the
   usual number for such a company, or as being the round number naturally
   employed when definiteness was not sought. They were divided equally,
   not because our Lord desired to tell, but because He wished to leave
   unnoticed, the numerical proportion of the two classes. One set are
   wise' and the other foolish,' because He wishes to show not only the
   sin, but the absurdity, of unreadiness, and to teach us that true
   wisdom is not of the head only, but far more of the heart. The conduct
   of the two groups of maidens is looked at from the prudent and
   common-sense standpoint, and the provident action of the one sets in
   relief the reckless stupidity of the other.

   There have been many opinions as to the meaning of the lamps and the
   oil, which it is needless to repeat. Surely the analogy of scriptural
   symbolism is our best guide. If we follow it, we get a meaning which
   perfectly suits the emblems and the whole parable. In the Sermon on the
   Mount, our Lord uses the same figure of the lamp, and explains it: Let
   your light shine before men, that they may see your good works.'

   II. Note the sleep of all the virgins. No blame is hinted on account of
   it. It is not inconsistent with the wisdom of the wise, nor does it
   interfere with their readiness to meet the bridegroom. It is, then,
   such a sleep as is compatible with watching. Our Lord's introduction of
   this point is an example of His merciful allowance for our weakness.
   There must be a certain slackening of the tension of expectation when
   the bridegroom tarries. Centuries of delay cannot but modify the
   attitude of the waiting Church, and Jesus here implies that there will
   be a long stretch of time before His advent, during which all His
   people will feel the natural effect of the deferring of hope. But the
   sleep which He permits, unblamed, is light, and such as one takes by
   snatches when waiting to be called. He does not ask us always to be on
   tiptoe of expectation, nor to refuse the teaching of experience; but
   counts that we have watched aright, if we wake from our light slumbers
   when the cry is heard, and have our lamps lit, ready for the
   procession.

   III. Then comes the midnight cry and the waking of the maidens. The
   hour, of night's black arch the keystone,' suggests the unexpectedness
   of His coming; the loudness of the cry, its all-awaking effect; the
   broken words of the true reading, Behold the bridegroom!' the closeness
   on the heels of the heralds with which the procession flashes through
   the darkness. The virgins had gone forth to meet him' at the beginning
   of the parable, but the going forth to which they are now summoned is
   not the same. The Christian soul goes forth once when, at the beginning
   of its Christian life, it forsakes the world to wait for and on Christ,
   and again, when it leaves the world to pass with Him into the banquet.
   Life is the slumber from which some are awaked by the voice of death,
   and some who remain' shall be awaked by the trumpet of judgment. There
   is no interval between the cry and the appearance of the bridegroom;
   only a moment to rouse themselves, to look to their lamps, and to speak
   the hurried words of the foolish and the answer of the wise, and then
   the procession is upon them. It is all done as in a flash, in a moment,
   in the twinkling of an eye.' This impression of swiftness, which leaves
   no time for delayed preparation, is the uniform impression conveyed by
   all the Scripture references to the coming of the Lord. The swoop of
   the eagle, the fierce blaze of lightning from one side of the sky to
   the other, the bursting of the flood, that morning's work at Sodom, not
   begun till dawn and finished before the sun was risen on the earth,'
   are its types. Foolish indeed to postpone preparation till that moment
   when cry and coming are simultaneous, like lightning and thunder right
   overhead!

   The foolish virgins' imploring request and its answer are not to be
   pressed, as if they meant more than to set forth the hopelessness of
   then attempting to procure the wanting oil, and especially the
   hopelessness of attempting to get it from one's fellows. There is a
   world of suppressed terror and surprise in that cry, Our lamps are
   going out.' Note that they burned till the bridegroom came, and then,
   like the magic lamps in old legends, at his approach shivered into
   darkness. Is not that true of the formal, outward religion, which
   survives everything but contact with His all-seeing eye and perfect
   judgment? These foolish maidens were as much astonished as alarmed at
   seeing their lights flicker down to extinction; and it is possible for
   professing Christians to live a lifetime, and never to be found out
   either by themselves or by anybody else. But if there has been no oil
   in the lamp, it will be quenched when He appears. The atmosphere that
   surrounds His throne acts like oxygen on the oil-fed flame, and like
   carbonic acid gas on the other.

   The answer of the wise is not selfishness. It is not from our fellows,
   however bright their lamps, that we can ever get that inward grace.
   None of them has more than suffices for his own needs, nor can any give
   it to another. It may be bought, on the same terms as the pearl of
   great price was bought, without money'; but the market is closed, as on
   a holiday, on the day of the king's son's marriage. That is not touched
   upon here, except in so far as it is hinted at in the absence of the
   foolish when he enters the banqueting chamber, and in their fruitless
   prayer. They had no time to get the oil before he came, and they had
   not got it when they returned. The lesson is plain. We can only get the
   new life of the Spirit, which will make our lives a light, from God;
   and we can get it now, not then.

   IV. We see the wise virgins within and the foolish without. They are,
   indeed, no longer designated by these adjectives, but as ready' and the
   others'; for preparedness is fitness, and they who are found of Him in
   possession of the outward righteousness and of its inward source, His
   own divine life in them, are prepared. To such the gates of the festal
   chamber fly open. In that day, place is the outcome of character, and
   it is equally impossible for the ready' to be shut out, and for the
   others' to go in.

   When the bridegroom with his feastful friends passes to bliss at the
   mid hour of night,' they who have filled their odorous lamps with deeds
   of light' have surely gained their entrance.' There is silence as to
   the unspeakable joys of the wedding feast. Some faint sounds of music
   and dancing, some gleams from the lighted windows, find their way out;
   but the closed door keeps its secret, and only the guests know the
   gladness.

   That closed door means security, perpetuity, untold blessedness, but it
   means exclusion too. The piteous reiterated call of the shut-out
   maidens, roused too late, and so suddenly, from songs and laughter to
   vain cries, evokes a stern answer, through which shines the awful
   reality veiled in the parable. We do not need to regard the prayer for
   entrance, and its refusal, as conveying more than the fruitlessness of
   wishes for entrance then, when unaccompanied with fitness to enter.
   Such desire as is expressed in this passionate beating at the closed
   door, with hoarse entreaties, is not fitness. If it were, the door
   would open; and the reason why it does not lies in the bridegroom's
   awful answer, I know you not.' The absence of the qualification
   prevents his recognising them as his. Surely the unalleviated darkness
   of a hopeless exclusion settles down on these sad five, standing,
   huddled together, at the door, with the extinguished lamps hanging in
   their despairing hands. Too late, too late, ye cannot enter now.' The
   wedding bell has become a funeral knell. They were not the enemies of
   the bridegroom, they thought themselves his friends. They let life ebb
   without securing the one thing needful, and the neglect was
   irremediable. There is a tragedy underlying many a life of outward
   religiousness and inward emptiness, and a dreadful discovery will flare
   in upon such, when they have to say to themselves,


     This might have been once,

     And we missed it, lost it for ever.'
     __________________________________________________________________

DYING LAMPS

   Our lamps are gone out.'--MATT. xxv. 8.

   This is one of the many cases in which the Revised Version, by accuracy
   of rendering the tense of a verb, gives a much more striking as well as
   correct reproduction of the original than the Authorised Version does.
   The former reads going out,' instead of gone out,' a rendering which
   the Old Version has, unfortunately, relegated to the margin. It is
   clearly to be preferred, not only because it more correctly represents
   the Greek, but because it sets before us a more solemn and impressive
   picture of the precise time at which the terrible discovery was made by
   the foolish five. They woke from their sleep, and hastily trimmed their
   lamps. These burned brightly for a moment, and then began to flicker
   and die down. The extinction of their light was not the act of a
   moment, but was a gradual process, which had advanced in some degree
   before it attracted the attention of the bearers of the lamps. At last
   it roused the half-sleeping five into startled, wide-awake
   consciousness. There is a tone of alarm and fear in their sudden
   exclamation, Our lamps are going out.' They see now the catastrophe
   that threatens, and understand that the only means of averting it is to
   replenish the empty oil-vessels before the flame has quite expired. But
   their knowledge and their dread were alike too late, and, as they went
   on their hopeless search for some one to give them what they once might
   have had in abundance, the last faint flicker ceased, and they had to
   grope their way in the dark, with their lightless lamps hanging useless
   in their slack hands, while far off the torches of the bridal
   procession, in which they might have had a part, flashed through the
   night. We have nothing to do with the tragical issue of the process of
   extinction; but solemn lessons of universal application gather round
   the picture of that process, as represented in our text, and to these
   we turn now.

   I. We must settle the meaning of the oil and the lamps.

   The Old Testament symbolism is our best guide as to the significance of
   the oil. Throughout it, oil symbolises the divine influences that come
   down on men appointed by God to their several functions, and which are
   there traced to the Spirit of the Lord. So the priests were set apart
   by unction with the holy oil; so Samuel poured oil on the black locks
   of Saul. So, too, the very name Messiah means anointed,' and the great
   prophecy, which Jesus claimed for His own in His first sermon in the
   synagogue at Nazareth, put into the Messiah's