EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D. , Litt. D. ST. MATTHEW _Chaps. IX to XXVIII_ EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D. , Litt. D. ST. MATTHEW _Chaps. IX to XVII_ 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) CHRIST'S ENCOURAGEMENTS 'Son, be of good cheer. '--MATT. Ix. 2. This word of encouragement, which exhorts to both cheerfulness andcourage, is often upon Christ's lips. It is only once employed inthe Gospels by any other than He. If we throw together the variousinstances in which He thus speaks, we may get a somewhat strikingview of the hindrances to such a temper of bold, buoyant cheerfulnesswhich the world presents, and of the means for securing it whichChrist provides. But before I consider these individually, let me point you to thisthought, 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 andtempers and dispositions, than we often are willing to acknowledge toourselves. Our 'low' times--when we fret and are dull, and all thingsseem 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 ourown imperfect Christianity as the response of our feelings to externalcircumstances. It is by no means an unnecessary reminder for us, whohave heavy tasks set us, which often seem too heavy, and are surrounded, as we all are, with crowding temptations to be bitter and melancholyand 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 thatJesus Christ never tells people to cheer up without giving themreason to do so. We shall see presently that in all cases where thewords occur they are immediately followed by words or deeds of Hiswhich hold forth something on which, if the hearer's faith lay hold, darkness and gloom will fly like morning mists before the risingsun. The world comes to us and says, in the midst of our sorrows andour difficulties, 'Be of good cheer, ' and says it in vain, andgenerally only rubs salt into the sore by saying it. Jesus Christnever thus vainly preaches the duty of encouraging ourselves withoutgiving us ample reasons for the cheerfulness which He enjoins. With these two remarks to begin with--that we ought to make it apart of our Christian discipline of ourselves to seek to cultivate acontinuous and equable temperament of calm, courageous good cheer;and that Jesus Christ never commands such a temper without showingcause for our obedience--let us turn for a few moments to thevarious instances in which this expression falls from His lips. I. Now the first of them is this of my text, and from it we learnthis truth, that Christ's first contribution to our temper ofequable, courageous cheerfulness is the assurance that all our sinsare forgiven. 'Son, be of good cheer, ' said He to that poor palsied sufferer lyingthere upon the little light bed in front of Him. He had been broughtto Christ to be cured of his palsy. Our Lord seems to offer him avery irrelevant blessing when, instead of the healing of his limbs, He offers him the forgiveness of his sins. That was possibly notwhat he wanted most, certainly it was not what the friends who hadbrought him wanted for him, but Jesus knew better than they what theman suffered most from and most needed to have cured. They wouldhave 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 inkind, ' and so Christ went to the fountain-head when He said, 'Thysins be forgiven thee. ' He therein implied, not only that the manwas longing for something more than his four kindly but ignorantbearers there knew, but also that the root of his disease wasextirpated when his sins were forgiven. And so, in like manner, 'thus conscience doth make cowards of usall. ' There is nothing that so drapes a soul with darkness as eitherthe consciousness of unforgiven sin or the want of consciousness offorgiven sin. There may be plenty of superficial cheerfulness. Iknow that; and I know what the bitter wise man called it, 'thecrackling of thorns under the pot, ' which, the more they crackle, the faster they turn into powdery ash and lose all their warmth. Forstable, deep, lifelong, reliable courage and cheerfulness, theremust be thorough work made with the black spot in the heart, and theblack lines in the history. And unless our comforters can come to usand say, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee, ' they are only chatteringnonsense, and singing songs to a heavy heart which will make aneffervescence 'like vinegar on nitre, ' when they say to us, 'Be ofgood cheer. ' How can I be glad if there lie coiled in my heart thatconsciousness of alienation and disorder in my relations to God, which all men carry with them, though they overlay it and try toforget it? There is no basis for a peaceful gladness worthy of a manexcept that which digs deep down into the very secrets of the heart, and lays the first course of the building in the consciousness ofpardoned sin. 'Son, be of good cheer!' Lift up thy head. Facesmaller evils without discomposure, and with quietly throbbingpulses, for the fountain of possible terrors and calamities isstanched and stayed with, 'Thy sins are forgiven thee. ' Side by side with this first instance, illustrating the same generalthought, though from a somewhat different point of view, I may putanother of the instances in which the same phrase was soothingly on ourLord's lips. 'Daughter, ' said He to the poor woman with the issue ofblood, 'be of good cheer. Thy faith hath saved thee. ' The consciousnessof a living union with God through Christ by faith, which results inthe present possession of a real, though it may be a partial, salvation, is indispensable to the temper of equable cheerfulness of which I havebeen speaking. Apart from that consciousness, you may have plenty ofexcitement, but no lasting calm. The contrast between the drugged andeffervescent potion which the world gives as a cup of gladness, and thepure tonic which Jesus Christ administers for the same purpose, isinfinite. 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, andthe downcast face is lifted up, and all things around change, as whenthe sunshine comes out on the wintry landscape, and the very snowsparkles into diamonds. So much, then, for the first of the instancesof the use of this phrase. II. We now take a second. Jesus Christ ministers to us cheerfulcourage because He manifests Himself to us as a Companion in thestorm (Matt. Xiv. 27). The narrative is very familiar to us, so that I need not enlargeupon it. You remember the scene--our Lord alone on the mountain inprayer, the darkness coming down upon the little boat, the stormrising as the darkness fell, the wind howling down the gorges of themountains round the landlocked lake, the crew 'toiling in rowing, for the wind was contrary. ' And then, all at once, out of themysterious obscurity beneath the shadow of the hills, Something isseen moving, and it comes nearer; and the waves become solid beneaththat light and noiseless foot, as steadily nearer He comes. JesusChrist uses the billows as the pavement over which He approaches Hisservants, and the storms which beat on us are His occasion fordrawing very near. Then they think Him a spirit, and cry out withvoices that were heard amidst the howling of the tempest, and struckupon the ear of whomsoever told the Evangelist the story. They cryout with a shriek of terror--because Jesus Christ is coming to themin so strange a fashion! Have _we_ never shrieked and groaned, and passionately wept aloud for the same reason; and mistaken theLord of love and consolation for some grisly spectre? When He comesit is with the old word on His lips, 'Be of good cheer. ' 'Tell us not to be frightened when we see something stalking acrossthe waves in the darkness!' 'It is I'; surely that is enough. TheCompanion in the storm is the Calmer of the terror. He who recognisesJesus Christ as drawing near to his heart over wild billows may well'be of good cheer, ' since the storm but brings his truest treasureto 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 withquiet 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 vainto such as take Him into their lives however tempest-tossed, andinto their hearts however tremulous. III. A third instance of the occurrence of this word of cheerpresents Jesus as ministering cheerful courage to us by reason ofHis being victor in the strife with the world (John xvi. 33). 'In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; Ihave overcome the world. ' Of course 'the world' which He overcame is the whole aggregate ofthings and persons considered as separated from God, and as beingthe great Antagonist and counter power to a holy life of obedienceand filial devotion. At that last moment when, according to alloutward seeming and the estimate of things which sense would make, He was utterly and hopelessly and all but ignominiously beaten, Hesays, 'I have overcome the world. ' What! Thou! within four-and-twentyhours of Thy Cross? Is that victory? Yes! For he conquers the worldwho 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 conqueredby 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 conformityto the Father's will. Christ has conquered. What does that matter to us? Why, it mattersthis, that we may have the Spirit of Jesus Christ in our hearts tomake us also victorious in the same fight. And whosoever will layhis weakness on that strong arm, and open his emptiness to receivethe fulness of that victorious Spirit for the very spirit of hislife, will be 'more than conqueror through Him that loved us, ' andcan front all the evils, dangers, threatenings, temptations of theworld, its heaped sweets and its frowning antagonisms, with the calmconfidence that none of them are able to daunt him; and that theVictor Lord will cover his head in the day of battle and deliver himfrom every evil work. 'Be of good cheer, for I have overcome theworld, and play your parts like men in the good fight of faith; forI 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 isone in which it was spoken by Christ's voice from heaven (Actsxxiii. 11). It was the voice which was heard by the Apostle Paulafter he had been almost torn in pieces by the crowd in the Temple, and had been bestowed for security, by the half-contemptuousprotection of the Roman governor, in the castle, and was lookingonward into a very doubtful future, not knowing how many hours'purchase his life might be worth. That same night the Lord appearedto him and said, 'Be of good cheer, Paul, for as thou hast testifiedof Me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome. ' That isto say, 'No man can touch you until I let him, and nobody shall touchyou until you have done your work and spoken out your testimony. Jerusalem is a little sphere; Rome is a great one. The tools to thehand that can use them. The reward for work is more work, and workin 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 inus the quiet confidence that no matter who may thwart or hinder, nomatter what dangers or evils may seem to ring us round, the Masterwho bids us 'Be of good cheer' will give us a charmed life, andnothing shall by any means hurt us until He says to us, 'Be of goodcourage; for you have done your work; and now come and rest. ' 'Waiton the Lord. Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thineheart; wait, I say, on the Lord. ' 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 isfollowed, in this and the preceding chapter, by a similar collectionof His works of healing. These are divided into three groups, eachconsisting of three members. This miracle is the last of the secondtriad, of which the other two members are the miraculous stillingof the tempest and the casting out of the demons from the men in thecountry of the Gergesenes. One may discern a certain analogy in these three members of thiscentral group. In all of them our Lord appears as the peace-bringer. But the spheres are different. The calm which was breathed over thestormy lake is peace of a lower kind than that which filled the soulof the demoniacs when the power that made discord within had beencast out. Even that peace was lower in kind than that which broughtsweet repose in the assurance of pardon to this poor paralytic. Forgiveness speaks of a loftier blessing than even the casting outof demons. The manifestation of power and love steadily rises to aclimax. The most important part of this story, then, is not the mere healingof the disease, but the forgiveness of sins which accompanies it. And the large teaching which our Lord gives as to the relationbetween His miracles and His standing work, His ordinary work whichHe 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, towershigh above the mere miracle, which is honoured by being the signalattestation of that work. Therefore I would turn to this story now, not for the sake ofdealing with the mere miraculous event, but in order to draw theimportant lessons from it which lie upon its very surface. I. The first thought that is suggested here is that our deepest needis forgiveness. How strangely irrelevant and beside the mark, at first sight, seemsthe answer which Christ gives to the eager zeal and earnestness ofthe man and his bearers. Christ's word is 'Son, ' or as the originalmight more literally and even more tenderly be rendered, 'Child--beof good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. ' That seemed far away fromtheir want. It _was_ far from their wish, but yet it was theshortest road to its accomplishment. Christ here goes straight tothe heart of the necessity, when, passing by the disease for themoment, He speaks the great word of pardon. The palsy was probablythe result of the sufferer's vice, and probably, too, he felt, whatever may have been his friends' wishes for him, that he neededforgiveness most. Such a conclusion as to his state of mind seems afair inference from our Lord's words to him, for Christ would neverhave offered forgiveness to an impenitent or indifferent heart. So we may learn that our chief and prime need is forgiveness. Amidall our clamours and hungry needs, that is our deepest. Is not aman's chief relation in this world his relation to God? Is not thatthe most important thing about all of us? If that be wrong, will noteverything 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 toevery human spirit, and that is the fact, and in some sense more orless 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 mostsuperficial observation ninety per cent. , at any rate, of man'smisery comes either from his own or from others' wrongdoing, and forthe rest, it is regarded in the eye of faith as being sorrow that isneedful because of sin, in order to discipline and to purify. Buthere stands the fact, that king and clown, philosopher and fool, menof 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 mostchiefly--that lapses from the path of rectitude, and indulgence inhabits, thoughts, feelings, and actions, which even our consciencestell us are wrong, characterise us all. Hence the profound wisdom of Christ and of His Gospel in that, whenit begins the task of healing, it does not peddle and potter on thesurface, but goes straight to the heart, with true instinct flies atthe head, like a wise physician pays little heed to secondary andunimportant symptoms, but grapples with the disease, makes the treegood, 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; andthe 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 sneersthat we often hear about Christian 'philanthropists taking tracts topeople when they want soup, ' and the like, are excessively shallowsneers, and indicate nothing more than this, that the critic hassuperficially diagnosed the disease, and is wofully wrong about theremedy. God forbid that I should say one word that would seem todepreciate the value of other forms of beneficence, or to cast doubtupon the purity of motives, or even to be lacking in admiration for theenthusiasm that fills and guides many an earnest man and woman, workingamongst the squalid vice of our great cities and of our complex andbarbarous civilisation to-day. I would recognise all their work asgood and blessed; but, oh! dear brethren, it deals with the surface, and you will have to go a great deal deeper down than ęsthetic, orintellectual, or economical, or political reformation and changesreach, before you touch the real reason why men and women aremiserable in this world. And you will only effectually cure themisery, but you certainly then will do it, when you begin where themisery begins, and deal first with sin. The true 'saviour of society'is the man that can go to his brother, and as a minister declaratoryof the divine heart can say--'Brother, be of good cheer; thy sins beforgiven thee. ' And then, after that, the palsy will go out of hislimbs, and a new nervous energy will come into them, and he willrise, take up his bed, and walk. II. Now, in the next place, notice, as coming out of this incidentbefore us, the thought that forgiveness is an exclusively divineact. There was, sitting by, with their jealous and therefore blind eyes, a whole crowd of wise men and religious formalists of the firstwater, collected together as a kind of ecclesiastical inquisitionand board of triers, as one of the other evangelists tells us, outof every corner of the land. They had no care for the dewy pity thatwas in Christ's looks, or for the nascent hope that began to swim upinto the poor, dim eye of the paralytic. But they had keen scent forheresy, and so they fastened with true feline instinct upon the onething, 'This man speaketh blasphemies. Who can forgive sins but Godalone?' Ah! if you want to get people blind as bats to the radiant beauty ofsome lofty character, and insensible as rocks to the wants of a sadhumanity, commend me to your religious formalists, whose religion ismainly a bundle of red tape tied round men's limbs to keep them fromgetting at things that they would like. These are the people whowill be as hard as the nether millstones, and utterly blind to allenthusiasm and to all goodness. But yet these Pharisees are right; perfectly right. Forgiveness_is_ an exclusively divine act. Of course. For sin has to dowith God only; vice has to do with the laws of morality; crime hasto 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 otherwith my fellows, in the last with God. And so evil considered as sincomes under God's control only, and only He against whom it has beencommitted can forgive. What is forgiveness? The sweeping aside of penalties? the shuttingup of some more or less material hell? By no means: penalties areoften left; when sins are crimes they are generally left; when sinsare vices they are always left, thank God! But in so far as sin issin, considered as being the perversion and setting wrong of myrelation to Him, its consequences, which are its penalties, areswept away by forgiveness; for forgiveness, in its essence anddeepest meaning, is neither more nor less than that the love of theperson against whom the wrong has been done shall flow out, notwithstanding the wrong. Pardon is love rising above the ice-damwhich we have piled in its course, and pouring into our hearts. When you fathers and mothers forgive your children, what does itmean? Does it not mean that your love is neither deflected norembittered any more, by reason of their wrongdoing, but pours uponthem as of old? So God's forgiveness is at bottom--'Child! there isnothing in my heart to thee, but pure and perfect love. ' We fill thesky with mists, through which the sun itself has to look like a redball of lurid fire. But it shines on the upper side of the mists allthe same, and all the time, and thins them away and scatters themutterly, and shines forth in its own brightness on the rejoicingheart. Pardon is God's love, unchecked and unembittered, granted tothe wrongdoer. And that is a divine act, and a divine act alone. Pharisees and Scribes were perfectly right. No man can forgive sinsbut God only. And I might add, though it is somewhat aside from my direct purpose, God _can_ forgive sin; which some people nowadays say isimpossible. The apparent impossibility arises only from shallow anderroneous notions of what forgiveness is. God does not--it might betoo bold to say God cannot, if we believe in miracles--but as amatter of fact, God does not, usually interfere to hinder men fromreaping, as regards this life, what they have sown. But as I say, that is not forgiveness; and is there any reason conceivable why itshould be impossible for the divine love to pour down upon a sinfulman who has forsaken his sin, and is trusting in God's mercy inChrist, just as if his sin was non-existent, in so far as it couldcondition 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 vaguetrust in a vague God and a vague mercy is not enough to still theconscience that has once been stung into action. My brothers, youwant neither priests nor ceremonies on the one hand, nor a mereperadventure of 'Oh! God is merciful!' on the other, in order to dealwith that deepest need of your heart. Nothing but the King's ownsign-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 actualcontact with Him, and hear, somehow, with infallible certitude, asfrom His own lips, the assurance of forgiveness, there is not enoughfor our needs. III. So I come to say, in the next place, that the incident beforeus teaches us that Jesus Christ claims and exercises this divineprerogative 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 aman, like us, standing in the same relation to the divine pardon thatother teachers, saints, and prophets have stood, and had nothing moreto 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'srelation to the divine forgiveness was nothing more than ministerialand declaratory, why, in the name, not of common sense only, but ofveracity, 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 orI would have done under similar circumstances, the misapprehension ofHis words: 'I use blasphemies? No! I am not speaking blasphemies. Iknow that God only can forgive sins, and I am doing no more thantelling my poor brother here that his sins are forgiven by God. ' Butthat is not His answer at all. What He says in effect is--'Yes; you arequite 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 "Thysins be forgiven thee"--far easier to say that than to say "Take up thybed and walk, " because one can verify and check the accomplishment ofthe saying in the one case, and one cannot in the other. The sentencesare equally easy to pronounce, the things are equally difficult for a_man_ to do, but the difference is that one of them can be verifiedand the other of them cannot. I will do the visible impossibility, andthen 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 itis this. We are here brought sharp up to a fork in the road. I knowthat it is not always a satisfactory way of arguing to compel a manto take one horn or other of an alternative, but it is quite fair todo go in the present case; and I would press it upon some of youwho, I think, urgently need to consider the dilemma. Either thePharisees were quite right, and Jesus Christ, the meek, the humble, the Pattern of all lowly gentleness, the Teacher whom nineteencenturies confess that they have not exhausted, was an audaciousblasphemer, or He was God manifest in the flesh. The whole contextforbids us to take these words, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee, ' asanything less than the voice of divine love wiping out the man'stransgressions; and if Jesus Christ pretended or presumed to dothat, there is no hypothesis that I know of which can save Hischaracter for the reverence of man, but that which sees in Him Godrevealed in manhood; the world's Judge, from whom the world mayreceive divine forgiveness. IV. Jesus Christ here brings visible facts into the witness-box asthe attesters of His invisible powers. Of course the miracle was such a witness in a special way, inasmuch asit and forgiveness were equally divine prerogatives and acts. I neednot dwell now upon what I have already observed in my introductoryremarks, that our Lord here teaches us the relative importance of theattesting miracle and the thing attested, and regards the miracle assubordinate to the higher and spiritual work of bringing pardon. But we may widen out this into the thought that the subsidiaryeffects of Christian faith in individuals, and of the less completeChristian faith which is diffused over society, do stand as verystrong evidences of the reality of Christ's professions and claimsto exercise this invisible power of pardon. Or, to put it into aconcrete form, and to take an illustration which may need largedeductions. --Go into a Salvation Army meeting. Admit the extravagance, the coarseness, and all the rest which we educated and superfineChristians cannot stand. But when you have blown away the froth, isthere not something left in the cup which looks uncommonly like thewine of the Kingdom? Are there not visible results of that, as ofevery earnest effort to carry the message of forgiveness to men, which create an immense presumption in favour of its reality anddivine origin? Men reclaimed, passions tamed, homes that werepandemoniums made Bethels, houses of God. Wherever Christ'sforgiving power really comes into a heart, life is beautified, ispurified, is ennobled; and secondary and material benefits follow inthe train. I claim all the difference between Christendom and Heathendom asattestation of the reality of Christ's divine and atoning work. Isay, and I believe it to be a valid and a good argument as againstmuch of the doubt of this day, 'If you seek His monument, lookaround. ' His own answer to the question, 'Art thou He that shouldcome?' is valid still: 'Go and tell John the things that ye see andhear'; the dead are raised, the deaf ears are opened; faculties thatlie dormant are quickened, and in a thousand ways the swift spiritof 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. Thisrod has budded at any rate, let the magicians do the same with theirenchantments. Now, Christian men and women, 'ye are My witnesses, ' saith the Lord. The world takes its notions of Christianity, and its belief in thepower of Christianity, a great deal more from you than it does frompreachers and apologists. _You_ are the Bibles that most menread. See to it that your lives represent worthily the redeeming andthe ennobling power of your Master. And as for the rest of you, do not waste your time trying to purifythe stream twenty miles down from the fountainhead, but go to thesource. Do not believe, brother, that your palsy, or your fever, your paralysis of will towards good, or the unwholesome ardour withwhich you are impelled to wrong, and the consequent misery andrestlessness, can ever be healed until you go to Christ--theforgiving Christ--and let Him lay His hand upon you; and from Hisown sweet and infallible lips hear the word that shall come as acharm through all your nature: 'Son, thy sins be forgiven thee. ''Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened; then shall the lame manleap as an hart';--then limitations, sorrows, miseries, will passaway, 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 thecure of the paralytic, and follow it with an account of Christ's answersto sundry cavils from Pharisees and John's disciples. No doubt, thespectacle of this new Teacher taking a publican into His circle ofdisciples, and, not content with such an outrage on all proper patrioticfeeling, following it up with scandalous companionship with the sortof people that a publican could get to accept his hospitality, sharpenedhatred and made suspicion prick its ears. Mark and Luke call thepublican Levi, he calls himself Matthew, the former being probably hisname before his discipleship, the latter, that by which he was knownthereafter. Possibly Jesus gave it him, as in the cases of Simon, andperhaps Bartholomew. But, however acquired, it superseded the old one, as the fact that it appears in the lists of the apostles in both theother evangelists and in Acts, shows. Its use here may be a trace ofa touching desire to make sure that readers, who only knew him asMatthew, should understand who this publican was. It is like the littlelikenesses of themselves, in some corner of a background, that earlypainters used to slip into a picture of Madonna and angels. There wasno 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 whomJesus honoured by His call. The condensed narrative emphasises three things, (1) his occupationwith his ordinary business when that wonderful summons thrilled hissoul; (2) the curt authoritative command, and (3) the swift obedience. As to the first, Capernaum was on a great trade route, and thecustom-house officers there would have their hands full. This one wasbusy at his work, hateful and shameful as it was in Jewish eyes, andinto that sordid atmosphere, like a flash of light into a mephiticcavern full of unclean creatures, came the transcendent mercy ofJesus' summons. There is no region of life so foul, so mean, sodespicable in men's eyes, but that the quickening Voice will enterthere. We do not need to be in temples or about sacred tasks in orderto hear it. It summons us in, and sometimes from, our daily work. Wellfor those who know whose Voice it is, and do not mistake it for someEli's! No doubt this was not the first of Matthew's knowledge of Jesus. Living in Capernaum, he would have had many opportunities of hearingHim or of Him, and his heart and conscience may have been stirred. As he sat in his 'tolbooth, ' feeling contempt and hatred poured onhim, he, no doubt, had had longings to get nearer to the One whosevoice was gentle, and His looks, love. So the call would come to himas the fulfilment of a dim hope, and it would be a joyful surpriseto know that Jesus wished to have him for a disciple as much as hewished to have Jesus for a Teacher. The ring of fire and hate withinwhich he had been imprisoned was broken, and there was One who caredto have him, and who would not shrink from his touch. In the lightof that assurance, the call became, not a summons to give anythingup, but an invitation to receive a better possession than all withwhich he was called to part. And if we saw things as they are, wouldit not always be so to us? 'Follow Me' does mean, Forsake earth andself, but it means still more: Take what is more than all. It partsfrom these because it unites to Jesus. Therefore it means gain, notdeprivation. And it condenses all rules for life into one, for tofollow Him is the sum of all duty, and yields the perfect pattern ofconduct and character, while it is also the secret of all blessedness, and the talisman that assures a man of continual progress. They whofollow are near, and will reach, Him. Of course, if His servantsfollow Him, it stands to reason that one day, 'where I am there shallalso My servants be. ' So in that command lie a sufficient guide forearth, and a sure guarantee for heaven. 'And he arose and followed Him. ' That is the only thing that we aretold of Matthew. We hear no more of him, except that he made a feastin 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 allthe world for all time, only by this one thing, that he unconditionally, immediately and joyfully obeyed Christ's call! He might have said: 'Howcan 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 postponefollowing till then. ' But he sprang up at once. He would have abundantopportunities to settle all details afterwards, but if he let thisopportunity of taking his place as a disciple pass, he might neverhave another. There are some things that are best done gradually andslowly, but obedience to Christ's call is not one of them. Promptobedience is the only safety. The psalmist knew the danger of delaywhen he said: 'I made haste and delayed not, but made haste to keep Thycommandments. ' Matthew does not tell us that _he_ made the feast, but Lukedoes. It was the natural expression of his thankfulness and joy forthe new bond. His knowledge was small, but his love was great. Howcould he honour Jesus enough? But he was a pariah in Capernaum, andthe only guests he could assemble were, like himself, outcasts from'respectable society. ' In popular estimation all publicans wereregarded without any more ado as 'sinners, ' but probably thatdesignation is here applied to disreputable folks of various kindsand degrees of shadiness, who gravitated to Matthew and his class, because, like him, they were repulsed by every one else. Evenoutcasts hunger for society, and manage to get a community of theirown, in which they find some glow of comradeship, and some defencefrom hatred and contempt. Even lepers herd together and have theirown rules of intercourse. But what a scandal in the eyes not only of Pharisees, but of all theproper people in Capernaum, Jesus' going to such a gathering ofdisreputables would be, we may estimate if we remember that they didnot know His reason, but thought that He went because He liked theatmosphere and the company. 'Like draws to like' was the conclusionsuggested, in the absence of His own explanation. The Phariseeconceived that his duty in regard to publicans and sinners was to keepas far from them as he could, and his strait-laced self-righteousnesshad never dreamed of going to them with an open heart, and trying towin them to a better life. Many so-called followers of Jesus stilltake that attitude. They gather up their skirts round them daintily, and never think that it would be liker their Lord to sweep away themud than to pick their steps through it, caring mainly to keep theirown shoes clean. The feast was probably spread in some courtyard or open space, towhich, as is the Eastern custom, uninvited spectators could haveaccess. It is quite in accordance with the usage of the times andland that the Pharisees should have been onlookers, and should havebeen able to talk to the disciples. No doubt their colloquy becameanimated, and perhaps loud, so that it could easily attract Christ'sattention. He answered for Himself, and the tone of His reply isfriendly and explanatory, as if He recognised that the questionersgenuinely wished to know 'why' He was sitting in such company. It discloses His motive, and thereby sweeps away all insinuationsthat He consorted with sinners because their company was congenial. It was precisely for the opposite reason, because He was so unlikethem. He came among these sinners as a physician; and who wonders at_his_ being beside the sick? He does not spend his days bytheir bedsides because he likes the atmosphere, but because it ishis business to make them well. Now, in that comparison, Jesuspronounces no opinion on the correctness of the Pharisees' estimateof themselves as 'righteous, ' or of publicans as sinners, but simplytakes them on their own ground. But He does make a great claim forHimself, and speaks out of His consciousness of power to heal men'sworst disease, sin. It is a tremendous assertion to make of oneself, and its greatness is enhanced by the quiet way in which it is statedas a thought familiar to Himself. What right had He to pose as thephysician for humanity, and how can such a claim be reconciled withHis being 'meek and lowly in heart'? If He Himself was one of thesick and needed healing, how can He be the healer of the rest? Ifbeing a sinful man, as we all are, He made such a claim, what becomesof 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 thepublicans to adduce the broad principle which should shape thePharisees' relation to them, as it had shaped His. Hosea had saidlong ago that God delighted more in 'mercy' than in 'sacrifice. 'Kindly helpfulness to men is better worship than exact performanceof any ritual. Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him, and imitation is the perfection of divine service. Jesus here speaksas all the prophets had spoken, and smites with a deadly stroke themechanical formalism which in every age stiffens religion intoceremonies and neglects love towards God, expressed in mercy to men. He lays bare the secret of His own life, and He thereby lays on Hisfollowers the obligation of making it the moving impulse of theirs. The great general truth is followed, as it has been preceded, by aplain statement of Jesus' own conception of His mission in theworld. 'I came, ' says He, hinting at the fact that He was before Hewas born, and that His Incarnation was His voluntary act. True, Hewas sent, and we speak of His mission, but also He 'came, ' and wespeak of His advent. 'To repentance' is omitted by the best editorsas being brought over from Luke, where it is genuine. But it is acorrect gloss on the simple word 'call, ' though 'repentance' is buta small part of that to which He summons. He calls us to repent; Hecalls us to Himself; He calls us to self-surrender; He calls us toEternal Life; He calls us to a better feast than Matthew had spread. But we must recognise that we are sinners, or we shall never realisethat 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 thesame breath find fault with Him for not fasting, but they putforward some of John's disciples to bring that fresh objection. Common hatred is a strong cement, and often holds opposites togetherfor a while. It was bad for John's followers that they should bewilling to say, 'We and the Pharisees. ' They had travelled far fromthe days when their master had called the same class a 'generationof vipers'! Their keen desire to uphold the honour of their teacher, whose light they saw paling before the younger Jesus, made themhostile to Him, and, as is usually the case, the followers were morepartisan than the leader. Religious antagonism sometimes stoops tovery strange alliances. The two questions brought together in thiscontext are noticeably alike, and noticeably different. Both ask forthe reason of conduct which they do not go the length of impugning. They seem to be desirous of enlightenment, they are really eager tocondemn. Both avoid seeming to call in question the acts of thepersons addressed, for the Pharisees interrogate the _disciples_ asto the reason for _Jesus'_ conduct, while John's disciples askfrom _Jesus_ the reason of His disciples' conduct. In both, mockrespectfulness covers lively hatred. Our Lord's first answer is as profound as it is beautiful, andveils, while it reveals, a lofty claim for Himself and a solemnforesight of His death, and lays down a great and fruitful principleas to the relations between spiritual moods and outward acts ofreligion. His speaking of Himself as 'the Bridegroom' would recallto some of His questioners, and that with a touch of shame, John'snobly humble acceptance of the subordinate place of the bridegroom'sfriend and elevation of Jesus to that of the bridegroom. But it wasnot merely a rebuking quotation from John's witness, but theexpression of His own unclouded and continual consciousness of whatHe was to humanity, and of what humanity could find in Him, as wellas 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 ofpossession, what rest of heart in trust, what dower of riches aredimly shadowed in that wonderful emblem, will never be known tillthe hour of the marriage-supper of the Lamb, when 'His bride hathmade herself ready. ' But across the light there flits a shadow. Itis but for a moment, and it meant little to the hearers, but it meantmuch to Him. For He could not look forward to winning His bridewithout seeing the grim Cross, and even athwart the brightness ofthe days of companionship with His humble friends, came the darknesson His soul, though not on theirs, of the violent end when He 'shallbe taken from them. ' The hint fell apparently on deaf ears, but itwitnesses to the continual presence in the mind of Jesus of Hissufferings and death. The certainty that He must die was not forcedon Him by the failure of His efforts as His career unfolded itself. It was no disappointment of bright earlier hopes, as is the casewith many a disillusionised reformer, who thought at the outsetthat he had only to speak and all men would listen. It was theclearly discerned goal from the first. 'The Son of Man came . .. Togive His life a ransom. ' But our Lord here lays down a broad principle, which, if applied as itwas meant to be, would lift a heavy burden of outward observance offthe Christian consciousness. Fast when you are sad; feast when you areglad. Let the disposition, the mood, the moment's circumstance, mouldyour action. There is no virtue or sanctity in observances which do notcorrespond to the inner self. What a charter of liberty is proclaimedin these quiet words! What mountains of ceremonial unreality, oppressiveto the spirit, are cast into the sea by them! How different Christendomwould have been and would be to-day, if Christians had learned thelesson of these words! The two condensed parables or extended metaphors, which follow thevindication of the disciples, carry the matter further, and lay downa principle which is intended to cover not only the question inhand, their non-observance of Jewish regulations as to fasting, butthe whole subject of the relations of the new word, which Jesus feltthat He brought, to the old system. The same consciousness of Hisunique 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 givethem new wine to drink, and He knows that what He brings is no merepatch on a worn-out system, but a new fermenting force, whichdemands fresh vehicles and modes of expression. The two metaphorstake up different aspects of one thought. To try to mend an old coatwith a bit of unshrunk cloth would only make a worse dissolution ofcontinuity, for as soon as a shower fell on it the patch wouldshrink, and, in shrinking, pull the thin pieces of the old garmentadjoining it to itself. Judaism was already 'rent' and worn too thinto be capable of repair. The only thing to be done was 'as avesture' 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 intothe world remains true, in less eminent degree, of the less acutedifferences between the Old and the New, within Christianity itself. There do come times when its externals become antiquated, worn thinand torn, and when patching is useless. Christian men, like others, constitutionally incline to conservatism or to progress, and the onetemperament needs to be warned against obstinately preserving oldclothes, and the other against eagerly insisting that they are pastmending. But a patch and a worn garment do not wholly describe the relationsof the old and the new. Freshly made wine, still fermenting, andold, stiff wine-skins which have lost their elasticity suggestfurther thoughts. Now we have to do with containing vessel _versus_contents, with a fermenting force _versus_ stiffened forms. To putthat into these will destroy both. For example, if the struggle ofthe Judaisers in the early Church had succeeded, and Christianityhad become a Jewish sect, it would have dwindled to nothing, as theJewish-minded Christians did. The wine must have bottles. Everygreat 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 containingvessel must be congruous with, and still more, it must be created by, the contained force, as there are creatures who frame their shellsto fit the convolutions of their bodies, and build them up from theirown substance. Forms are good, as long as they can stretch if need be;when they are too stiff to expand, they restrict rather than containthe wine, and if short-sighted obstinacy insists on keeping _it_ in_them_, there will be a great spill and loss of much that isprecious. 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 thelast group of this series. Those of the second group were alleffected by Christ's word. Those now to be considered are alleffected by touch. The first two are intertwined. The narrative ofthe healing of the woman is embedded in the account of the raisingof Jairus's daughter. Mark the impression of calm consciousness of power and leisurelydignity produced by Christ's having time to pause, even on such anerrand, in order to heal, by the way, the other sufferer. The fatherand the disciples would wonder at Him as He stayed His steps, and beapt to feel that priceless moments were being lost; but He knows Hisown resources, and can afford to let the child die while He healsthe woman. The one shall receive no harm by the delay, and the otherwill be blessed. Our Lord is sitting at the feast which Matthew gaveon the occasion of his call, engaged in vindicating His sharing ininnocent festivity against the cavils of the Pharisees, when thesummons to the death-bed comes to Him from the lips of the father, who breaks in on the banquet with his imploring cry. Matthew givesthe story much more summarily than the other evangelists, and doesnot distinguish, as they do, between Jairus's first words, 'at thepoint of death, and the message of her actual decease, which metthem on the way. The call of sorrow always reaches Christ's ear, andthe 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 ofmourning. How near together, in this awful life of ours, the twolie, and how thin the partition walls! Well for those whose feastsdo 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 wepass a hundred other sorrowing hearts, so close packed lie the griefsof men. This woman is a poor shrinking creature, broken down by longillness (which had lasted for the same length of time as the joyouslife of Jairus's child), made more timid by disappointed hopes ofcure, and depressed by poverty to which her many doctors had broughther. She does not venture to stop this new Rabbi-physician, as Hegoes with the church dignitary of the town to heal his daughter, butlets Him pass before she can make up her mind to go near Him; andthen 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 Matthewthrows into prominence, in his condensed narrative, the essentialpoints. Notice her real but imperfect faith. There was unquestionableconfidence in Christ's power, and very genuine desire for healing. But it was a very ignorant faith. She believes that her touch of thegarment will heal without Christ's will or knowledge, much more Hispitying love, having any part in it. She thinks that she may win herdesire furtively, and may carry it away, and He be none the wiser northe poorer for the stolen blessing. What utter, blank ignorance of Hischaracter and way of working! What gross superstition! Yes, and withalwhat a hunger of desire, what absolute assurance of confidence thatone finger-tip on His robe was enough! Therefore she had her desire, and her Healer recognised her faith as true, though blended with muchignorance of Him. Her error was very like that which many Christiansentertain with less excuse. To attach importance to external means ofgrace, rites, ordinances, sacraments, outward connection with Christianorganisations, is the very same misconception in a slightly differentform. Such error is always near us; it is especially rife in countrieswhere there has long been a visible Church. It has received strangenew vigour to-day, partly by reaction from extreme rationalism, partlyby the growing cultivation of the aesthetic faculties. It is threateningto corrupt the simplicity and spirituality of Christian worship, andneeds to be strenuously resisted. But the more we have to fightagainst it, the more do we need to remember that, along with thisclinging to the hem of the garment instead of to the heart of itsWearer, there may be a very real trust, which might shame some ofthose who profess to hold a less sensuous form of faith. Many a poorsoul clasping a crucifix clings to the Cross. Many a devout heartkneeling at mass sees through the incense-smoke the face of Christ. This woman's faith was selfish. She wanted health; she did not caremuch about the Healer. She would have been quite contented to havehad no more to do with Him, if she could only have stolen out of thecrowd cured. She would have had little gratitude to the unconsciousGiver of a stolen good. So, many a Christian life in its earlierstages is more absorbed with its own deep misery and its desire fordeliverance, than with Him. Love comes after, born of the experienceof His love. But faith precedes love, and the predominant motiveimpelling to faith at first is distinctly self-regard. That is all asit should be. The most purely self-absorbed wish to escape from themost rudely pictured hell is often the beginning of a true trust inChrist, which, in due time, will be elevated into perfect consecration. Some of our modern teachers, who are shocked at Christianity becauseit lays the foundation of the most self-denying morality in such'selfishness, ' would be none the worse for going to school to thisstory, and learning from it how a desire for nothing more than toget rid of a painful disease, started a process which turned a lifeinto a peaceful, thankful surrender of the cured self to the loveand service of the mighty Healer. Observe, next, how Christ answers the imperfect faith, and, byanswering, corrects and confirms it. Matthew omits Christ's questionas to who touched Him, the disciples' reply, and His renewedasseveration that He was conscious of power having gone forth fromHim. All these belong to the loving method by which our Lord soughtto draw forth an open acknowledgment. Womanly diffidence, enfeebledhealth, 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 conquerher shame, and tell all the truth. Strange kindness that; strangelycontrasted with His ordinary desire to avoid notoriety, and with Hisordinary tender consideration for shrinking weakness! He did it forher sake, not for His own. She is changed from timidity to courage. At one moment she stretches out her wasted finger, a tremulousinvalid; at the next, she flings herself at His feet, a confessor. He would have us testify for Him, because faith unavowed, like aplant in the dark, is apt to become pale and sickly; but ere He bidsus own His name, He pours into our hearts, in answer to our secretappeal, the health of His own life, and the blissful consciousnessof 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 goodcheer, ' and then He sets right her error: 'Thy faith'--not thyfinger--'hath made thee whole. ' There was no real connection betweenthe touch of the robe and healing; but the woman thought that therewas, and so Christ stooped to her childish thought, and allowed herto prescribe the road which His mercy should take. But He would notleave her with her error. The true means of contact between us andHim is not our outward contact with external means of grace, but thetouch of our spirits by faith. Faith is nothing in itself, and healsonly because it brings us into union with His power, which is thesole cause of our healing. Faith is the hand which receives theblessing. It may be a wasted and tremulous hand, like that whichthis woman laid lightly on His robe. But He feels its touch, thougha universe presses on Him, and He answers. Not the garment's hem, but Christ's love, is the cause of our salvation. Not an outwardcontact with it or with Him, but faith, is the condition on whichHis life, which knows no disease, pours into our souls. The hand ofmy faith lifted to Him will receive into its empty palm and claspingfingers the special blessing for my special wants. The other evangelists tell us that, at the moment of His words tothe woman, the messengers came bearing tidings of the child's death. How Jairus must have grudged the pause! A word from Christ, like thepressure of His hand, heartened him. Like a river turned from itscourse for a space, to fill some empty reservoir, His love comesback to its original direction. How abundant the power and mercy, towhich such a work as that just done was but a parenthesis! Thedoleful music and the shrill shrieks of Eastern mourning, which metthem as they entered Jairus's house, disturbed the sanctity of thehour, and were in strong contrast with the majestic calmness ofJesus. Not amid venal lamentations and excited cries will He do Hiswork. He bids the noisy crowd forth with curt, almost stern, command, and therein rebukes all such hollow and tumultuous scenes, in thepresence of the stillness of death, still more where faith in Himhas robbed it of its terror, in robbing it of its perpetuity. It isstrange that believing readers should have thought that our Lord meantto say that the little girl was not really dead, but only in a swoon. The scornful laughter of the flute-players and hired mournersunderstood Him better. They knew that it was real death, as mencount death, and, as has often been the case, the laughter of Hisfoes has served to establish the truth. That was not worthy to becalled death from which the child was so soon and easily to beawaked. 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 loveHim. The euphemism is not peculiar to Christianity, but has a deepermeaning on Christian lips than when Greeks or Romans spoke of theeternal sleep. Others speak of death by any name rather than itsown, because they fear it so much. The Christian does so, because hefears it so little, --and, as a matter of fact, the use of the worddeath as meaning merely the separation of soul and body by thephysical act is exceptional in the New Testament. This name ofsleep, sanctioned thus by Christ, is the sweetest of all. It speaksof the cessation of connection with the world of sense, and 'longdisquiet merged in rest. ' It does not imply unconsciousness, for weare not unconscious when we sleep, but only unaware of externals. Itholds the promise of waking when the sun comes. So it has driven outthe ugly old name. Our tears flow less bitterly when we think of ourdear ones as 'sleeping in Jesus. ' Their bodies, like this littlechild's, are dead, but _they_ are not. They rest, conscious oftheir own blessedness and of Him 'in whom they live, and have theirbeing, ' whether they 'move' or no. Then comes the great deed. The crowd is shut out. For such a worksilence is befitting. The father and mother, with His foremost threedisciples, go with Him into the chamber. There is no effort, repeatedand gradually successful, as when Elisha raised the dead boy; nopraying, as when Peter raised Dorcas; only the touch of the hand inwhich life throbbed in fulness, and, as the other narratives record, two words, spoken strangely to, and yet more strangely heard by, thedull, cold ear of death. Their echo lingered long with Peter, andMark gives us them in the original Aramaic. But Matthew passes themby, as he seems here to have desired to emphasise the power ofChrist's touch. But touch or word, the real cause of the miraclewas 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 thecircumstances of the recipients required, and in order that they andwe might learn that He was tied to none. These miracles of raisingthe dead are three in number. Jairus's daughter is raised from herbed, just having passed away; the widow's son at Nain from his bier, having been for a little longer separated from his body; Lazarusfrom the grave, having been dead four days. A few minutes, or days, or four thousand years, are one to His power. These three are insome sense the first-fruits of the great harvest; the stars thatshone out singly before all the heaven is in a blaze. For, thoughthey died again, and so left to Him the precedence in resurrection, as in all besides, they are still prophetic of His power in the hourwhen they 'that sleep in the dust' shall awake at His voice. Blessedthey who, like this little maiden, are awakened, not only by Hisvoice, 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 thesecond in the group, because he treats the two former as so closelyconnected 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 itis the cry of these two blind men. There is something pathetic andexquisitely natural in the two being together, as is also the case inthe similar miracle, at a later period, on the outskirts of Jericho. Equal sorrows drive men together for such poor help and solace asthey can give each other. They have common experiences which isolatethem from others, and they creep close for warmth and companionship. All the blind men in the Gospels have certain resemblances. One isthat they are all sturdily persevering, as perhaps was easier forthem because they could not see the impatience of the listeners, andpossibly because, in most cases, persistent begging was their trade, and they were used to refusals. But a more important trait is theirrecognition of Jesus as 'Son of David. ' Blind as they are, they seemore than do the seeing. Thrown in upon themselves, they may havebeen led to ponder the old words, and by their affliction been mademore ready to welcome One who, if He were Messiah, was coming with aspecial blessing for them--'to open the blind eyes. ' Men who deeplydesire a good are quick to listen to the promise of its accomplishment. So these two followed Him along the road, loudly and perseveringlycalling 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 stockof power or of pity? Certainly His reason was, as it always was, theirgood. We do not know why it was better for them to have to wait, andcontinue their entreaty; but we may be quite sure that the reason forall His delays is the same, --the larger blessing which comes with theanswer when it comes, and the large blessings which may be gatheredwhile we wait its coming. Christ's question to them, when at lastthey have found their way even indoors, holds out more hope than theyhad yet received. By it, Christ established a close relation with them, and implied to them that He was willing to answer their cry. One canfancy how the poor blind faces would light up with a flush of eagerexpectation, and how swift would be the answer. The question is notcold or inquisitorial. It is more than half a promise, and a powerfulaid to the faith which it requires. There is something very beautiful and pathetic in the simple brevityof the unhesitating answer, 'Yea, Lord. ' Sincerity needs few words. Faith can put an infinite deal of meaning into a monosyllable. Theireagerness to reach the goal made their answer brief. But it wasenough. Again the hand which had clasped the maiden's palm is putout and laid gently on the useless eyes, and the great word spoken, 'According to your faith be it unto you. ' Their blindness made thetouch peculiarly fitting in their case, as bringing evidence ofsense to those who could not see the gracious pity of His looks. Theword spoken was, like that to the centurion, a declaration of thepower of faith, which determines the measure, and often the manner, of His gifts to us. The containing vessel not only settles thequantity of, but the shape assumed by, the water which is taken upin it from the sea. Faith, which keeps inside of Christ's promises(and what goes outside of them is not faith), decides how much ofChrist we shall have for our very own. He condescends to run themolten gold of His mercies into the moulds which our faith prepares. These two men, who had used their tongues so well in their persistentcry for healing, went away to make a worse use of them in tellingeverywhere of their cure. Jesus desired silence. Possibly He didnot wish His reputation as a mere worker of miracles to be spreadabroad. In all His earlier ministry He avoided publicity, singularlycontrasting therein with the evident desire to make Himself thecentre of observation which marks its close. He dreaded the smokyflame of popular excitement. His message was to individuals, not tocrowds. It was a natural impulse to tell the benefits these two hadreceived; but truer gratitude and deeper faith would have made themobey His lightest word, and have shut their mouths. We honour Christmost, not by taking our way of honouring Him, but by absolute obedience. The final miracle of the nine (or ten) marshalled in long processionin chapters viii. And ix. Is told with singular brevity. There isnothing individual in our Lord's treatment of the sufferer, as therewas in the previous healing of the two blind men, and no details aregiven 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 allthe petitions and hopes of his bearers were expressed in the act ofbringing the sufferer thither, and silently setting him there beforethese eyes of universal pity. It was enough. With Jesus, to see wasto compassionate, and to compassionate was to help. In the otherinstances of casting out demons, the method is an authoritativecommand, addressed not to the possessed, but to the alien personalitythat has seized on him, and we conclude that such was the methodhere. Jesus undoubtedly believed in demoniacal possession, if we canat all rely on the Gospel narratives; and it may be humbly suggestedthat there are dark depths in humanity, which had need to be fathomedmore completely, before any one is warranted in dogmaticallypronouncing that He was wrong in His diagnosis. There are ugly factswhich should give pause to those who are inclined to say--'There areno demons, and if there were, they could not dominate a humanconsciousness. ' But the effects of the miracle are emphasised more than itself. Theyare two, neither of them what might or should have been. The dumbman is not said to have used his recovered speech to thank hisdeliverer, nor is there any sign that he clung to Him, either forfear of being captured again or in passionate gratitude. It looks asif he selfishly bore away his blessing and cared nothing for itsgiver. That is very human, and we all are too often guilty of thesame sin. Nor was the effect on the multitudes much better, for theywere only struck with vulgar wonder, which had no moral quality init and led to nothing. They saw 'the miracle, ' that is, thewonderfulness of the act made some dint even on their minds, butthese were either too fluid to retain the impression, or too hard tolet it be deep, and so it soon filled up again. We have to think ofChrist's deeds as 'signs, ' not only as 'wonders, ' or they will dolittle to draw us to Him. Wonder is a necessarily evanescentemotion, which may indeed set something better stirring in us, butis quite as likely to die barren. The Pharisees did not wonder, and did look into the phenomenon withsharp eyes; and in so far, they were in advance of the gapingmultitudes. They were much too superior persons to be astonished atanything, and they had already settled on a formula which wasdelightfully easy of application, and had the further advantage ofturning the miracles into evidences that the doer of them was achild of the Devil. It appears to have been a well-worked formulatoo, for it is found again in chap. Xii. 24, and in Luke xi. 15, inthe account of another cure of a dumb demoniac. It is possible thatthe incident now before us may be the same as this, but there isnothing improbable in the occurrence of such a case twice, nor inthe repetition of what had become the commonplace of the Pharisaicpolemic. But what a piercing example that explanation is of theblinding power of prejudice, determined to hold on to a foregoneconclusion, and not to see the sun at noon! Jesus in league with'the prince of the devils'! And that was gravely said by religiousauthorities! They saw the loveliness of His perfect life, His gentlegoodness, His self-forgetting love, His swift-springing pity, andthey set it all down to His commerce with the Evil One. He was sogood 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 whofollowed Him from place to place, and we have here cast into a symbolthe impression produced upon Him by their outward condition. That isto say, He sees them lying there weary, and footsore, and travel-stained. They have flung themselves down by the wayside. There is no leader orguide, no Joshua or director to order their march; they are a worn-out, tired, unregulated mob, and the sight smites upon His eye, and itsmites upon His heart. He says to Himself, if I may venture to putwords into His lips, 'There are a worse weariness, and a worse wandering, and a worse anarchy, and a worse disorder afflicting men than that poormob of tired pedestrians shows. ' Matthew, who was always fond of showingthe links and connections between the Old Testament and the New, castsour Lord's impression of what He then saw into language borrowed fromthe prophecy of Ezekiel (ch. Xxxiv. ), which tells of a flock that isscattered in a dark and cloudy day, that is broken, and torn, anddriven away. I venture to see in the text three points: (1) Christteaching us how to look at men; (2) Christ teaching us how to feel atsuch a sight; and (3) Christ teaching us what to do with the feeling. 'When He saw the multitude, He was moved with compassion, because theyfainted and were scattered abroad. ' 'Then He said unto His disciples, the harvest is plenteous, the labourers are few, pray ye the Lord ofthe harvest to send forth labourers unto the harvest. ' And then therefollows, 'And when He had called unto Him His twelve disciples, He gavethem 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, veryclear and intelligible, but there may be a little difficulty as tothe precise force of the language. The obscurity of it is in somedegree reflected in the margin of our Bibles; so, perhaps, you willpermit one word of an expository nature. The description of theflock, 'Because they fainted and were scattered abroad, ' is couchedin the original in a couple of words, one of which means properly'torn' or 'fainting, ' according as one or other of two readings ofthe text is adopted, and the other means 'lying down. ' Now, theformer of these gives a very pathetic picture if we apply it to theindividuals that made up the flock. We have then the image of thepoor sheep that has lost its way, struggling through briars andthorns, getting out of them with its fleece all torn and hanging instrips dangling at its heels, or of it as lacerated by the beasts ofthe field to whom it is a prey. If we take the metaphor, as seemsmore probably to be intended, as applying not so much to theindividuals as to the flock, then it comes to mean 'torn asunder, ''thrown apart, ' and gives us the notion of anarchic confusion intowhich the flock comes if there be no shepherd to lead it. Then theother word, which our Bible translates 'were scattered abroad, 'seems to mean more properly 'lying down, ' and it gives the idea ofthe poor, wearied creature, after all its struggles and wanderings, utterly beaten and dejected, having lost its way, at its wits' endand resourceless, flinging itself down there in despair, and pantingits timid life out anywhere where it finds itself. So it comes to bea picture of the utter weariness and hopelessness of all men'sefforts apart from that Guide and Shepherd, who alone can lead themin the way. And then both of these miserable states, the lacerationif you take the one explanation, the disintegration and castingapart if you take the other, the weariness and exhaustion, aretraced to their source, they are 'as sheep having no shepherd. ' Hehas gone, and so all this comes. With this explanation we may takethe points of view that are thus suggested simply as they lie beforeus. First of all, notice how here, as always to Jesus Christ, theoutward was nothing, except as a symbol and manifestation of theinward; how the thing that He saw in a man was not the externalaccidents of circumstance or position, for His true, clear gaze andHis loving, wise heart went straight to the essence of the matter, and dealt with the man not according to what he might happen to bein the categories of earth, but to what he was in the categories ofheaven. All the same to Him whether it was some poor harlot, or arabbi; 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 werenothing; sheer away He cut them all, and went down to the hidden heartof 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 getrid of all these superficial veils and curtains with which we drapeourselves and attitudinise in the world, and to see men as Christ sawthem, both in regard to your judgment of them, and in regard to yourjudgment 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 usget below all that. The one question worth asking and worth answeringis, 'How am I affected towards Him?' There are many temporary andlocal principles of arrangement and order among men; but they willall vanish some day, and there will be one regulating and arrangingprinciple, and it is this: 'Do I love God in Jesus Christ, or do Inot?' Oh! for myself, for yourself, and for all our outlook towardsothers, let us not forget that the inmost, deepest, hidden man of theheart is the man, and that all else is naught, and that its wholecharacter is absolutely determined by its relation to Jesus Christ. But this is somewhat aside from my main purpose, which is ratherbriefly to expand the various phases which, as I have alreadysuggested, are included in such an emblem. The first of them isthis: Try to think for yourselves of the condition of humanity asapart from Christ--shepherdless. That old metaphor of a shepherdwhich comes out of the Old Testament is there sometimes used toindicate a prophet, and sometimes to indicate a king. I suppose wemay put both of these uses together, as far as our present purposesare concerned; and this is what I want to insist upon. I dare saysome people here will think it is very old-fashioned, very narrow inthese broad and liberal days; but what I would say is this, thatunless Jesus Christ is both Guide and Teacher, we have neither guidenor teacher but are shepherdless without Him. There are plenty ofrulers. There was no lack of other authority in the days of Hisflesh. There were crowds of rabbis, guides, and directors. The lifeof the nation was throttled by the authorities that had plantedthemselves upon its back, and yet Christ saw that there were none ofthose 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 havesought to impose their authority upon an era. Where is there onethat has swayed passion, that has ruled hearts, that has impressedhis own image on the will, that has made obedience an honour, andabsolute, abject devotion to his command a very patent of nobility?Here, and nowhere beside. Besides that Christ there is no ruleramongst men who can come to them and say to his servant, 'Go, ' andhe goeth, and to this man, 'Do this, ' and he doeth it. Obedience toany besides is treason against the dignity of our own nature;disobedience to Him is both treason against our nature and blasphemyagainst God. 'Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ, Thou art theeverlasting Son of the Father. ' _There_ is the deepest reasonfor His rule. And as for 'teacher, ' whom are we to put up beside Him? Is it to bethese dim figures of religious reformers that are gliding, ghostlike, to their doom, being wrapped round and round about byever thicker and thicker folds of the inevitable oblivion thatswallows all that is human? Brethren, by common consent it is Christor nobody. Aaron dies upon Hor; Moses dies upon Pisgah; theteachers, the leaders, the guides, the under-shepherds, pass awayone by one; and if this Christ be but a Man and a Teacher, He toowill pass away. Shall I be thought very blind to the signs of thetimes if I say that I see no sign of His dominion being exhausted, of His influence being diminished, of His guidance being capable ofbeing dispensed with? You may say, 'Oh, we do not want any teacheror guide; we do not want a shepherd. ' I am not going to enter uponthat question now at all, except just to say this, that the instinctsof humanity rise up in contradiction, as it seems to me, of that coldand cheerless creed, and that we have this fact staring us in theface, that men are made capable of a devotion and submission themost passionate, the most absolute, the most mighty force in theirlives, to human guides and ensamples, and that it is all wasted unlessthere 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 GoodShepherd; follow Me, and ye shall not walk in darkness, ' 'He saw themultitudes as sheep having no shepherd. ' Still further, take that other phase of the metaphor which, as Isuggested, the text includes, namely, the idea of disintegration, the rending apart of social ties and union, unless there be thecentre of unity in the shepherd of the flock. 'I will smite theshepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered, ' says the old prophecy. Of course, for what is there to hold them together unless it betheir guide and their director? So we are brought face to face withthis plain prosaic rendering of the metaphor--that but for the centreof unity provided for mankind in the person and work of Jesus Christ, there is no satisfaction of the deep hunger for unity and societywith which in that case God would have cursed mankind. For whilstthere are many other bonds most true, most blessed, God-given, andmighty, such as that of the sacred unity of the family, and that ofthe nation and many others of which we need not speak, yet all theseare constantly being disintegrated by the unresting waves of thatgnawing sea of selfishness, if I may so say, which, like the watersupon our eastern coasts, eats and eats for ever at the base of thecliffs, so that society in all its forms, whether it be built uponidentity of opinion, which is perhaps the shabbiest bond of all, orwhether it be built upon purposes of mutual action, which is a greatdeal better, or whether it be built upon hatred of other people, which is the modern form of patriotism, or whether it be built uponthe domestic affections, which are the purest and highest of all--allthe other bonds of society, such as creeds, schools, nations, associations, leagues, families, denominations, all go sooner orlater. The base is eaten out of them, because every man that belongsto them has in him that tyrannous, dominant self, which is everseeking to assert its own supremacy. Here is Babel, with itshalf-finished tower, built on slime; and there is Pentecost, withits great Spirit; here is the confusion, there is the unifying; herethe disintegration, there the power that draws them all together. 'They were scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd, ' and onelooks out over the world and sees great tracts of country and longdismal generations of time, in which the very thought of unity andcharity and human bonds knitting men together has faded from theconsciousness 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 ofunion that shall never be broken, and is all the more precious andall the more true because it is not a unity like the vulgar unitiesthat express themselves in external associations. You know, ofcourse or if you do not know it will be a good thing that you shouldknow, that that verse in John's Gospel which I have quoted has beenterribly mangled by a little slip of our translators. Christ said, 'Other sheep I must bring which are not of this fold, ' the foldbeing the external unity of the Jewish church--an enclosure made ofhurdles that you can stick in the ground. 'I shall bring them, ' saysHe, 'and there shall be one'--(not, as our Bible says, 'fold, '--butsomething far better)--'there shall be one flock'; which becomes aunity not by wattling round about it on the outside, but by ashepherd standing in the middle. 'There shall be one flock and oneshepherd'--a unity which is neither the destruction of the variety ofthe churches, nor the crushing of men, nationalities, and types ofcharacter 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 onlydoubtfully suggested by the words--namely, that of laceration andwounding--let me say a word about the last of the aspects ofhumanity when Christless, which is set forth in this text, and thatis, the dejected weariness arising from the fruitless wanderingswherewith men are cursed. As a verse in the Book of Proverbs putsit, 'The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, becausethey 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 allmen's souls a deep longing after peace and rest, after goodness andbeauty and truth, and that all the strenuous efforts to satisfythese longings, either by social reforms or by individual cultureand discipline, are pathetically vain and profitless, because thereis none to guide them. The sheep go wandering in any direction, andwith no goal; and wherever one has jumped, a dozen others will goafter him, and so they are wearied out long before the day's journeyis 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 humanhistory that, after any epoch of great aspirations and strongexcitement of the noblest parts of human nature, there has alwayscome a reaction of corruption and a collapse from weariness. Whatdid 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' end in? A guillotine. What doall similar epochs end in, when they do not take the Christ to marchahead of them? An utter disgust and disillusion, and a despair ofall progress. That is why wild revolutionists in their youth arealways obstinate Conservatives in their old age. The wandering sheepare footsore, and they fling themselves down by the wayside. That iswhy heathenism presents to us the aspect that it does. There isnothing about it that seems to me more tragical than the wearylanguor 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 theysit, because there is no hope in rising and moving. They would haveto grope if they arose, and so with folded hands they sit like theBuddha, which one great section of heathenism has taken as being thetrue emblem and ideal of the noblest life. Absolute passivity layshold upon them all--torpor, stagnation, no dream of advance orprogress. The sheep are dejected, despairing, anarchic, disintegrated, lacerated, guideless, and shepherdless--away from Christ. So Hethought them. God give you and me grace, dear brethren, to see, asChrist 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 secondmovement of His mind and heart here. He teaches us not only how tothink of men, but how that sight should touch us. 'He was moved with compassion on them when He saw the multitude'--withthe eye of a god, I was going to say, and the heart of a man. Pitybelongs to the idea of divinity; compassion belongs to the idea ofdivinity incarnate; and the motion that passed across His heart is themotion that I would seek may pass, with its sweet and healing breath, across yours and mine. The right emotion for a Christian looking onthe Christless crowds is pity, not aversion; pity, not anger; pity, notcuriosity; pity, not indifference. How many of us walk the streets ofthe towns in which our lot is cast, and never know one touch of thatemotion, when we look at these people here in England torn, and anarchic, and wearied, and shepherdless, within sound of our psalm-singing inour chapels? Why, on any Sunday there are thousands of men and womenstanding about the streets who, we may be sure, have not seen theinside of a church or a chapel since they were married, and that notone in five hundred of all the good people that are going with theirprayer-books and hymn-books to church and chapel ever think anythingabout them as they pass them by; and some of them, perhaps, if theycome to any especially disreputable one, will gather up their skirtsand keep on the safe side of the pavement, and there an end of it. ButJesus Christ had no aversions. His white purity was a great deal nearerto the blackness of the woman that was a sinner, than was the leprouswhiteness of the whited sepulchre of the self-righteous Pharisee. Hehad neither aversion, nor anger, nor indifference. And, if I might venture to touch upon another matter, compassion andnot curiosity is an especial lesson for the day to the more thoughtfuland cultivated amongst our congregations. I have just said that theappropriate Christian feeling in contemplating the state of the sheepwithout the Shepherd is compassion, not curiosity. That reminder isparticularly needful in view of the prominence to-day of investigationsinto the new science of Comparative Religion. I speak with mostunfeigned respect of it and of its teachers, and gratefully hail thewonderful light that it is casting upon ideas underlying the strangeand often savage and obscene rites of heathenism; but it has a side ofdanger 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 tolet such investigations be our principal occupation in the face ofheathenism. If idolatry was dead we could afford to do that, but itis alive--the more's the pity; and it is not only a curious instanceof the workings of man's intelligence, and a great apocalypse ofearlier stages of society, but, besides that, it is a lie that isdeceiving and damning our brethren, and we have got to kill it firstand dissect it afterwards. So I say, do not only think of heathenismin its various forms as a subject for speculation and analysis; asmuch as you like of that, only do not let it drive out the otherthing, and after you have tried to understand it, then come back tomy text, 'He was moved with compassion. ' And so pity, and neitheranger, nor aversion, nor curiosity, nor indifference is what I urgeas the Christian emotion. III. Let us take this text as teaching us how Christ would have usact, after such emotion built and based upon such a look. It is perfectly legitimate, although it is by no means the highestmotive, to appeal to feeling as a stimulus to action. We have aright to base our urging of Christian men and women to missionarywork either at home or abroad, upon the ground of the condition ofthe men to whom the Gospel has to be carried. I know that if takenalone it is a very inadequate motive. I believe that any failurethat may be manifest in the interest of Christian people inmissionary work is largely traceable to the blunder we have made indwelling on superficial motives more than we ought to have done, inproportion to the degree in which we have dwelt on the deepest. Wehave been gathering the surface-water instead of going right down tothe green sand, to which the artesian well must be sunk if thestream is to come up without pumping or wasting. So I say that adeeper reason than the sorrow and darkness of the heathen is--'thelove of Christ constraineth me'; but yet the first is a legitimateone. Only remember this, that Bishop Butler taught us long ago, thatif you excite emotions which are intended to lead to action, and theaction does not follow, the excitation of the emotion without itsappropriate action makes the heart a great deal harder than it wasbefore. That is why it is playing with edged tools to speak so muchto our Christian audiences, as we sometimes hear done, about thecondition of the heathen as a stimulus to missionary work. If a mandoes not respond and do something, some crust of callousness andcoldness comes over his own heart. You cannot indulge in the luxuryof emotion which you do not use to drive your spindles, withoutdoing yourselves harm. It is never intended to be blown off as wastesteam and allowed to vanish into the air. It is meant to be conservedand guided, and to have something done with it. Therefore beware ofsentimental contemplation of the sad condition of the shepherdlesssheep 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 intowhich we are to cast the emotions that should spring from this gazeupon the world. I will only name three points. Christ opened Hismouth and spake to them, and taught them many things; Christ said toHis disciples, 'Pray ye the Lord of the harvest'; and Christ sentout His apostles to preach the Kingdom. These three things in theirbearing upon us are--personal work, prayer, help to send forthChrist's messengers. There is nothing like personal work for makinga man understand and feel the miseries of his fellows. Christian menand women, it is your first business everywhere to proclaim the nameof Jesus Christ, and no prayers and no subscriptions absolve youfrom that. In this army a man cannot buy himself off and send in asubstitute at the cost of an annual guinea. If Christ sent theapostles, do you hold up the hands of the apostles' successors, andso by God's grace you and I may help on the coming of that blessedday when there shall be one flock and one Shepherd, and when 'theLamb that is in the midst of the throne'--for the Shepherd isHimself a lamb--'shall feed them and lead them, and God shall wipeaway 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 forChrist. Peter and James and John we know; the other James and Judashave possibly left us short letters; Matthew gives us a Gospel; andof all the rest no trace is left. Some of them are never so much asnamed again, except in the list at the beginning of the Acts of theApostles; and none of them except the three who 'seemed to be pillars'appear to have been of much importance in the early diffusion of theGospel. There are many instructive and interesting points in reference tothe Apostolate. The number of twelve, in obvious allusion to thetribes of Israel, proclaims the eternal certainty of the divinepromises to His people, and the dignity of the New Testament Churchas their true heir. The ties of relationship which knit so many ofthe apostles together, the order of the names varying, but withincertain limits, in the different catalogues, the uncultivatedprovincial rudeness of most of them, would all afford material forimportant reflections. But, perhaps, not the least important factabout the Apostolate is that one to which we have referred, whichlike the names of countries on the map, escapes notice because it is'writ' so 'large'--namely, the small place which the apostles as abody fill in the subsequent narrative, and the entire oblivion intowhich so many of them pass from the moment of their appointment. It is to that fact that we wish to turn attention now. It maysuggest some considerations worth pondering, and among other things, may help to show the exaggeration of the functions of the office bythe opposite extremes of priests and rationalists. The one schoolmakes it the depository of exclusive supernatural powers; the otherregards it as a master-stroke of organisation, to which the earlyrapid growth of Christianity was largely due. The facts seem to showthat it was neither. I. The first thought which this peculiar and unexpected silencesuggests is of the True Worker in the Church's progress. The way in which the New Testament drops these apostles is of a piecewith the whole tone of the Bible. Throughout, men are introduced intoits narratives and allowed to slip out with well-marked indifference. Nowhere do we get more vivid, penetrating portraiture, but nowhere dowe see such carelessness about following the fortunes or completing thebiographies 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 atMary's door in the grey of the morning, and after brief, eager talkwith his friends he vanishes to hide in 'another place, ' and is nomore heard of, except for a moment in the great council, held inJerusalem, about the admission of Gentiles to the Church. The secondof the three is killed off in a parenthesis. The third is only seentwice in the Book of the Acts, as a silent companion of Peter at amiracle and before the Sanhedrim. Remember how Paul is left in hisown hired house, within sight of trial and sentence, and neither theoriginal writer of the book nor any later hand thought it worthwhile to add three lines to tell the world what became of him. Astrange 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 habitof letting men leap upon the stage as if they had dropped from theclouds, and vanish from it as abruptly as if they had fallen througha trap-door. Such a peculiarity there is. One of the three to whom we havereferred has explained it in the words with which he closes hisgospel, words which might stand for the motto of the whole book, 'These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son ofGod. ' The true purpose is not to speak of men except in so far asthey 'bore witness to that light' and were illuminated for a momentby contact with Him. From the beginning the true 'Hero' of the Bibleis God; its theme is His self-revelation culminating for evermore inthe Man Jesus. All other men interest the writers only as they aresubsidiary or antagonistic to that revelation. As long as thatbreath blows through them they are music; else they are but commonreeds. Men are nothing except as instruments and organs of God. Heis all, and His whole fulness is in Jesus Christ. Christ is the soleworker in the progress of His Church. That is the teaching of allthe New Testament. The thought is expressed in the deepest, simplestform in His own unapproachable words, unfathomable as they are intheir depth of meaning, and inexhaustible in their power tostrengthen and to cheer: 'I am the vine, ye are the branches, without Me ye can do nothing. ' It shapes the whole treatment of thehistory of the so-called 'Acts of the Apostles, ' which by its veryfirst sentence proclaims itself to be the Acts of the ascendedJesus, 'the former treatise' being declared to have had for itssubject 'all that Jesus _began_ to do and teach while on earth, and this treatise being manifestly the continuance of the sametheme, and the record of the heavenly activity of the Lord. So thethought 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 asto that early Church. His continuous energy is pouring down on us ifwe will accept it. _In_ us, _for_ us, _by_ us He works. 'My Father workethhitherto, 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 themost energetic divine activity. He is all in all to His people. He isall their strength, wisdom, and righteousness. They are but the cloudsirradiated by the sun and bathed in its brightness; He is the lightwhich flames in their grey mist and turns it to a glory. They are butthe belts and cranks and wheels; He is the power. They are but thechannel, muddy and dry; He is the flashing life that fills it and makesit a joy. They are the body; He is the soul dwelling in every part tosave 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 ofmen, to which our human affections and our feeble faith tempt us sosorely! There _is_ One man, and One man only, whose biographyis a 'Gospel, who owes nothing to circumstances, and who originatesthe power which He wields; One who is a new beginning, and haschanged the whole current of human history, One to whom we are rightto bring offerings of the gold, and incense, and myrrh of ourhearts, and wills, and minds, which it is blasphemy and degradationto lay at the feet of any others. We may utterly love, trust, andobey Jesus Christ. We dare not do so to any other. The inscriptionwritten over the whole book, that it may be transcribed on our wholenature, is, 'No man any more save Jesus only. ' If this thought be true, what confidence it ought to give us as wethink of the tasks and fortunes of the Church! If we think only of thedifficulties and of the enormous work before us, so disproportionedto our weak powers, we shall be disposed to agree with our enemies, who talk as if Christianity was on the point of perishing, as theyhave been doing ever since it began. But the outlook is wonderfullydifferent when we take Christ into the account. We are very apt toleave Him out of the reckoning. But one man with Christ to back him isalways 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 loftyand strong, and the besiegers few and weak, badly armed, and quiteunfit 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 heartsmay leap up in assured confidence of victory as we recognise in Himthe Captain of the Lord's Host, who has already overcome, and willmake us valiant in fight and more than conquerors. When conscious of our own weakness, and tempted to think of our taskas heavy, or when complacent in our own power, and tempted to regardour task as easy, let us think of His ever-present work in and for Hispeople, till it braces us for all duty, and rebukes our easy-goingidleness. Surely from that thought of the active, ascended Christ maycome to many of His slothful followers the pleading question, as fromHis own lips, 'Dost thou not care that thou hast left me to servealone?' Surely to us all it should bring inspiration and strength, courage and confidence, deliverance from man, and elevation above thereverence of blind impersonal forces. Surely we may all lay to heartthe grand lesson that union with Him is our only strength, and oblivionof ourselves our highest wisdom. Surely he has best learned his trueplace and the worth of Jesus Christ, who abides with unmoved humilityat His feet, and, like the lonely, lowly forerunner, puts away alltemptations to self-assertion while joyfully accepting it as the lawof 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 mustdecrease!' II. This same silence of Scripture as to so many of the apostles maybe taken as suggesting what the real work of these delegated workerswas. It certainly seems very strange that, if they were the possessors ofsuch extraordinary powers as the theory of Apostolic Successionimplies, we should hear so little of these in the narratives. Thesilence of Scripture about them goes a long way to discredit suchideas, while it is entirely accordant with a more modest view of theapostolic office. What was an apostle's function during the life of Christ? One of theevangelists divides it into three portions: to be with Jesus; topreach the kingdom; to cast out devils and to heal. There is nothingin these offices peculiar to them. The seventy had miraculous powerstoo, and some at least were our Lord's companions and preachers ofHis kingdom who were simple disciples. What was an apostle'sfunction after the resurrection? Peter's words, on proposing theelection of a new apostle, lay down the duty as simply 'to bearwitness' of that resurrection. They were not supernatural channelsof mysterious grace, not lords over God's heritage, not even leadersof the Church, but bearers of a testimony to the great historicalfact, on the acceptance of which all belief in an historical Christdepended then and depends now. Each of the greater of the apostlesis penetrated with the same thought. Paul disclaims anything besidein his 'Not I, but the grace of God in me. ' Peter thrusts thequestion 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 hiscalm way, tells his children at Ephesus, 'Ye need not that any manteach you. ' Such an idea of the apostolic office is far more reasonable andaccordant with Scripture than a figment about unexampled powers andauthority in the Church. It accounts for the qualifications asstated in the same address of Peter's, which merely secure thevalidity of their testimony. The one thing that _must_ be foundin an apostle was that he should have been in familiar intercoursewith Christ during his earthly life, both before and after Hisresurrection, in order that he might be able to say, 'I knew Himwell; I know that He died; I know that He rose again; I saw Him goup to heaven. ' For such a work there was no need for men ofcommanding power. Plain, simple, honest men who had the requisiteeye-witness were sufficient. The guidance and the missionary work ofthe Church need not necessarily be in their hands, and, in fact, does not seem to have been. In harmony with this view of the officeand its requisites, we find that Paul rests the validity of hisapostolate on the fact that 'He was seen of me also, ' and regardsthat vision as his true appointment which left him not 'one whitbehind the very chiefest apostles. ' Miraculous gifts indeed theyhad, and miraculous gifts they imparted; but in both instancesothers shared these powers with them. It was no apostle who laid hishands on the blinded Saul in that house in Damascus and said, 'Receive the Holy Ghost. ' An apostle stood by passive and wonderingwhen the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In realityapostolic succession is absurd, because there is nothing to succeedto, except what cannot be transmitted, personal knowledge of thereality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. To establish that factas indubitable history is to lay the foundation of the ChristianChurch, and the eleven plain men, who did that, need nosuperstitious mist around them to magnify their greatness. In so far as any succession to them or any devolution of their officeis possible, all Christian men inherit it, for to bear witness of theliving power of the risen Lord is still the office and honour ofevery believing soul. It is still true that the sharpest weapon whichany man can wield for Christ is the simple adducing of his own personalexperience. 'That which we have seen and handled we declare' is stillthe best form into which our preaching can be cast. And such a voiceevery man and woman who has found the sweetness and the power of Christfilling their own souls, is bound--rather let us say, is privileged--tolift 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 isdoing for ourselves and for all men. III. We may gather, too, the lesson of how often faithful work isunrecorded and forgotten. No doubt those apostles who have no place in the history toiledhonestly and did their Lord's commands, and oblivion has swallowedit all. Bartholomew and 'Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus, ' andthe rest of them, have no place in the record, and their obscurework is faded, faithful and good as certainly it was. So it will be sooner or later with us all. For most of us, ourservice has to be unnoticed and unknown, and the memory of our poorwork will live perhaps for a year or two in the hearts of some fewwho loved us, but will fade wholly when they follow us into thesilent land. Well, be it so; we shall sleep none the less sweetly, though none be talking about us over our heads. The world has ashort memory, and, as the years go on, the list that it has toremember grows so crowded that it is harder and harder to find roomto write a new name on it, or to read the old. The letters on thetombstones are soon erased by the feet that tramp across thechurchyard. All that matters very little. The notoriety of our workis of no consequence. The earnestness and accuracy with which westrike our blow is all-important; but it matters nothing how far itechoes. It is not the heaven of heavens to be talked about, nor doesa man's life consist in the abundance of newspaper or otherparagraphs about him. 'The love of fame' is, no doubt, sometimesfound in 'minds' otherwise 'noble, ' but in itself is very much thereverse of noble. We shall do our work best, and be saved from muchfestering anxiety which corrupts our purest service and fevers ourserenest thoughts, if we once fairly make up our minds to workingunnoticed and unknown, and determine that, whether our post be aconspicuous or an obscure one, we shall fill it to the utmost of ourpower--careless of praise or censure, because our judgment is withour God; careless whether we are unknown or well known, because weare known altogether to Him. The magnitude of our work in men's eyes is as little important asthe noise of it. Christ gave all the apostles their tasks--to someof them to found the Gentile churches, to some of them to leave toall generations precious teaching, to some of them none of thesethings. What then? Were the Peters and the Johns more highlyfavoured than the others? Was their work greater in His sight? Notso. To Him all service done from the same motive is the same, andHis measure of excellence is the quantity of love and spiritualforce in our deeds, not the width of the area over which theyspread. An estuary that goes wandering over miles of shallows mayhave less water in it, and may creep more languidly, than thetorrent that thunders through some narrow gorge. The deeds thatstand highest on the records in heaven are not those which wevulgarly call great. Many 'a cup of cold water only' will be foundto have been rated higher there than jewelled golden chalicesbrimming with rare wines. God's treasures, where He keeps Hischildren's gifts, will be like many a mother's secret store ofrelics of her children, full of things of no value, what the worldcalls 'trash, ' but precious in His eyes for the love's sake that wasin them. All service which is done from the same motive and with the samespirit is of the same worth in His eyes. It does not matter whetheryou have the gospel in a penny Testament printed on thin paper withblack ink and done up in cloth, or in an illuminated missal glowingin gold and colour, painted with loving care on fair parchment, andbound in jewelled ivory. And so it matters little about the materialor 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 trueservice while it lasts, ' and the unnoticed insignificant servantsmay 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, andunrecorded names are recorded above. The names of these almost anonymous apostles have no place in therecords of the advancement of the Church or of the development ofChristian doctrine. They drop out of the narrative after the list inthe first chapter of the Acts. But we do hear of them once more. Inthat last vision of the great city which the seer beheld descendingfrom God, we read that in its 'foundations were the names of thetwelve apostles of the Lamb. ' All were graven there--the inconspicuousnames carved on no record of earth, as well as the familiar ones cutdeep in the rock to be seen of all men for ever. At the least thatgrand image may tell us that when the perfect state of the Church isrealised, the work which these men did when their testimony laid itsfoundation, will be for ever associated with their names. Unrecordedon earth, they are written in heaven. The forgotten work and its workers are remembered by Christ. Hisfaithful heart and all-seeing eye keep them ever in view. The world, and the Church whom these humble men helped, may forget, yet He willnot forget. From whatever muster-roll of benefactors and helperstheir names may be absent, they will be in His list. The ApostlePaul, in his Epistle to the Philippians, has a saying in which hisdelicate courtesy is beautifully conspicuous, where he half apologisesfor not sending his greetings 'to others my fellow-workers' by name, and reminds them that, however their names may be unwritten in hisletter, 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 whatrecord ours may be absent so long as they are found there. Let usrejoice that, though we may live obscure and die forgotten, we mayhave our names written on the breastplate of our High Priest as Hestands in the Holy Place, the breastplate which lies close to Hisheart of love, and is girded to His arm of power. The forgotten and unrecorded work lives, too, in the great whole. Thefruit of our labour may perhaps not be separable from that of others, any more than the sowers can go into the reaped harvest-field andidentify the gathered ears which have sprung from the seed that theysowed, but it is there all the same; and whosoever may be unable topick out each man's share in the blessed total outcome, the Lord ofthe harvest knows, and His accurate proportionment of individualreward to individual service will not mar the companionship in thegeneral gladness, when 'he that soweth and he that reapeth shallrejoice together. ' The forgotten work will live, too, in blessed results to the doers. Whatever of recognition and honour we may miss here, we cannot berobbed of the blessing to ourselves, in the perpetual influence onour own character, of every piece of faithful even if imperfectservice. Habits are formed, emotions deepened, principles confirmed, capacities enlarged by every deed done for Christ, and these make anover-measure of reward here, and in their perfect form hereafter areheaven. Nothing done for Him is ever wasted. 'Thou shalt find itafter many days. ' We are all writing our lives' histories here, asif with one of these 'manifold writers'--a black blank page beneaththe flimsy sheet on which we write, but presently the black pagewill be taken away, and the writing will stand out plain on the pagebehind that we did not see. Life is the filmy, unsubstantial page onwhich our pen rests; the black page is death; and the page beneathis that indelible transcript of our earthly actions, which we shallfind waiting for us to read, with shame and confusion of face, orwith humble joy, in another world. Then let us do our work for Christ, not much careful whether it begreater or smaller, obscure or conspicuous; assured that whoeverforgets us and it, He will remember, and however our names may beunrecorded on earth, they will be written in heaven, and confessedby 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 abrogatedby Christ, both in reference to the scope of, and the equipment for, their mission (Matt. Xxviii. 19; Luke xxii. 36). The spirit of themremains as the perpetual obligation of all Christian workers, andevery Christian should belong to that class. Some directevangelistic work ought to be done by every believer, and in doingit he will find no better directory than this charge to theapostles. 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 thatthe negative prohibition precedes the positive injunction, as if theapostles were already so imbued with the spirit of universalism thatthey would probably have overpassed the bounds which for the presentwere needful. The restriction was transient. It continued in theline of divine limitation of the sphere of Revelation which confineditself to the Jew, in order that through him it might reach theworld. That method could not be abandoned till the Jew himself haddestroyed it by rejecting Christ. Jesus still clung to it. Even whenthe commission was widened to 'all the world, ' Paul went 'to the Jewfirst, ' till he too was taught by uniform failure that Israel wasfixed in unbelief. How tenderly our Lord designates the nation as 'the lost sheep ofthe house of Israel'! He is still influenced by that compassionwhich the sight of the multitudes had moved in Him (chap. Ix. 36). Lost indeed, wandering with torn fleece, and lying panting, inignorance of their pasture and their Shepherd, they are yet 'sheep, 'and they belong to that chosen seed, sprung from so venerableancestors, and heirs of so glorious promises. Clear sight of, andinfinite pity for, men's miseries, must underlie all apostoliceffort. 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! Ifthe heralds can do these, what will not the King be able to do? If suchhues attend the dawn, how radiant will be the noontide! Note 'as yego, ' indicating that they were travelling evangelists, and were tospeak as they went, and go when they had spoken. The road was to betheir pulpit, and each man they met their audience. What a differentworld it would be if Christians carried their message with them _so_! 'Freely ye have received'; namely, in the first application of thewords, the message of the coming kingdom and the power to workmiracles. But the force of the injunction, as applied to us, is evenmore soul-subduing, as our gift is greater, and the freedom of itsbestowal should evoke deeper gratitude. The deepest springs of theheart's love are set flowing by the undeserved, unpurchased gift ofGod, which contains in itself both the most tender and mighty motivefor self-forgetting labour, and the pattern for Christian service. How can one who has received that gift keep it to himself? How canhe sell what he got for nothing? 'Freely give'--the precept forbidsthe seeking of personal profit or advantage from preaching thegospel, and so makes a sharp test of our motives; and it alsoforbids clogging the gift with non-essential conditions, and somakes a sharp test of our methods. II. The prohibition to make gain out of the message, serves as atransition to the directions as to equipment. The apostles were togo as they stood; for the command is, '_Get_ you no gold, ' etc. It has been already noted that these prohibitions were abrogated byJesus in view of His departure, and the world-wide mission of theChurch. But the spirit of them is not abrogated. Note that thedescending value of the metals named makes an ascending stringencyin the prohibition. Not even copper money is to be taken. The'wallet' was a leather satchel or bag, used by shepherds and othersto carry a little food; sustenance, then, was also to be leftuncared for. Dress, too, was to be limited to that in wear; nochange 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 wasto take it (Mark vi. 8). The command was meant to lift the apostlesabove suspicion, to make them manifestly disinterested, to free themfrom anxiety about earthly things, that their message might absorbtheir thoughts and efforts, and to give room for the display ofChrist's power to provide. It had a promise wrapped in it. He whoforbade them to provide for themselves thereby pledged Himself totake care of them. 'The labourer is worthy of his food. ' They may besure of subsistence, and are not to wish for more. All this has a distinct bearing on modern church arrangements. Onthe one hand, it vindicates the right of those who preach the gospelto live of the gospel, and sets any payments to them on the rightfooting, as not being charity or generosity, but the discharge of adebt. On the other hand, it enjoins on preachers and others who arepaid for service not to serve for pay, not to be covetous of largeremuneration, and to take care that no taint of greed for moneyshall mar their work, but that their conduct may confirm their wordswhen they say with Paul, 'We seek not yours, but you. ' III. The conduct required from, and the reception met with by, themessengers come next. Christ first enjoins discretion anddiscrimination of character, so far as possible. The messenger ofthe kingdom is not to be mixed up with disreputable people, lest themessage should suffer. The principle of his choice of a home is tobe, not position, comfort, or the like, but 'worthiness'; that is, predisposition to receive the message. However poor the chamber inthe house of such, there is the apostle to settle himself. 'If yehave judged me to be faithful, come into my house, ' said Lydia. Theless Christ's messengers are at home with Christ's neglecters, thecalmer their own hearts, and the more potent their message. Theygive the lie to it, if they voluntarily choose as their associatesthose to whom their dearest convictions are idle. Christian charitydoes not blind to distinctions of character. A little common sensein reading these will save many a scandal, and much weakening ofinfluence. Christian earnestness does not abolish courtesy. The message is notto be blurted out in defiance of even conventional forms. Zeal forthe Lord is no excuse for rude abruptness. But the salutation of thetrue apostle will deepen the meaning of such forms, and make theconventional the real expression of real goodwill. No man should say'Peace be unto you' so heartily as Christ's servant. The servant'sbenediction will bring the Master's ratification; for Jesus says, '_Let_ your peace come upon it, ' as if commanding the goodwhich we can only wish. That will be so, if the requisite conditionis fulfilled. There must be soil for the seed to root in. But no true wish for others' good--still more, no effort for it--isever void of blessed issue. If the peace does not rest on a houseinto which jarring and sin forbid its entrance, it will not behomeless, but come back, like the dove to the ark, and fold itswings in the heart of the sender. The reflex influence of Christianeffort is precious, whatever its direct results are. How the Churchhas 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 receiveand some would reject their words. In this rapid preparatorymission, there was no time for long delay anywhere; but for us, itis not wise to conclude that patient effort will fail because firstappeals have not succeeded. Much close communion with Jesus, not alittle self-suppression, and abundant practical wisdom, are neededto determine the point at which further efforts are vain. No doubt, there is often great waste of strength in trying to impressunimpressible people, or to revive some moribund enterprise; but itis a pardonable weakness to be reluctant to abandon a field. Stillit _is_ a weakness, and there come times when the only rightthing to do is to 'shake off the dust' of the messenger's feet intoken that all connection is ended, and that he is clear from theblood of the rejecters. The awful doom of such is solemnlyintroduced by 'Verily, I say unto you. ' It rests on the plainprinciple that the measure of light is the measure of criminality, and hence the measure of punishment. The rejecters of Christ amongus are as much more guilty than 'that city' as its inhabitants werethan the men of Sodom. The first section of this charge properly ends with verse 15, thefollowing verse being a transition to the second part. The Greekputs strong emphasis on 'I. ' It is He who sends among wolves, therefore He will protect. A strange thing for a shepherd to do! Astrange encouragement for the apostles on the threshold of theirwork! But the words would often come back to them when beset by thepack with their white teeth gleaming, and their howls filling thenight. They are not promised that they will not be torn, but theyare assured that, even if they are, the Shepherd wills it, and willnot lose one of His flock. What is the Christian defence? Prudence like the serpent's, but notthe serpent's craft or malice; harmlessness like the dove's, but notwithout the other safeguard of 'wisdom. ' The combination is a rareone, and the surest way to possess it is to live so close to Jesusthat we shall be progressively changed into His likeness. Then ourprudence will never degenerate into cunning, nor our simplicitybecome blindness to dangers. The Christian armour and arms are meek, unconquerable patience, and Christ-likeness, To resist is to bebeaten; to endure unretaliating is to be victorious. 'Be notovercome 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 bringingtogether sayings and incidents of a like kind without regard totheir original connection. The Sermon on the Mount and the series ofmiracles in chapters viii. And ix. Are groups, the elements of whichare for the most part found disconnected in Mark and Luke. Thischarge to the twelve in chapter x. Seems to present a thirdinstance, and to pass over in verse 16 to a wider mission than thatof the twelve during our Lord's lifetime, for it forebodespersecution, whereas the preceding verses opened no darker prospectthan that of indifference or non-reception. The 'city' which, inthat stage of the gospel message, simply would 'not receive you norhear your words, ' in this stage has worsened into one where 'theypersecute you, ' and the persecutors are now 'kings' and 'Gentiles, 'as well as Jewish councils and synagogue-frequenters. The periodcovered in these verses, too, reaches to the 'end, ' the finalrevelation of all hidden things. Obviously, then, our Lord is looking down a far future, and giving acharge to the dim crowd of His later disciples, whom His prescienteye saw pressing behind the twelve in days to come. He had no dreamsof swift success, but realised the long, hard fight to which He wassummoning His disciples. And His frankness in telling them the worstthat they had to expect was as suggestive as was His freedom fromthe rosy, groundless visions of at once capturing a world whichenthusiasts are apt to cherish, till hard experience shatters theillusions. He knew the future in store for Himself, for His Gospel, for His disciples. And He knew that dangers and death itself willnot appal a soul that is touched into heroic self-forgetfulness byHis love. 'Set down my name, ' says the man in _Pilgrim's Progress_, though he knew--may we not say, because he knew?--that the enemieswere outside waiting to fall on him. A further difference between this and the preceding section is, thatthere the stress was laid on the contents of the disciples' message, but that here it is laid on their sufferings. Not so much by whatthey say, as by how they endure, are they to testify. 'The noblearmy of martyrs praise Thee, ' and the primitive Church preachedJesus 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, andcalls for close attention; the majestic '_I_ send you, ' whichmoves to obedience whatever the issues, and pledges Him to defendthe poor men who are going on His errands and the pathetic pictureof the little flock huddled together, while the gleaming teeth ofthe wolves gnash all round them. A strange theme to drape in ametaphor! but does not the very metaphor help to lighten thedarkness of the picture, as well as speak of His calmness, while Hecontemplates it? If the Shepherd sends His sheep into the midst ofwolves, surely He will come to their help, and surely any peril ismore courageously faced when they can say to themselves, 'He put ushere. ' The sheep has no claws to wound with nor teeth to tear with, but the defenceless Christian has a defence, and in his veryweaponlessness wields the sharpest two-edged sword. 'Force fromforce must ever flow. ' Resistance is a mistake. The victoriousantagonist of savage enmity is patient meekness. 'Sufferance is thebadge of all' true servants of Jesus. Wherever they have beenmisguided enough to depart from Christ's law of endurance and togive blow for blow, they have lost their cause in the long run, andhave hurt their own Christian life more than their enemies' bodies. Guilelessness and harmlessness are their weapons. But 'be ye wise asserpents' is equally imperative with 'guileless as doves. ' Mark thefine sanity of that injunction, which not only permits but enjoinsprudent self-preservation, so long as it does not stoop to crookedpolicy, and is saved from that by dove-like guilelessness. Adifficult combination, but a possible one, and when realised, abeautiful one! The following verses (17-22) expand the preceding, and mingle in avery remarkable way plain predictions of persecution to the deathand encouragements to front the worst. Jewish councils andsynagogues, Gentile governors and kings, will unite for once incommon hatred, than which there is no stronger bond. That is a grimprospect to set before a handful of Galilean peasants, but twolittle words turn its terror into joy; it is 'for My sake, ' and thatis enough. Jesus trusted His humble friends, as He trusts all suchalways, and believed that 'for My sake' was a talisman which wouldsweeten the bitterest cup and would make cowards into heroes, andsend men and women to their deaths triumphant. And history hasproved that He did not trust them too much. 'For His sake'--is thata charm for _us_, which makes the crooked straight and therough places plain, which nerves for suffering and impels to nobleacts, which moulds life and takes the sting and the terror out ofdeath? Nor is that the only encouragement given to the twelve, whomight well be appalled at the prospect of standing before Gentilekings. Jesus seems to discern how they shrank as they listened, atthe thought of having to bear 'testimony' before exalted personages, and, with beautiful adaptation to their weakness, He interjects agreat promise, which, for the first time, presents the divine Spiritas dwelling in the disciples' spirits. The occasion of the dawningof that great Christian thought is very noteworthy, and not less sois the designation of the Spirit as 'of your Father, ' with all theimplications of paternal care and love which that name carries. Special crises bring special helps, and the martyrologies of allages and lands, from Stephen outside the city wall to the lastChinese woman, have attested the faithfulness of the Promiser. Howoften have some calm, simple words from some slave girl in Romancities, or some ignorant confessor before Inquisitors, beenmanifestly touched with heavenly light and power, and silencedsophistries and threats! The solemn foretelling of persecution, broken for a moment, goes onand becomes even more foreboding, for it speaks of dearest onesturned to foes, and the sweet sanctities of family ties dissolved bythe solvent of the new Faith. There is no enemy like a brotherestranged, and it is tragically significant that it is in connectionwith the rupture of family bonds that death is first mentioned asthe price that Christ's messengers would have to pay forfaithfulness to their message. But the prediction springs at abound, as it were, from the narrow circle of home to the widestrange, and does not fear to spread before the eyes of the twelvethat they will become the objects of hatred to the whole human raceif they are true to Christ's charge. The picture is dark enough, andit has turned out to be a true forecast of facts. It suggests twoquestions. 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 gladlytake up the burden which He laid on them? He has the right todispose 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 itleads 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 deathgives us the disposition to yield ourselves wholly to Him, to be Hisapostles according to our opportunities, and to say, 'Whether I liveor die, I am the Lord's. ' That thought of world-wide hatred is soothed by the recurrence ofthe talisman, 'For My name's sake, ' and by a moment's showing of afair prospect behind the gloom streaked with lightning in theforeground. 'He that endureth to the end shall be saved. ' The samesaying occurs in chapter xxiv. 13, in connection with the predictionof the fall of Jerusalem, and in the same connection in Mark xiii. 13, in both of which places several other sayings which appear inthis charge to the apostles are found. It is impossible to settlewhich is the original place for these, or whether they were twicespoken. The latter supposition is very unfashionable at present, buthas perhaps more to say for itself than modern critics are willingto allow. But Luke (xxi. 19) has a remarkable variation of thesaying, for his version of it is, 'In your patience, ye shall winyour souls. ' His word 'patience' is a noun cognate with the verbrendered in Matthew and Mark 'endureth, ' and to 'win one's soul' isobviously synonymous with being 'saved. ' The saying cannot belimited, in any of its forms, to a mere securing of earthly life, for in this context it plainly includes those who have beendelivered to death by parents and brethren, but who by death havewon their lives, and have been, as Paul expected to be, thereby'saved into His heavenly kingdom. ' To the Christian, death is theusher who introduces him into the presence-chamber of the King, andhe 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 withwillingness to take all worthy means to escape it. There has been acertain unwholesome craving for martyrdom generated in times ofpersecution, which may appear noble but is very wasteful. The worstuse that you can put a man to is to burn him, and a living witnessmay do more for Christ than a dead martyr. Christian heroism may beshown in not being afraid to flee quite as much as in courting, orpassively awaiting, danger. And Christ's Name will be spread whenHis lovers are hounded from one city to another, just as it was when'they that were scattered abroad, went everywhere, preaching theword. ' 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 nothave gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come. ' IsJesus here reverting to the narrower immediate mission of theapostles? What 'coming' is referred to? We have seen that the firstmission of the twelve was the theme of verses 5-15, and was therepursued to its ultimate consequences of final judgment on rejecters, whilst the wider horizon of a future mission opens out from verse 16onwards. A renewed contraction of the horizon is extremely unlikely. It would be as if 'a flower should shut and be a bud again. ' Therecurrence in verse 23 of 'Verily I say unto you, ' which has alreadyoccurred in verse 15, closing the first section of the charge, makesit probable that here too a section is completed, and thatprobability is strengthened if it is observed that the same phraseoccurs, for a third time, in the last verse of the chapter, whereagain the discourse soars to the height of contemplating the finalreward. The fact that the apostles met with no persecution on theirfirst mission, puts out of court the explanation of the words thatrefers them to that mission, and takes the 'coming' to be Jesus' ownappearances in the places they had preceded Him as His heralds. Thedifficult question as to what is the _terminus ad quem_ pointedto here seems best solved by taking the 'coming of the Son of Man'to be His judicial manifestation in the destruction of Jerusalem andthe consequent desolation of many of 'the cities of Israel, ' whilstat the same time, the nearer and smaller catastrophe is a prophecyand symbol of the remoter and greater 'day of the Son of Man' at theend of the days. The recognition of that aspect of the fall ofJerusalem is forced on us by the eschatological parts of theGospels, which are a bewildering whirl without it. Here, however, itis the crash of the fall itself which is in view, and the thoughtconveyed is that there would be cities enough to serve for refuges, and scope enough for evangelistic work, till the end of the Jewishpossession of the land. In verses 26-31, 'fear not' is thrice spoken, and at each occurrenceis enforced by a reason. The first of these encouragements is theassurance of the certain ultimate world-wide manifestation of hiddenthings. That same dictum occurs in other connections, and with otherapplications, but in the present context can only be taken as anassurance that the Gospel message, little known as it thus far was, was destined to fill all ears. Therefore the disciples were to befearless in doing their part in making it known, and so working inalliance with the divine purpose. It is the same thing that is meantby the 'covered' that 'shall be revealed, ' the 'hidden' that 'shallbe known, ' 'that which is spoken in darkness, ' and 'that which iswhispered in the ear'; and all four designations refer to the wordwhich every Christian has it in charge to sound out. We note thatJesus foresees a far wider range of publicity for His servants'ministry than for His own, just as He afterwards declared that theywould do 'greater works' than His. He spoke to a handful of men inan obscure corner of the world. His teaching was necessarily largelyconfidential communication to the fit few. But the spark is going tobe 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'sworking should let no fear make us dumb, but should ever hear andobey the command: 'Lift up thy voice with strength, lift it up, benot afraid. ' A second reason for fearlessness is the limitation of the enemy'spower to hurt, reinforced by the thought that, while the penaltiesthat man can inflict for faithfulness are only corporeal, transitory, and incapable of harming the true self, the consequencesof unfaithfulness fling the whole man, body and soul, down to utterruin. There is a fear that makes cowards and apostates; there is afear which makes heroes and apostles. He who fears God, with the awethat has no torment and is own sister to love, is afraid of nothingand of no man. That holy and blessed fear drives out all other, asfire draws the heat out of a burn. He that serves Christ is lord ofthe world; he that fears God fronts the world, and is not afraid. The last reason for fearlessness touches a tender chord, anddiscloses a gracious thought of God as Father, which softens thetremendous preceding word: 'Who is able to destroy both soul andbody in hell. ' Take both designations together, and let them worktogether in producing the awe which makes us brave, and the filialtrust which makes us braver. A bird does not 'fall to the ground'unless wounded, and if it falls it dies. Jesus had looked pityinglyon the great mystery, the woes of the creatures, and had stayedHimself on the thought of the all-embracing working of God. The verydying sparrow, with broken wing, had its place in that universalcare. God is 'immanent' in nature. The antithesis often drawnbetween His universal care and His 'special providence' ismisleading. Providence is special because it is universal. Thatwhich embraces everything must embrace each thing. But the immanentGod is 'your Father, ' and because of that sonship, 'ye are of morevalue than many sparrows. ' There is an ascending order, and anincreasing closeness and tenderness of relation. 'A man is betterthan a sheep, ' and Christians, being God's children, may count ongetting closer into the Father's heart than the poor crippled birdcan, or than the godless man can. 'Your Father, ' on the one hand, can destroy soul and body, therefore fear Him; but, on the other, Hedetermines whether you shall 'fall to the ground' or soar abovedangers, 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 toohad His favourite sayings, the light of which He was wont to flashinto many dark places. Such a saying, for instance, was, 'To himthat hath shall be given. ' Such a saying is this of my text; andprobably several other of our Lord's utterances, which are repeatedmore than once in different Gospels, and have too hastily beensometimes assumed to have been introduced erroneously by theevangelists, in varying connections. This half-proverb occurs four times in the Gospels, and in threevery different connections, pointing to three different subjects. Here, and once in John's Gospel, in the fifteenth chapter, it isemployed to enforce the lesson of the oneness of Christ and Hisdisciples in their relation to the world; and that His servantscannot expect to be better off than the Master was. 'If they havecalled Me Beelzebub they will not call you anything else. ' Then in Luke's Gospel (vi. 40) it is employed to illustrate theprinciple that the scholar cannot expect to be wiser than hismaster; that a blind teacher will have blind pupils, and that theywill both fall into the ditch. Of course, the scholar may get beyondhis master, but then he will get up and go away from the school, andwill not be his scholar any longer. As long as he is a scholar, thebest that can happen to him, and that will not often happen, is tobe on the level of his teacher. Then in another place in John's Gospel (xiii. 16) the saying isemployed in reference to a different subject, viz. To teach themeaning of the pathetic, symbolical foot-washing, and to enforce theexhortation to imitate Jesus Christ, as generally in conduct, sospecially in His wondrous humility. 'The servant is not greater thanhis lord. ' 'I have left you an example that ye should do as I havedone to you. ' So if we put these three instances together we get a threefoldillustration of the relation between the disciple and the teacher, in respect to wisdom, conduct, and reception by the world. And thesethree, with their bearing on the relation between Christians andJesus Christ, open out large fields of duty and of privilege. Thevery centre of Christianity is discipleship, and the very highesthope, as well as the most imperative command which the Gospel bringsto men is, 'Be like Him whom you profess to have taken as yourMaster. 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. ' 'Thedisciple is not greater than his master. ' 'It is enough for thedisciple 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 histeacher's footsteps, to see with his eyes, to absorb his wisdom, tolearn his truth, we may apply it in two opposite directions. First, it teaches us the limitations, and the misery, and the folly oftaking men for our masters; and then, on the other hand, it teachesus the large hope, the blessing, freedom, and joy of having Christfor our Master. Now, first, look at the principle as bearing upon the relation ofdisciple and human teacher. All such teachers have theirlimitations. Each man has his little circle of favourite ideas thathe is perpetually reiterating. In fact, it seems as if one truth wasabout as much as one teacher could manage, and as if, whensoever Godhad any great truth to give to the world, He had to take one man andmake 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. Theeyes that see truth directly and for themselves in this world arevery few. Most men have to take truth at second-hand, and few indeedare they who, like a perfect medium, receive even the fragmentarytruth that human lips can impart to them, and transmit it as pure asthey receive it. Disciples present exaggerations, caricatures, misconceptions, the limitations of the master becoming even morerigid in the pupil. Schools spring up which push the founder'steaching to extremes, and draw conclusions from it which he neverdreamed of. Instead of a fresh voice, we have echoes, which, likeall echoes, give only a syllable or two out of a sentence. Teacherscan tell what they see, but they cannot give their followers eyes, and so the followers can do little more than repeat what theirleader said he saw. They are like the little suckers that spring upfrom the 'stool' of a cut-down tree, or like the kinglets amongwhose feebler hands the great empire of an Alexander was divided athis death. It is a dwarfing thing to call any man master upon earth. And yetmen will give to a man the credence which they refuse to Christ. Thefollowers 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 andreligion, and then go away and put a man in the very place whichthey have denied to Him, and swallow down his _dicta_ whole. Such facts show how heart and mind crave a teacher; how discipleshipis ingrained in our nature; how we all long for some one who shallcome to us authoritatively and say, 'Here is truth--believe it andlive on it. ' And yet it is fatal to pin one's faith on any, and itis miserable to have to change guides perpetually and to feel thatwe have outgrown those whom we reverence, and that we can look downon the height which once seemed to touch the stars--and, if we cutourselves loose from all men's teaching, the isolation is dreary, and few of us are strong enough of arm, or clear enough of eye, toforce or find the path through the tangled jungles of error. So take this thought, that the highest hope of a disciple is to belike the master in wisdom, in its bearing on the relation between usand Christ, and look how it then flashes up into blessedness andbeauty. Such a teacher as we have in Him has no limitations, and it is safeto follow Him absolutely and Him alone. All others have plainlyborne the impress of their age, or their nation, or theiridiosyncrasy, in some way or another; Christ Jesus is the onlyteacher that the world has ever heard of, in whose teaching there isno mark of the age or generation or set of circumstances in which itoriginated. This water does not taste of any soil through which ithas passed, it has come straight down from Heaven, and is pure anduncontaminated as the Heaven from which it has come. This teacher issafe to listen to absolutely: there are no limitations there; younever hear Him arguing; there is no sign about His words as if Hehad ever dug out for Himself the wisdom that He is proclaiming, orhad ever seen it less distinctly than He sees it at the moment. Thegreat peculiarity of His teaching is that He does not reason, butdeclares that His 'Verily! Verily!' is the confirmation of all Hismessage. His teaching is Himself; other men bring lessons about truth;He says, 'I am the Truth. ' Other teachers keep their personality inthe background; He clashes His down in the foreground. Other men say, 'Listen to what I tell you, never mind about me. ' He says, 'This islife eternal, that ye should believe on Me. ' This Teacher has Hismessage level to all minds, high and low, wise and foolish, cultivatedand rude. This Teacher does not only impart wisdom by words as fromwithout, though He does that too, but He comes into men's spirits, andcommunicates Himself, and so makes them wise. Other teachers fumble atthe outside, but 'in the hidden parts He makes me to know wisdom. ' Soit is safe to take this Teacher absolutely, and to say, 'Thou art myMaster, Thy word is truth, and the opening of Thy lips to me is wisdom. ' In following Christ as our absolute Teacher, there is no sacrificeof independence or freedom of mind, but listening to Him is the wayto secure these in their highest degree. We are set free from men, we are growingly delivered from errors and misconceptions, in themeasure in which we keep close to Christ as our Master. The Lord isthat Teacher, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there, and thereonly, is liberty; freedom from self, from the dominion of popularopinion, from the coterie-speech of schools, from the imposingauthority of individuals, and from all that makes cowardly men sayas other people say, and fall in with the majority; and freedom fromour own prejudices and our own errors, which are cleared away whenwe 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 truththat He has to give, and have received all the wisdom that He canimpart unto us as to God and Himself, does His teaching cease. Herewe may grow indefinitely in the knowledge of Christ, and in thefuture we shall know even as we are known. His merciful teachingwill not come to a close till we have drunk in all His wisdom, andtill He has declared to us all which He has heard of the Father. Hewill pass us from one form to another of His school, but in Heavenwe 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 resortto cisterns when we may draw from the spring? Why listen to men whenwe may hear Christ? He is, as Dante called the great Greek thinker, 'the Master of those who know. ' Why should we look to the planetswhen we can see the sun? 'Call no man master upon earth, for One isyour Master, and all ye are brethren. ' And His merciful teachingwill never cease until 'everyone that is perfected shall be as hisMaster. ' II. Now, turn to the second application of this principle. Likenessto the Master in life is the law of a disciple's conduct. That pathetic and wonderful story about the foot-washing in John'sGospel is meant for a symbol. It is the presenting, in a picturesqueform, of the very heart and essence of Christ's Incarnation in itsmotive and purpose. The solemn prelude with which the evangelistintroduces it lays bare our Lord's heart and His reason for Hisaction. 'Having loved His own, which were in the world, He lovedthem to the end. ' His motive, then, was love. Again, the exaltedconsciousness which accompanied His self-abasement is made prominentin the words, 'Knowing that the Father had given all things into Hishand, and that He was come from God and went to God. ' And themajestic deliberation and patient continuance in resolved humilitywith which He goes down the successive steps of the descent, arewonderfully given in the evangelist's record of how He 'riseth fromsupper, and laid aside His garments and girded Himself, and pouredwater into the basin. ' It is a parable. Thus, in the consciousnessof His divine authority and dignity, and moved by His love to thewhole world, He laid aside the garments of His glory, and vestedHimself with the towel of His humanity, the servant's garb, and tookthe water of His cleansing power, and came to wash the feet of allwho will let Him cleanse them from their soil. And then, havingreassumed His garments, He speaks from His throne to those who havebeen cleansed by His humiliation and His sacrifice, 'Know ye what Ihave done to you? The servant is not greater than his lord. ' That is to say, dear brethren, in this one incident, which is thecondensation, so to speak, of the whole spirit of His life, is thelaw for our lives as well. We, too, are bound to that same love asthe main motive of all our actions; we, too, are bound to that samestripping off of dignity and lowly equalising of ourselves withthose below us whom we would help, and we, too, are bound to make itour main object, in our intercourse with men, not merely that weshould please nor enlighten them, nor succour their lower temporalneeds, but that we should cleanse them and make them pure with thepurity that Christ gives. A Christian life all moved and animated by self-denuding love, andwhich came amongst men to make them better and purer, and all theinfluence of which tended in the direction of helping poor foulhearts to get rid of their filth, how different it would be from ourlives! What a grim contrast much of our lives is to the Master'sexample and command! Did you ever strip yourself of anything, mybrother, in order to make some poor, wretched creature a littlepurer and liker the Saviour? Did you ever drop your dignity and godown to the low levels in order to lift up the people that werethere? Do men see anything of that example, as reproduced in yourlives, of the Master that lays aside the garments of Heaven for thevesture of earth, and dies upon the Cross in order that He mightmake our poor hearts purer and liker His own? But, hard as such imitation is, it is only one case of a generalprinciple. 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 isthe disciple of Incarnate Love if his whole life is incarnateselfishness? What is the use of your calling yourselves Christians, and saying that you are followers of Jesus Christ, when He came todo God's will and delighted in it, and you come to do your own, andnever do God's will at all, or scarcely at all, and then reluctantlyand with many a murmur? What kind of a disciple is he, the habitualtenor of whose life contradicts the life of his Master and disobeysHis commandments? And I am bound to say that that is the life of anenormously large proportion of the professing disciples in this ageof conventional Christianity. 'The disciple shall be as his master. ' Do you make it your effort tobe like Him? If so, then the saying is not only a law, but apromise, for it assures us that our effort shall not fail butprogressively succeed, and lead on at last to our becoming what webehold, and being conformed to Him whom we love, and like the Masterto whose wisdom we profess to listen. They whose earthly life is afollowing of Christ, with faltering steps and afar off, shall havefor their heavenly blessedness, that they shall 'follow the Lambwhithersoever He goeth. ' III. And now, lastly, likeness to the Master in relation to theworld is the fate that the disciple must put up with. 'If they have called the master of the house Beelzebub, how muchmore shall they call them of his household?' 'The disciple is notabove his master, nor the servant above his lord. ' Our Lordreiterated 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 HisWord as the truth upon which we repose, depend upon it, in ourmeasure and in varying fashions, we shall have to bear the same kindof treatment that He received from the world. The days of so-calledpersecution are over in so-called Christian countries, but if youare a disciple in the sense of believing all that Jesus Christ says, and taking Him for your Teacher, the public opinion of this day willhave a great many things to say about you that will not be verypleasant. You will be considered to be 'old-fashioned, ' 'narrow, ''behind the times, ' etc. Etc. Etc. Look at the bitter spirit ofantagonism to an earnest and simple Christianity and adoption ofChrist as our authoritative Teacher which goes through much of ourhigh-class literature to-day. It is a very small matter as measuredwith what Christian men used to have to bear; but it indicates theset of things. We may make up our minds that if we are not contentedwith the pared-down Christianity which the world allows to pass atpresent, but insist upon coming to the New Testament for our beliefsand practices, and avow--'I believe all that Jesus Christ says, andI believe it because He says it, and I take Him as my model'; weshall find out that the disciple has to be 'as his Master, ' and thatthe Pharisees and the Scribes of to-day stand in the same relationto the followers as their predecessors did to the Leader. If you arelike your Master in conduct, you will be no more popular with theworld than He was. As long as Christianity will be quiet, and letthe world go its own gait, the world is very well contented to letit alone, or even to say polite things to it. Why should the worldtake the trouble of persecuting the kind of Christianity that somany of us display? What is the difference between our Christianityand their worldliness? The world is quite willing to come to churchon Sundays, and to call itself a Christian world, if only it maylive as it likes. And many professing Christians have precisely thesame idea. They attend to the externals of Christianity, and callthemselves Christians, but they bargain for its having very littlepower over their lives. Why, then, should two sets of people whohave the same ideas and practices dislike each other? No reason atall! But let Christian men live up to their profession, and aboveall let them become aggressive, and try to attack the world's evil, as they are bound to do; let them fight drunkenness, let them goagainst the lust of great cities, let them preach peace in the faceof a nation howling for war, let them apply the golden rules ofChristianity to commerce and social relationships and the like, andyou will very soon hear a pretty shout that will tell you that thedisciple 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 withthe world, I am afraid it is because you have less of the Master'sspirit than you have of the world's. The world loves its own. If youare not 'of the world, the world will hate you. ' If it does not, itmust 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 arelike Him in character, our very share in 'His reproach, ' and oursense of being 'aliens' here, bear the promise that we shall be likeHim in all worlds. His fortune is ours. 'The disciple shall be ashis master. ' If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him. Nocross, no crown;--if cross, then crown! The end of discipleship isnot reached until the Master's image and the Master's lot arerepeated in the scholar. Take Christ for your sacrifice, trust to His blood, listen to Histeaching, walk in His footsteps, and you shall share His sovereigntyand sit on His throne. 'It is enough, '--ay! more than enough, andnothing less than that is enough, --'for the disciple that he be_as_'--and _with_--'his master. ' 'I shall be satisfied when I awake inThy 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 ashort flight to try the young birds' wings. The larger portion ofthis charge to them passes far beyond the immediate occasion, anddeals with the permanent relations of Christ's servants to the worldin which they live, for the purpose of bringing it into subjectionto its true King. These solemn closing words, which make our presentsubject, contain the duty and blessedness of confessing Him, the visionof the antagonisms which He excites, His demand for all-surrenderingfollowing, 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 tothe 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 thehonour of being confessed by Christ. No matter what may befall Hiswitnesses, the extremest disaster shall not rob them of their reward. They may be flung down from the house-tops where they lift up theirbold voices, but He who does not let a sparrow fall to the grounduncared for, will give His angels charge concerning them who are somuch more precious, and they shall be borne up on outstretched wings, lest they be dashed on the pavement below. Thus preserved, they shallall attain at last to their guerdon. Nothing can come between Christ'sservant and his crown. The tender providence of the Father, whosemercy is over all His works, makes sure of that. The river of theconfessor's life may plunge underground, and be lost amid persecutions, but it will emerge again into the brighter sunshine on the other sideof the mountains. The confession which is to be thus rewarded, like the denial opposedto it, is, of course, not merely a single utterance of the lip. Sofar Judas Iscariot confessed Christ, and Peter denied Him. But it isthe habitual acknowledgment by lip and life, unwithdrawn to the end. The context implies that the confession is maintained in the face ofopposition, and that the denial is a cowardly attempt to save one'sskin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not comein that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be madebrave if it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and thefire, and screw oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than toresist the more specious blandishments of the world, especially whenit has been christened, and calls itself religious. The light laughof scorn, the silent pressure of the low average of Christiancharacter, the close associations in trade, literature, public anddomestic life which Christians have with non-Christians, make many aman's tongue lie silent, to the sore detriment of his own religiouslife. 'Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, ' and find it hard tofulfil the easier conflict to which you are called. The sun has morepower than the tempest to make the pilgrim drop his garment. But theduty remains the same for all ages. Every man is bound to make thedeepest springs of his life visible, and to stand to hisconvictions, whatever they be. If he do not, his convictions willdisappear like a piece of ice hid in a hot hand, which will melt andtrickle away. This obligation lies with infinitely increased weighton Christ's servants; and the consequences of failing to dischargeit are more tragic in their cases, in the exact proportion of thegreater preciousness of their faith. Corn hoarded is sure to bespoiled by weevils and rust. The bread of life hidden in our sackswill certainly go mouldy. The reward and punishment of confession and denial come to them notas separate acts, but as each being the revelation of the spiritualcondition of the doers. Christ implies that a true disciple cannotbut be a confessor, and that therefore the denier must certainly beone whom He has never known. Because, therefore, each act issymptomatic of the doer, each receives the congruous andcorrespondent reward. The confessor is confessed; the denier isdenied. What calm and assured consciousness of His place as Judgeunderlies these words! His recognition is God's acceptance; Hisdenial is darkness and misery. The correspondence between the workand the reward is beautifully brought out by the use of the sameword to express each. And yet what a difference between ourconfession of Him and His of us! And what a hope is here for all whohave 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 byHis. He will say, 'Yes, this man is mine, and I am his. ' That willbe glory, honour, blessedness, life, heaven. II. The vision of the discord which follows the coming of the Kingof peace. It is not enough to interpret these words as meaning thatour Lord's purpose indeed was to bring peace, but that the result ofHis coming was strife. The ultimate purpose is peace; but animmediate purpose is conflict, as the only road to the peace. He isfirst 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 worldinto the likeness of heaven; and all in the world which hates suchlikeness is embattled against Him. He saw realities, and knew men'shearts, and was under no illusion, such as many an ardent reformerhas cherished, that the fair form of truth need only be shown tomen, and they will take her to their hearts. Incessant struggle isthe law for the individual and for society till Christ's purpose forboth is realised. That conflict ranges the dearest in opposite ranks. The gospel isthe great solvent. As when a substance is brought into contact withsome chemical compound, which has greater affinity for one of itselements than the other element has, the old combination isdissolved, and a new and more stable one is formed, so Christianityanalyses and destroys in order to synthesis and construction. Inverse 21 our Lord had foretold that brother should deliver upbrother to death. Here the severance is considered from the oppositeside. The persons who are 'set at variance' with their kindred arehere Christians. Perhaps it is fanciful to observe that they are alljunior members of families, as if the young would be more likely toflock to the new light. But however that may be, the separation ismutual, but the hate is all on one side. The 'man's foes' are of hisown household; but he is not their foe, though he be parted fromthem. III. Earthly love may be a worse foe to a true Christian than eventhe enmity of the dearest; and that enmity may often be excited bythe Christian subordination of earthly to heavenly love. So our Lordpasses from the warnings of discord and hate to the danger of theopposite--undue love. He claims absolute supremacy in our hearts. He goes still farther, and claims the surrender, not only of affections, but of self andlife to Him. What a strange claim this is! A Jewish peasant, deadnineteen hundred years since, fronts the whole race of man, andasserts His right to their love, which is strange, and to theirsupreme love, which is stranger still. Why should we love Him atall, if He were only a man, however pure and benevolent? We mayadmire, as we do many another fair nature in the past; but is thereany possibility of evoking anything as warm as love to an unseenperson, who can have had no knowledge of or love to us? And whyshould we love Him more than our dearest, from whom we have drawn, or to whom we have given, life? What explanation or justificationdoes He give of this unexampled demand? Absolutely none. He seems tothink that its reasonableness needs no elucidation. Surely never didteacher professing wisdom, modesty, and, still more, religion, putforward such a claim of right; and surely never besides did anysucceed in persuading generations unborn to yield His demand, whenthey heard it. The strangest thing in the world's history is thatto-day there are millions who do love Jesus Christ more than allbesides, and whose chief self-accusation is that they do not loveHim more. The strange, audacious claim is most reasonable, if webelieve that Jesus is the Son of God, who died for each of us, andthat each man and woman to the last of the generations had aseparate place in His divine human love when He died. It is meet tolove Him, if that be true; it is not, unless it be. The requirementis as stringent as strange. If the two ever seem to conflict, theearthly must give way. If the earthly be withdrawn, there must befound sufficiency for comfort and peace in the heavenly. The lowermust not be permitted to hinder the flight of the heavenly to itshome. 'More than Me' is a rebuke to most of us. What a contrastbetween the warmth of our earthly and the tepidity or coldness ofour heavenly love! How spontaneously our thoughts, when left free, turn to the one; how hard we find it to keep them fixed on theother! How sweet service is to the dear ones here; how reluctantlyit is given to Christ! How we long, when parted, to rejoin them; howlittle we are drawn to the place where He is! We have all to confessthat we are 'not worthy of' Him; that we requite His love withinadequate returns, and live lives which tax His love for itshighest exercise, the free forgiveness of sins against itself. Compliance with that stringent law, and subordinating all earthlylove to His, is the true elevating and ennobling of the earthly. Itis promoted, not degraded, when it is made second, and is infinitelysweeter and deeper then than when it was set in the place ofsupremacy, where it had no right to be. But Christ's demand is not only for the surrender of the heart, butfor the giving up of self, and, in a very profound sense, for thesurrender of life. How enigmatical that saying about taking up thecross must have sounded to the disciples! They knew little about thecross, as a punishment; they had not yet associated it in any waywith their Lord. This seems to have been the first occasion of Hismentioning it, and the allusion is so veiled as to be but partiallyintelligible. But what was intelligible was bewildering. A strangeroyal procession that, of the King with a cross on His shoulder, andall His subjects behind Him with similar burdens! Through the agesthat procession has marched, and it marches still. Self-denial forChrist's sake is 'the badge of all our tribe. ' Observe that word'take. ' The cross must be willingly and by ourselves assumed. Noother can lay it on our shoulders. Observe that other word 'his. 'Each man has his own special form in which self-denial is needfulfor him. We require pure eyes, and hearts kept in very closecommunion with Jesus, to ascertain what our particular cross is. Hehas them of many patterns, shapes, sizes, and materials. We canalways make sure of strength to carry the one which He means us tocarry, 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 identifiesthese twelve with Himself in a manner which must have soundedstrange to them then, but have heartened them for their work by theconsciousness of His mysterious oneness with them. The wholedoctrine of Christ's unity with His people lay in germ in thesewords, though much more was needed, both of teaching and ofexperience, before their depth of blessing and strengthening couldbe apprehended. _We_ know that He dwells in His true subjectsby His Spirit, and that a most real union subsists between the headand the members, of which the closest unions of earth are but faintshadows, so as that not only those who receive His followers receiveHim, but, more wonderful still, His followers are received at thelast by God Himself as joined to Him, and portions of His very self, and therefore 'accepted in the Beloved. ' Our Lord adds to thesewords the thought that, in like manner, to receive Him is to receivethe Father, and so implies that our relation to Him is in certainreal respects parallel with His relation to the Father. We too aresent. He who sends abides with us, as the Son ever abode in God, andGod in Him. We are sent to be the brightness of Christ's glory, andto manifest Him to men, as He was sent to reveal the Father. A LIFE LOST AND FOUND[Footnote: Preached after the funeral of Mr. F. W. Crossley. ] '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 avoidingpersonal references in the pulpit. Death has been busy in our owncongregation this last week, and yesterday we laid in the grave allthat 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. Hewas long a member of this church and congregation. I need not speakof his utter unselfishness, of his lifelong consecration, of hislavish generosity, of his unstinted work for God and man; butthinking of him and of it, I have felt as if the words of my textwere the secret of his life, and as if he now understood the fulnessof the promise they contain: 'He that loseth his life for My sakeshall find it. ' Now, looking at these words in the light of theexample so tenderly beloved by some of us, so sharply criticised bymany, but now so fully recognised as saintly by all, I ask you toconsider-- I. The stringent requirement for the Christian life that is heremade. Now we shall very much impoverish the meaning and narrow the sweepof these great and penetrating words, if we understand by 'losingone's life' only the actual surrender of physical existence. It isnot only the martyr on whose bleeding brows the crown of life isgently placed; it is not only the temples that have been torn by thecrown of thorns, that are soothed by that unfading wreath; but thereis a daily dying, which is continually required from all Christianpeople, and is, perhaps, as hard as, or harder than, the brief andbloody passage of martyrdom by which some enter into rest. For thetrue losing of life is the slaying of self, and that has to be doneday by day, and not once for all, in some supreme act of surrenderat the end, or in some initial act of submission and yielding at thebeginning, of the Christian life. We ourselves have to take theknife into our own hands and strike, and that not once, but ever, right on through our whole career. For, by natural disposition, weare all inclined to make our own selves to be our own centres, ourown aims, the objects of our trust, our own law; and if we do so, weare dead whilst we live, and the death that brings life is when, dayby 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 withanguish; and that slow agony, in all its terribleness andprotractedness, is the image that is set before us as the true idealof every life that would not be a living death. The world is to becrucified to me, and I to the world. We have our centre in ourselves, and we need the centre to beshifted, or we live in sin. If I might venture upon so violent animage, the comets that career about the heavens need to be caughtand tamed, and bound to peaceful revolution round some central sun, or else they are 'wandering stars to whom is reserved the blacknessof darkness for ever. ' So, brethren, the slaying of self by apainful, 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 commandmentsand providences, the making of that obstinate part of our naturemeek and obedient and plastic as the clay in the potter's hands. Thetanner takes a stiff hide, and soaks it in bitter waters, anddresses it with sharp tools, and lubricates it with unguents, andhis work is not done till all the stiffness is out of it and it isflexible. 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 willbut Thine be done. ' They who thus submit, they who thus welcome intotheir hearts, and enthrone upon the sovereign seat in their wills, Christ and His will--these are they who have lost their lives. Whenwe can say, 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, ' then, andonly then, have we in the deepest sense of the words 'lost ourlives. ' The phrase means the suppression, and sometimes the excision, ofappetites, passions, desires, inclinations. It means the hallowingof all aims; it means the devotion and the consecration of allactivities. It means the surrender and the stewardship of allpossessions. And only then, when we have done these things, shall wehave come to practical obedience to the initial requirement thatChrist makes from us all--to lose our lives for His sake. I need not diverge here to point to that life from which my thoughtshave taken their start in this sermon. Surely if there was any onecharacteristic in it more distinct and lovely than another, it wasthat self was dead and that Christ lived. There may be sometimes acall for the actual--which is the lesser--surrender of the bodilylife, in obedience to the call of duty. There have been Christianmen 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 bethat, if he had done like so many of our wealthy men--had flunghimself into business and then collapsed into repose--he would havebeen here to-day. Perhaps it would have been better if there hadbeen a less entire throwing of himself into arduous and clamantduties. I am not going to enter on the ethics of that question. I donot think there are many of this generation of Christians who arelikely 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 torust out. ' But only this I will say: we honour the martyrs ofScience, of Commerce, of Empire, why should not we honour themartyrs of Faith? And why should they be branded as imprudententhusiasts, if they make the same sacrifice which, when an exploreror a soldier makes, his memory is honoured as heroic, and his coldbrows are crowned with laurels? Surely it is as wise to die forChrist as for England. But be that as it may; the requirement, thestringent requirement, of my text is not addressed to any spiritualaristocracy, but is laid upon the consciences of all professingChristians. II. Observe the grounds of this requirement. Did you ever think--or has the fact become so familiar to you thatit ceases to attract notice?--did you ever think what anextraordinary position it is for the son of a carpenter in Nazarethto plant Himself before the human race and say, 'You will be wise ifyou die for My sake, and you will be doing nothing more than yourplain 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 putout a masterful hand and claim to take as Thine the life of myheart?' Ah! brethren, there is but one answer: 'Who loved me, andgave Himself for me. ' The foolish, loving, impulsive apostle thatblurted out, before his time had come, 'I will lay down my life forThy sake, ' was only premature; he was not mistaken. There neededthat His Lord should lay down His life for Peter's sake; and then Hehad a right to turn to the apostle and say, 'Thou shalt follow Meafterwards, ' and 'lay down thy life for My sake. ' The ground ofChrist's unique claim is Christ's solitary sacrifice. He who hasdied for men, and He only, has the right to require the unconditional, the absolute surrender of themselves, not only in the sacrifice of alife that is submitted, but, if circumstances demand, in the sacrificeof a death. The ground of the requirement is laid, first in the factof our Lord's divine nature, and second, in the fact that He who asksmy 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 lifepossible. I suppose that there is nothing else that will wholly dethrone selfbut the enthroning of Jesus Christ. That dominion is too deeplyrooted to be abolished by any enthusiasms, however noble they maybe, except the one that kindles its undying torch at the flame ofChrist's own love. God forbid that I should deny that wonderful andlovely instances of self-oblivion may be found in hearts untouchedby the supreme love of Christ! But whilst I recognise all the beautyof such, I, for my part, humbly venture to believe and assert that, for the entire deliverance of a man from self-regard, the onesufficient motive power is the reception into his opening heart ofthe love of Jesus Christ. Ah! brethren, you and I know how hard it is to escape from thetyrannous dominion of self, and how the evil spirits that have takenpossession of us mock at all lesser charms than the name which'devils fear and fly'; 'the Name that is above every name. ' We havetried other motives. We have sought to reprove our selfishness byother considerations. Human love--which itself is sometimes onlythe love of self, seeking satisfaction from another--human love doesconquer it, but yet conquers it partially. The demons turn roundupon all other would-be exorcists, and say, 'Jesus we know . .. Butwho are ye?' It is only when the Ark is carried into the Temple thatDagon falls prone before it. If you would drive self out of yourhearts--and if you do not it will slay you--if you would drive selfout, let Christ's love and sacrifice come in. And then, what nobrooms and brushes, no spades nor wheelbarrows, will ever do--namely, cleanse out the filth that lodges there--the turning of the river inwill do, and float it all away. The one possibility for complete, conclusive deliverance from the dominion and tyranny of Self is tobe found in the words 'For My sake. ' Ah! brethren, I suppose thereare none of us so poor in earthly love, possessed or remembered, butthat we know the omnipotence of these words when whispered by belovedlips, '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 twofoldreference and accomplishment: here and now, yonder and then. Here and now, no man possesses himself till he has given himself toJesus Christ. Only then, when we put the reins into His hands, can wecoerce and guide the fiery steeds of passion and of impulse, And soScripture, in more than one place, uses a remarkable expression, whenit speaks of those that believe to the 'acquiring of their souls. 'You are not your own masters until you are Christ's servants; andwhen you fancy yourselves to be most entirely your own masters, youhave promised yourselves liberty and have become the slave ofcorruption. So if you would own yourselves, give yourselves away. Andsuch an one 'shall find' his life, here and now, in that all earthlythings will be sweeter and better. The altar sanctifies the gift. When some pebble is plunged into a sunlit stream, the water bringsout the veined colourings of the stone that looked all dull and dimwhen it was lying upon the bank. Fling your whole being, your wealth, your activities, and everything, into that stream, and they willflash in splendour else unknown. Did not my friend, of whom I havebeen speaking, enjoy his wealth far more, when he poured it out likewater upon good causes, than if he had spent it in luxury andself-indulgence? And shall we not find that everything is sweeter, nobler, better, fuller of capacity to delight, if we give it all toour Master? The stringent requirement of Christ is the perfection ofprudence. 'Who pleasure follows pleasure slays, ' and who slayspleasure finds a deeper and a holier delight. The keenestepicureanism could devise no better means for sucking the last dropof sweetness out of the clustering grapes of the gladnesses ofearth than to obey this stringent requirement, and so realise theblessed promise, 'Whoso loseth his life for My sake shall find it. 'The selfish man is a roundabout fool. The self-devoted man, theChrist-enthroning man, is the wise man. And there will be the further finding hereafter, about which wecannot speak. Only remember, how in a passage parallel with this ofmy text, spoken when almost within sight of Calvary, our Lord laiddown not only the principle of His own life but the principle forall His servants, when He said, 'Except a corn of wheat fall intothe ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringethforth much fruit. ' The solitary grain dropped into the furrow bringsforth a waving harvest. We may not, we need not, particularise, butthe life that is found at last is as the fruit an hundredfold of thelife that men called 'lost' and God called 'sown. ' 'Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord; they rest from theirlabours, and their works do follow them. ' 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 thepresent or to the future. We shall probably not go wrong if weregard them as having reference to both. For all godliness has'promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is tocome, ' and '_in_ keeping God's commandments, ' as well as _for_keeping them, 'there is great reward, ' a reward realised in thepresent, even although Death holds the keys of the treasure-housein which the richest rewards are stored. No act of holy obedienceis here left without foretastes of joy, which, though they be but'brooks by the way, ' contain the same water of life which hereafterswells to an ocean. Some people tell us that it is defective morality in Christianity tobribe men to be good by promising them Heaven, and that he who isactuated by such a motive is selfish. Now that fantastic andoverstrained objection may be very simply answered by twoconsiderations: self-regard is not selfishness, and Christianitydoes not propose the future reward as the motive for goodness. Themotive for goodness is love to Jesus Christ; and if ever there was aman who did acts of Christian goodness only for the sake of what hewould get by them, the acts were not Christian goodness, because themotive was wrong. But it is a piece of fastidiousness to forbid usto reinforce the great Christian motive, which is love to JesusChrist, by the thought of the recompense of reward. It is a stimulusand an encouragement of, not the motive for, goodness. This textshows us that it is a subordinate motive, for it says that thereception of a prophet, or of a righteous man, or of 'one of theselittle ones, ' which is rewardable, is the reception 'in the name of'a prophet, a disciple, and so on, or, in other words, is therecognising of the prophet, or the righteous man, or the disciplefor what he is, and because he is that, and not because of thereward, receiving him with sympathy and solace and help. So, with that explanation, let us look at these very remarkablewords of our text. I. The first thing which I wish to observe in them is the threeclasses of character which are dealt with--'prophet, ' 'righteousman, ' 'these little ones. ' Now the question that I would suggest is this: Is there any meaningin the order in which these are arranged? If so, what is it? Do webegin at the bottom, or at the top? Have we to do with an ascendingor with a descending scale? Is the prophet thought to be greaterthan the righteous man, or less? Is the righteous man thought to behigher than the little one, or to be lower? The question is animportant one, and worth considering. Now, at first sight, it certainly does look as if we had here to dowith a descending scale, as if we began at the top and wentdownwards. A prophet, a man honoured with a distinct commission fromGod to declare His will, is, in certain very obvious respects, loftier than a man who is not so honoured, however pure andrighteous he may be. The dim and venerable figures, for instance, ofIsaiah and Jeremiah, tower high above all their contemporaries; andgodly men who hung upon their lips, like Baruch on Jeremiah's, feltthemselves to be, and were, inferior to them. And, in like manner, the little child who believes in Christ may seem to be insignificantin comparison with the prophet with his God-touched lips, or therighteous man of the old dispensation with his austere purity; as ahumble 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 ChristHimself declared that 'the least of the little ones' was greaterthan the greatest who had gone before; and it is not at all likelythat He who has just been saying that whosoever received Hisfollowers received Himself, should classify these followers beneaththe righteous men of old. The Christian type of character isdistinctly higher than the Old Testament type; and the humblestbeliever is blessed above prophets and righteous men because hiseyes behold and his heart welcomes the Christ. Therefore I am inclined to believe that we have here an ascendingseries--that we begin at the bottom and not at the top; that theprophet is less than the righteous man, and the righteous man lessthan the little one who believes in Christ. For, suppose there werea prophet who was not righteous, and a righteous man who was not aprophet. Suppose the separation between the two characters werecomplete, which of them would be the greater? Balaam was a prophet;Balaam was not a righteous man; Balaam was immeasurably inferior tothe righteous whose lives he did not emulate, though he could notbut envy their deaths. In like manner the humblest believer in JesusChrist has something that a prophet, if he is not a disciple, doesnot possess; and that which he has, and the prophet has not, ishigher than the endowment that is peculiar to the prophet alone. May we say the same thing about the difference between the righteousman and the disciple? Can there be a righteous man that is not adisciple? Can there be a disciple that is not a righteous man? Canthe separation between these two classes be perfect and complete?No! in the profoundest sense, certainly not. But then at the timewhen Christ spoke there were some men standing round Him, who, 'astouching the righteousness which is of the law, ' were 'blameless. 'And there are many men to-day, with much that is noble and admirablein their characters, who stand apart from the faith that is in JesusChrist; and if the separation be so complete as that, then it is tobe emphatically and decisively pronounced that, if we have regard toall that a man ought to be, and if we estimate men in the measure inwhich they approximate to that ideal in their lives and conduct, 'the Christian is the highest style of man. ' The disciple is abovethe righteous men adorned with many graces of character, who, ifthey are not Christians, have a worm at the root of all theirgoodness, because it lacks the supreme refinement and consecrationof faith; and above the fiery-tongued prophet, if he is not adisciple. Now, brethren, this thought is full of very important practicalinferences. Faith is better than genius. Faith is better thanbrilliant gifts. Faith is better than large acquirements. The poet'simagination, the philosopher's calm reasoning, the orator's tongueof fire, even the inspiration of men that may have their lipstouched to proclaim God to their brethren, are all less than thebond of living trust that knits a soul to Jesus Christ, and makes itthereby partaker of that indwelling Saviour. And, in like manner, ifthere be men, as there are, and no doubt some of them among myhearers, adorned with virtues and graces of character, but who havenot rested their souls on Jesus Christ, then high above these, too, stands the lowliest person who has set his faith and love on thatSaviour. Neither intellectual endowments nor moral character are thehighest, but faith in Jesus Christ. A man may be endowed with allbrilliancy of intellect and fair with many beauties of character, and he may be lost; and on the other hand simple faith, rudimentaryand germlike as it often is, carries in itself the prophecy of allgoodness, and knits a man to the source of all blessedness. 'Whetherthere be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, itshall vanish away. Now abideth these three, faith, hope, charity. ''Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you, but ratherrejoice because your names are written in Heaven. ' Ah! brethren, if we believed in Christ's classification of men, andin the order of importance and dignity in which He arranges them, itwould make a wonderful practical difference to the lives, to thedesires, and to the efforts of a great many of us. Some of youstudents, young men and women that are working at college or yourclasses, if you believed that it was better to trust in Jesus Christthan to be wise, and gave one-tenth, ay! one-hundredth part of theattention and the effort to secure the one which you do to securethe other, would be different people. 'Not many wise men after theflesh, ' but humble trusters in Jesus Christ, are the victors in theworld. 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, likephotographs that have been shut up in a portfolio, and when you takethem out have faded off the paper. 'The world knows nothing of itsgreatest men, ' but there is a time coming when the spurious mushroomaristocracy that the world has worshipped will be forgotten, likethe nobility of some conquered land, who are brushed aside andrelegated to private life by the new nobility of the conquerors, andwhen the true nobles, God's aristocrats, the righteous, who arerighteous because they have trusted in Christ, shall shine forthlike the sun 'in the Kingdom of My Father. ' Here is the climax: gifts and endowments at the bottom, characterand morality in the middle, and at the top faith in Jesus Christ. II. Now notice briefly in the second place the variety of the rewardaccording to the character. The prophet has his, the righteous man has his, the little one hashis. That is to say, each level of spiritual or moral staturereceives its own prize. There is no difficulty in seeing that thisis so in regard to the rewards of this life. Every faithful messagedelivered by a prophet increases that prophet's own blessedness, andhas joys in the receiving of it from God, in the speaking of it tomen, 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. Allcourses of obedient conduct have their own appropriate consequencesand satisfaction. Every character is adapted to receive, and doesreceive, in the measure of its goodness, certain blessings and joys, here and now. 'Surely the righteous shall be recompensed in theearth. ' And the same principle, of course, applies if we think of the rewardas altogether future. It must be remembered, however, thatChristianity does not teach, as I believe, that if there be aprophet or a righteous man who is not a disciple, that prophet orrighteous man will get rewards in the future life. It must beremembered, too, that every disciple is righteous in the measure ofhis faith. Discipleship being presupposed, then the disciple who isa prophet will have one reward, and the disciple who is a righteousman shall have another; and where all three characteristicscoincide, there shall be a triple crown of glory upon his head. That is all plain and obvious enough, if only we get rid of theprejudice that the rewards of a future life are merely bestowed uponmen by God's arbitrary good pleasure. What is the reward of Heaven?'Eternal life, ' people say. Yes! 'Blessedness. ' Yes! But where doesthe life come from, and where does the blessedness come from? Theyare both derived, they come from God in Christ; and in the deepestsense, and in the only true sense, God is Heaven, and God is thereward of Heaven. 'I am thy shield, ' so long as dangers need to beguarded against, and then, thereafter, 'I am thine exceeding greatReward. ' It is the possession of God that makes all the Heaven ofHeaven, the immortal life which His children receive, and theblessedness with which they are enraptured. We are heirs ofimmortality, 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 inHeaven, as on earth, men will get just as much of God as they canhold; and that in Heaven, as on earth, capacity for receiving God isdetermined by character. The gift is one, the reward is one, and yetthe reward is infinitely various. It is the same light which glowsin all the stars, but 'star differeth from star in glory. ' It is thesame wine, the new wine of the Kingdom, that is poured into all thevessels, but the vessels are of divers magnitudes, though each befull to the brim. And so in those two sister parables of our Master's, which are soremarkably discriminated and so remarkably alike, we have both theseaspects of the Heavenly reward set forth--both that which declaresits identity in all cases, and the other which declares its varietyaccording to the recipient's character. All the servants receive thesame welcome, the same prize, the same entrance into the same joy;although one of them had ten talents, and another five, and anothertwo. But the servants who were each sent out to trade with one poorpound in their hands, and by their varying diligence reaped varyingprofits, were rewarded according to the returns that they hadbrought; and one received ten, and the other five, and the othertwo, cities over which to have authority and rule. So the reward isone, and yet infinitely diverse. It is not the same thing whether aman or a woman, being a Christian, is an earnest, and devoted, andgrowing Christian here on earth, or a selfish, and an idle, and astagnant one. It is not the same thing whether you contentyourselves with simply laying hold on Christ, and keeping atremulous and feeble hold of Him for the rest of your lives, orwhether 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 goinginto the brightness with the smell of the fire on your garments. There is such a fate as having just, as it were, squeezed intoHeaven, and got there by the skin of your teeth. And there is such athing as having an abundant entrance ministered, when its portalsare thrown wide open. Some imperfect Christians die with but littlecapacity for possessing God, and therefore their heaven will not beas bright, nor studded with as majestic constellations, as that ofothers. The starry vault that bends above us so far away, is thesame in the number of its stars when gazed on by the savage with hisunaided eye, and by the astronomer with the strongest telescope; andthe 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 uponHim. So, brethren, remember that the one glory has infinite degrees;and faith, and conduct, and character here determine the capacityfor God which we shall have when we go to receive our reward. III. The last point that is here is the substantial identity of thereward to all that stand on the same level, however different may bethe form of their lives. 'He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receivea prophet's reward. ' And so in the case of the others. The activeprophet, righteous man, or disciple, and the passive recogniser ofeach in that character, who receives each as a prophet, or righteousman, or disciple, stand practically and substantially on the samelevel, though the one of them may have his lips glowing with thedivine inspiration and the other may never have opened his mouth forGod. That is beautiful and deep. The power of sympathising with anycharacter is the partial possession of that character for ourselves. A man who is capable of having his soul bowed by the stormy thunderof Beethoven, or lifted to Heaven by the ethereal melody ofMendelssohn, is a musician, though he never composed a bar. The manwho recognises and feels the grandeur of the organ music of'Paradise Lost' has some fibre of a poet in him, though he be but 'amute, inglorious Milton. ' All sympathy and recognition of character involve some likeness tothat character. The poor woman who brought the sticks and preparedfood for the prophet entered into the prophet's mission and sharedin 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 thatclapped Luther on the back when he went into the Diet of Worms, andsaid to him, 'Well done, little monk!' shared in Luther's victoryand in Luther's crown. He that helps a prophet because he is aprophet, 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 thesame type of spiritual character will involve the same reward. Youfind the Egyptian medal on the breasts of the soldiers that kept thebase of communication as well as on the breasts of the men thatstormed the works at Tel-el-Kebir. It was a law in Israel, and it isa law in Heaven: 'As his part is that goeth down into the battle, soshall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff, they shall partalike. ' 'I am going down into the pit, you hold the ropes, ' saidCarey, the pioneer missionary. They that hold the ropes, and thedaring miner that swings away down in the blackness, are one in thework, may be one in the motive, and, if they are, shall be one inthe reward. So, brethren, though no coal of fire may be laid uponyour lips, if you sympathise with the workers that are trying toserve God, and do what you can to help them, and identify yourselfwith 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 receivea prophet's reward. ' They who by reason of circumstances, bydeficiency of power, or by the weight of other tasks and duties, canonly give silent sympathy, and prayer, and help, are one with themen whom they help. Dear brethren! remember that this awful, mystical life of ours isfull everywhere of consequences that cannot be escaped. What we sowwe reap, and we grind it, and we bake it, and we live upon it. Wehave to drink as we have brewed; we have to lie on the beds that wehave made. 'Be not deceived: God is not mocked. ' The doctrine ofreward has two sides to it. 'Nothing human ever dies. ' All our deedsdrag after them inevitable consequences; but if you will put yourtrust in Jesus Christ, He will not deal with you according to yoursins, nor reward you according to your iniquities; and the darkestfeatures of the recompense of your evil will all be taken away bythe forgiveness which we have in His blood. If you will trustyourselves to Him you will have that eternal life, which is notwages, but a gift; which is not reward, but a free bestowment ofGod's love. And then, if we build upon that Foundation on whichalone men can build their hopes, their thoughts, their characters, their lives, however feeble may be our efforts, however narrow maybe 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 thefire is kindled which reveals and tests our works, that, by themight of humble faith in Christ, we have built upon that Foundation, gold and silver and precious stones; and shall receive the rewardgiven 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 2-6inclusive, giving us the faltering faith of the great witness, andChrist's gentle treatment of the waverer; the second, from verse 7to the end, giving the witness of Christ to John, exuberant inrecognition, notwithstanding his momentary hesitation. I. We do not believe that this message of John's was sent for the sakeof strengthening his disciples' faith in Jesus as Messiah, nor that itwas merely meant as a hint to Jesus to declare Himself. The questionis John's. The answer is sent to him: it is he who is to ponder thethings which the messengers saw, and to answer his own questionthereby. The note which the evangelist prefixes to his accountgives the key to the incident. John was 'in prison, ' in that gloomyfortress of Machaerus which Herod had rebuilt at once for 'a sinfulpleasure-house' and for an impregnable refuge, among the savage cliffsof 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 intowhich the bars were fixed to which the prisoners--John, perhaps, one ofthem--were chained. No wonder that in the foul atmosphere of a darkdungeon the spirit which had been so undaunted in the free air of thedesert began to flag; nor that even he who had seen the fluttering dovedescend 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 beenwiser if commentators, instead of trying to save John's credit at thecost of straining the narrative, had recognised the psychological truthof the plain story of his wavering conviction and had learned itslessons of self-distrust. There is only one Man with whom it was alwayshigh-water; all others have ebbs and flows in their religious life, andvariations in their grasp of truth. The narrative further gives the motive for John's embassy, in thereport which had reached him of 'the works of Christ. ' We need onlyrecall John's earlier testimony to understand how these works wouldnot seem to him to fill up the role which he had anticipated forMessiah. Where is the axe that was to be laid at the root of thetrees, or the fan that was to winnow out the chaff? Where is thefiery spirit which he had foretold? This gentle Healer is not thetheocratic judge of his warning prophecies. He is tending andnurturing, rather than felling, the barren trees. A nimbus ofmerciful deeds, not of flashing 'wrath to come, ' surrounds His head. So John began to wonder if, after all, he had been premature in hisrecognition. Perhaps this Jesus was but a precursor, as he himselfwas, of the Messiah. Evidently he continues firm in the convictionof Christ's being sent from God, and is ready to accept His answeras conclusive; but, as evidently, he is puzzled by the contrarietybetween Jesus' deeds and his own expectations. He asks, 'Art Thou_He that cometh_'--a well-known name for Messiah--'or are we toexpect 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 inprophecy, and as embodied in John's own preaching, which Jesus hadleft unfulfilled. We may well take to heart the lesson of the fluctuations possible tothe firmest faith, and pray to be enabled to hold fast that we have. We may learn, too, the danger to right conceptions of Christ, ofseparating the two elements of mercy and judgment in His characterand work. John was right in believing that the Christ must come tojudge. A Christ without the fan in His hand is a maimed Christ. Johnwas wrong in stumbling at the gentleness, just as many to-day, whogo to the opposite extreme, are wrong in stumbling at the judicialside of His work. Both halves are needed to make the full-orbedcharacter. We have not to 'look for a different' Christ, but we haveto look for Him, coming the second time, the same Jesus, but nowwith His axe in His pierced hands, to hew down trees which He haspatiently tended. Let John's profound sense of the need for ajudicial aspect in the Christ who is to meet the prophecies writtenin men's hearts, as well as in Scripture, teach us how one-sided andsuperficial are representations of His work which suppress or slurover 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 thoroughcure is needed. So Christ attacks it in its roots by referring himback for answer to the very deeds which had excited his doubt. Indoing so, He points to, or indeed, we may say, quotes, two propheticpassages (Isa. Xxxv. 5, 6; lxi. 1) which give the prophetic 'notes' ofMessiah. It is as if He had said, 'Have you forgotten that the veryprophets whose words have fed your hopes, and now seem to minister toyour doubts, have said this and this about the Messiah?' Further, there is deep wisdom in sending John back again to think over the verydeeds at which he was stumbling. It is not Christ's work which iswanting in conformity to the divine idea; it is John's conceptions ofthat idea that need enlarging. What he wants is not so much to be toldthat Jesus is the Christ, as to grow up to a truer, because morecomprehensive, notion of what the Christ is to be. A wide principle istaught us here. The very points in Christ's work which may occasiondifficulty, will, when we stand at the right point of view, becomeevidences of His claims. What were stumbling-blocks becomestepping-stones. Arguments against become proofs of, the truth when welook at them with clearer eyes, and from the proper angle. Further, weare taught here, that what Christ does is the best answer to thequestion 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 newworld, because they gaze with faith on Him. Lame limbs are endowedwith strength, and can run in the way of His commandments, and walkwith unfainting perseverance the thorniest paths of duty andself-sacrifice. Lepers are cleansed from the rotting leprosy of sin, and their flesh comes again, 'as the flesh of a little child. ' Deafears 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 knowshimself to be in need of all things may claim all things as his own inChrist. He who through the ages has been working such works, and worksthem still, 'needs not to speak anything' to confirm His claims, 'neither is there salvation in any other. ' We look for no secondChrist; but we look for that same Jesus to come the second time to bethe Judge of the world of which He is the Saviour. The benediction on him who finds none occasion of stumbling inChrist, is at once a beatitude and a warning. It rebukes in thegentlest fashion John's temper, which found difficulty in even theperfect personality of Jesus, and made that which should have beenthe 'sure foundation' of his spirit a stone of stumbling. Our Lord'sconsciousness of absolute perfection of moral character, and ofabsolute perfectness in His office and work, is distinct in thewords. He knows that 'there is none occasion of stumbling in Him, 'and that whoever finds any, brings it or makes it. He knows andwarns us that all blessedness lies for us in recognising Him forwhat He is--God's sure foundation of our hopes, our peace, ourthoughts, our lives. He knows that all woe and loss are involved instumbling on this stone, against which whosoever falls is broken, and by which, when it begins to move, and falls on a man, he isground to powder, like the dust of the threshing-floor. Whattremendous arrogance of assertion! Who is he who can venture on suchwords without blasphemy against God, and universal ridicule frommen? II. The witness of Christ to John. Praise from Jesus is praiseindeed; and it is poured out here with no stinted hand on thelanguishing prisoner whose doubts had just been brought to Him. Suchan eulogium at such a time is a wonderful instance of lovingforbearance with a true-hearted follower's weakness, and of a desirewhich, in a man, we should call magnanimous, to shield John'scharacter from depreciation on account of his message. The worldpraises a man to his face, and speaks of his faults behind his back. Christ does the opposite. Not till the messengers were departingdoes He begin to speak 'concerning John. ' He lays bare the secret ofthe Baptist's power, and allocates his place as greatest in oneepoch and as less than the least in another, with an authority morethan human, and on principles which set Himself high above allcomparison with men, whether the greatest or the least. The Kingplaces His subjects, and Himself sits enthroned above them all. First, Christ praises John's great personal character in thedramatic and vivid questions which begin this section. He recallsthe scenes of popular enthusiasm when all Israel streamed out to thedesert preacher. A small man could not have made such an upheaval. What drew the crowds? Just what will draw them; the qualitieswithout which, either possessed in reality or in popular estimation, no man can be a power religiously. The first essential is heroicfirmness. It was not reeds swaying in the wind by Jordan's banks, nor a poor feeble man like these, that the people flocked to listento. His emblem was not the reed, but 'an iron pillar. ' His wholecareer had been marked by decisiveness, constancy, courage. Nothingcan be done worth doing in the world without a wholesome obstinacyand imperturbability, which keep a man true to his convictions andhis task, whatever winds blow in his teeth. The multitudes will notflock to listen to a teacher who does not speak with the accent ofconviction, nor will truths feebly grasped touch the lips with fire. The first requisite for a religious teacher is that he shall be sureof his message and of himself. Athanasius has to 'stand against theworld' before the world accepts his teaching. 'Though there were asmany devils in Worms as there are tiles on the house-tops, go Iwill, ' said Luther. That is the temper for God's instruments. The next requisite, which John also had, is manifest indifference tomaterial ease. Silken courtiers do not haunt the desert. Kings'houses, and not either the wilderness or kings' dungeons, are thesunny spots where they spread their plumage. If the gaunt ascetic, with his girdle of camel's hair and his coarse fare, had been aself-indulgent sybarite, his voice would never have shaken a nation. The least breath of suspicion that a preacher is such a man ends hispower, and ought to end it; for self-indulgence and the love offleshly comforts eat the heart out of goodness, and make the eyestoo heavy to see visions. John was the same man then as they hadknown him to be; therefore it was no impatience of the hardships ofhis prison that had inspired his doubts. Our Lord next speaks of John's great office. He was a prophet. Thedim recognition that God spoke in His fiery words had drawn thecrowds, weary of teachers in whose endless jangle and jargon ofcasuistry was no inspiration. The voice of a man who gets hismessage at first-hand from God has a ring in it which even dull earsdetect as something genuine. Alas for the bewildering babble ofechoes and the paucity of voices to-day! So far Jesus had been appealing to His hearers' knowledge; He nowgoes on to add higher truth concerning John. He declares that he ismore than a prophet, because he is His messenger before His face;that is, immediately preceding Himself. We cannot stay to comment onthe remarkable variation between the original form of the quotationfrom Malachi and Christ's version of it, which, in its substitutionof 'thee' for 'me, ' bears so forcibly on the divinity of Christ; butwe may mark the principle on which John's superiority to the wholeprophetic order is based. It is that nearness to Jesus makesgreatness. The closer the relation to Him, the higher the honour. Inthat long procession the King comes last; and of 'them that gobefore, crying, Hosanna to Him that cometh, ' the order of precedenceis that the first are last, and that the highest is he who walks infront of the Sovereign. Next, we have the limitations of the forerunner and his relativeinferiority to the least in the kingdom of heaven. Another standardof greatness is here from that of the world, which smiles at thecontrast between the uncultured preacher of repentance and themighty thinkers, poets, legislators, kingdom-makers, whom it enrolsamong the great. In Christ's eyes greatness is nearness to Him, andunderstanding of Him and His work. Neither natural faculty nor worthis in question, but simply relation to the Kingdom and the King. Hewho had only to preach of Him who should come after him, and had buta partial apprehension of Christ and His work, stood on a lowerlevel than the least who has to look to a Christ who has come, andhas opened the gates of the kingdom to the humblest believer. Thetruths which were hid from ages, and were but visible as in morningtwilight to John, are sunlit to us. The scholars in our Sunday-schoolsknow familiarly more than prophets and kings ever knew. We 'hold thegrey barbarian lower than the Christian child'; and not merely he, butthe wisest of the prophets, and the forerunner himself. The history ofthe world is parted into two by the coming of Jesus Christ, as everydictionary of dates tells, and the least of the greater is greater thanthe greatest of the less. What a place, then, does Christ claim! Ourrelation to Him determines greatness. To recognise Him is to be in theKingdom of Heaven. Union to Him brings us to fulfil the ideal of humannature; and this is life, to know and trust Him, the King. Our Lord adds a brief characterisation of the effect of John'sministry. It was of mingled good and evil, and there is a tone ofsadness perceptible in the ambiguous words. John had aroused greatpopular excitement, and had stirred multitudes to seek to enter theKingdom. So far was good. But had all the crowds understood what sortof kingdom it was? Had they not too often dragged down the loftyconception to their own vulgar level, and, with their dream of anoutward sovereignty, thought to gain it for their own by violenceinstead of meekness, by arms and worldly force rather than bysubmission? The earnestness was good, but Christ's sad insight sawhow much strange fire had mingled in the blaze, as if some earth-bornsmoky flame should seek to blend with the pure sunlight. Such seemsthe most natural interpretation of the words, but they are ambiguous, and may possibly mean by 'the violent' those who had been roused togenuine earnestness by the clarion voice which rang in the ears ofthat slumbering generation. Then follows the explanation of this new interest in the kingdom. 'All the prophets and the law prophesied until John. ' The wholeperiod till his coming was one of preparation, and it all convergedon the epoch of the forerunner. The eagerness to flock into theKingdom which characterised his time would have been impossible inthe earlier days. He closes that order of things, standing, as itwere, on the isthmus between prophecy and fulfilment, belongingproperly to neither, but having affinities with both, and being thetransition from the one to the other. Then our Lord closes His wordsconcerning John with the distinct statement, which He expects Hishearers to have difficulty in receiving, probably from thecontradiction 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 flamedacross a corrupt age with a stern message of repentance ordestruction, was repeated in the lonely ascetic who had his Ahab inHerod, and his Jezebel in Herodias, and like his prototype, knew nofear, but flashed out the lightnings of his words on every sin. Thetwo men were brothers, and their voices answer each other across thecenturies. Christ crowns His witness to John while thus quoting thelast swansong of ancient prophecy, and thereby at once sets John ona pinnacle of greatness, and advances a claim concerning Himself allthe more weighty, because He leaves it to be inferred. 'He that hathears to hear, let him hear'--this eulogium on the forerunner needsto 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' wasalready above the horizon. Jesus' witness concerning John ends inwitness 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 wasreviled He reviled not again. ' If ever He did, it was for the sakeof those whom it harmed to distort His beauty. Thus, here He speaks, without the slightest trace of irritation, of the capriciousinconsistency of condemning Himself and John on precisely oppositegrounds. 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 thiscontrary working dislike? It was the dislike for the truths theyboth preached, the rejection of the wisdom of which they were themessengers. When men do not like the message, nothing that themessengers do, or are, is right. Never mind consistency, but objectto this form of Christian teaching that it is too harsh, and tothat, that it is too soft; to this man that he is always thunderingcondemnation, to that, that he is always preaching mercy; to one, that he has too much to say about duty, to another, that he dwellstoo much on grace; to this presentation of the gospel, that it istoo learned and doctrinal, to that, that it is too sentimental andemotional, and so on, and so on. The generation of children whoneither like piping nor lamenting, lives still. But my purpose now is not to dwell on the conduct with which ourLord is dealing, but on this caricature of Him which His own lipsrepeat without a sign of anger. It is the only calumny ofantagonists reported by Himself. We owe our knowledge of itscurrency to this saying. Like other words of His enemies, thissaying is a distorted refraction of His glory. The facts it embodiesare facts; the conclusions it draws are false. If Jesus had not comeeating and drinking, He could not have been called gluttonous and awine-bibber. If He had not drawn publicans and sinners to Him in aconspicuous manner and degree, He could not have been called theirfriend. The charge, like all others, is a tribute. Let us try to seewhat was the blessed truth that it caricatured. We may take the twopoints 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 Heshared our common lot in all things assumes proportions of majesticcondescension. Extend to all physical necessities, and to simple materialpleasures. What a witness this hostile criticism is to Christ's genialidentification 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 thecontrol, of the flesh by the spirit. And in accordance with thisthought, we may see in the eating and drinking Christ, the patternfor the religious life. Asceticism is not the noblest form ofsanctity. There is nothing more striking in Old Testament than theway 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. Whendevotion cools, it is crusted with superstition and external marksof godliness. Propriety in posturing in worship, casuistry in theinterpretation of law, and abstinence from common enjoyments, camein Pharisaic times. And into such a world Jesus came, eating anddrinking. But His bearing in these matters is example for us. They wererigidly kept in subordination. They were all done in communion withGod. So He has hallowed all by taking part in them. Christ should be present in all our material enjoyments. If youcannot think that He is with you, if you cannot conceive of Hisbeing there, that is no place for you. If you cannot feel that Heapproves, that is no fit enjoyment for you. The tendency of this day is to take a wider view of the libertyallowed to Christians in regard to partaking in material enjoyment, and I dare say that many of you who have thought that I spoke wellin insisting on all things belonging to the Christian, will thinkthat I am dropping back into the old narrow groove in my nextremark, that all such thoughts need guarding. One has heard the example of Christ invoked to justify unchristianlaxity and excess. Therefore I wish to say that the libertypermitted to Christians in these matters is to be limited within thelimits within which Christ's was confined. The excessive use of innocent things is not justified by Hisexample, nor is the use of things innocent in themselves, which aremixed 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 asagainst total abstinence. It has no bearing on the question. But ifHe gave up heaven for His brethren, I think that they who give up anindulgence for the sake of theirs are in the line of His action. Iventure to think that if Jesus Christ lived in England to-day, Hewould be a total abstinence fanatic. 'If thy hand offend thee, cut it off. ' Asceticism is not thehighest, but it is sometimes necessary. If my indulgence in innocentthings hurts me, or if my abstinence from them would help others, orincrease my power for good, or if innocent things are intertwistedwith things not innocent, then it is vain to try to shelter underChrist's example, and the only right course for His disciple is toabridge his liberty. He came eating and drinking, therefore Hisfollowers may use all innocent earthly blessings and bodilypleasures, subject to this one law: 'Whether ye eat or drink, orwhatever ye do, do all to the glory of God, ' and to this solemnwarning: 'He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reapcorruption. ' 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 tohave them round Him. The inference natural to low natures was_noscitur a sociis_ and that the bond between Him and them wascommon evil tendencies and ways. His censors could not conceive ofany one's seeking the outcasts from pity and for their good. (_a_) Christ's consorting with these was the revelation of Hislove 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 moralearnestness. How difficult for anything but actual sight of such a life to havepainted it! Where did the evangelists get such an embodiment of twoattitudes so unlike each other, and which we so seldom see united infact? I venture to think that the combination in perfect harmony andproportion of these, is a strong presumption in favour of thehistorical truth of the Christ of the gospels. But remember that if we take His own statement ('He that hath seenMe hath seen the Father'), we are to see in this kindly consortingwith sinners not only the love of a perfectly pure manhood, but arevelation of the heart of God. And that adds wonderfulness and aweto the fact. This man to whom sinners were drawn by strangeattraction, in whom they found the highest purity and yet softesttenderness, therein revealed God. (_b_) It witnesses to His boundless hope. No outcasts were hopeless in His view. To man's eyes there arehopeless 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 hightemperature of love, just as there are no metals that cannot bevolatilised 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 ofmere educationists or moralists. None of them paint human nature so black as it does, but none ofthem have such boundless confidence in the possibility of making itlustrously white. Urge, then, that none are beyond the power of Christ's gospel. Hisdivine Spirit can change any man. There are no incurables in thejudgment of the great Physician. (_c_) It witnesses to the truth that gross sin does not shutout from Him so much as does self-complacent ignorance of our ownneed. '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 weare not sinners and do not need Him. This boundless hopefulness and seeking after the outcasts is theunique glory of Christianity. What has been the mainspring of allmovements for their elevation? What broke the chains of slavery?What has sent men to the ends of the earth for the elevation ofsavage races? What is the motive power in the benevolent works ofthis day? Is it philosophical altruism or is it Christian faith? Nodoubt, there are some sporadic movements among people who do notaccept the gospel. At present, I do not ask how far these are due tothe underground influence of Christianity filtering to men who standapart from it. But I gravely doubt whether you will ever get anylarge, continuous, self-sacrificing efforts for the outcasts, unlessthey are the direct result of the spirit of Christ moving on men whoowe their own deliverance to Him. We have not yet seen agnosticmissionary societies or the like. This spirit must mark all living Christianity. If ever churchesforget their obligations to the publicans and sinners, they willcease to grow. It will be a sign that they have lost their hold ofChrist. They will soon die, and no mourners will attend theirfunerals. It is a good sign to-day that all Christian churches arewaking up to feel more their obligations to the outcasts. Only, wemust take heed that we go to them as Christ did, making nocompromise with sin, speaking no false flatteries, and bent on onething, their emancipation from the evil which is slaying them. Let us all take the blessed thought for ourselves, that Jesus Christis our friend because He is the friend of sinners, and we aresinners. Degrees of sinfulness vary, but the fact is invariable. Theuniversality of sinfulness makes the universality of Christ's lovethe more wonderful and blessed. If He did not love sinners, therewould be none for Him to love. We may be His enemies, or may neglectall His beseechings; but He is still our friend, wishing us well, and desiring to bless us. But He cannot give us His deepestfriendship unless we are willing to recognise our sin. We must cometo Him on the footing of transgressors if we are to come to Him atall. He will deliver us from our sins. Appeal to give hearts to Him. How has He shown His friendship? 'Greater love hath no man thanthis, ' 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 Mohammedanlands is still El Khalil, the companion or friend. That is ourhighest 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 anotherconnection in Luke's Gospel. He attaches them to his report of themission of the seventy disciples. Matthew here introduces them in anorder which seems not to depend upon time, but upon identity ofsubject. It is his method in his Gospel to group together similarevents, as we have it exemplified, for instance, in the Sermon onthe Mount, and in the long procession of miracles which immediatelyfollows it, as well as in other parts of the Gospel. In this chapterit is not difficult to discover the common idea which binds itsparts into a whole. We have a number of instances strung together, illustrating the different effects of Christ's appearance and workon different classes of persons. There pass before us, John theBaptist with his doubts, the excitable multitude ready to take theKingdom of Heaven by storm, the critics who cavilled with impartialinconsistency alike at John's asceticism and at Christ's freedom. Then follow the woes pronounced by Him upon the indifference ofthose who knew Him best, and these are succeeded by His rejoicing inspirit over the babes who accepted Him; and the whole is crowned bygreat words of invitation which extend equally over those and overall other varieties of disposition, and, since all 'labour and areheavy laden, ' summon all, be they what they may, to come and findrest in Him. Obviously, then, the order in this chapter is not thatof time, but that of subject. Notice that of all these different classes and types of characterthat pass in review before us, the one that is singled out for thesolemn denunciation of heavy judgment is that of the people whostood in a blaze of light, and simply paid no attention to it. Theseare the worst sort. I wonder how many of them are in my audiencenow? Let me try, then, to bring before you the thoughts naturallysuggested by these introductory words, and the solemn, sorrowfulforebodings of retribution which follow them. I ask you to look atthree things, --the blaze of light; the neglect of the light; therebuke for the neglected light. 'Jesus began to upbraid the citieswherein 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 miraclesof our Lord were wrought in these three places. 'Cities, ' our Biblecalls them; two of them were little fishing villages, the third asomewhat considerable town. Where are these miracles recorded? Notin our gospels. As for Chorazin, we never hear its name except inthis verse, and in the parallel in Luke's Gospel; and all that Hedid there is swallowed up in oblivion. As for Bethsaida, there are acouple of miracles, probably, recorded as having been wrought there, though there is some obscurity in reference to the locality of atleast one of them. As for Capernaum, there are several miraclesrecorded as having been performed in that place, and several othersreferred to as having been done there. But there is nothing in thefour 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 andincomplete these four gospels avowedly are! They harvest for us afew ears plucked in the great waving cornfield, --and all the otherswithered and died where they grew. The light falls upon one or twogroups in the crowd of miserables whom He helped, the rest lie indim shadow. You have to think of dozens, I suppose I should not beexaggerating if I were to say hundreds, of miracles unrecorded butknown, lying behind the specimens that we have in the gospels. 'Manyother things truly did Jesus, which are not written in this book. ' Our Lord takes these two little fishing villages, and He parallelsand contrasts them with the two great maritime cities of Tyre andSidon, and says that these insignificant places have far more lightthan those had. Then He isolates Capernaum, a place of moreimportance, and His own usual settled residence; and, in likemanner, He contrasts it with the long-buried Sodom, and proclaimsthe superiority of the illumination which fell on the more modernthree. Why were they so superior? Because they had Moses? becausethey had the prophets, the law, the temple, the priesthood? By nomeans. Because they had _Him_. So He sets Himself forth asbeing the highest and clearest of all the revelations that God hasmade to the world, and asserts that in Him, in His character, in Hisdeeds, men ought to find motives that should bow them in penitencebefore God; motives sweeter, tenderer, stronger than any that theworld knows besides. There is no such light of the knowledge of theglory of God anywhere else as there is in the face of Jesus Christ. And oh! brother; no thoughts of the nobleness of rectitude, and theimperfection of one's own life, no thoughts of a divine justice anda divine punishment, will bow a man in penitence like having oncecaught a glimpse of the perfect sweetness and perfect beauty of theperfect Humanity that is revealed to us in Jesus Christ. But now, mark;--as Capernaum is to Sodom, so is Manchester toCapernaum! I wonder if Jesus Christ were to come amongst us now, whether He would not repeat in spirit the same lesson that is in mytext, and bid us contrast our greater illumination with the morningtwilight that dawned upon these men, and yet was light enough tobring condemnation? Think, --these people of whom our Lord isspeaking here, and setting them high above Tyre and Sidon and Sodom, knew nothing about His cross, death, resurrection, ascension. Theyknew Him only as 'a dubious Name, ' as a possible Divine Messengerand a Miracle-worker; but all the sweetest and the deepest thoughtsabout Him lay unrevealed. Whilst they stood but in the morningtwilight, you and I stand in the noonday blaze. _They_ might bepardoned for doubting whether the light that shone from Him wassunshine or candle, but men of this twentieth century, who have thewhole story of Christ, which is the gospel for the world, wroughtout through all the tragedy and pathos of His death, and triumph andpower of His resurrection, and who have, besides, the history of theworld and of the Church for nineteen centuries, are moreunpardonable 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, ofthe heavenly radiance. A whole Christ, a crucified Christ, a risenChrist, an ascended Christ, a Christ who is the Lord of the Spirit, a Christ who through the centuries is saving and blessing men, aChrist who can point to nineteen hundred years and say, 'That is Mywork, in so far as it is good and noble, '--this Christ shines with aclearer evidence than the Miracle-worker of Capernaum and Bethsaida. And to you the word comes, 'If the mighty works which have been donein _thee_, had been done in Bethsaida and Chorazin, they wouldhave remained until this day. ' There are many of you here saturated with the knowledge of thegospel, 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 thatis' round 'thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!' II. That brings me in the next place to notice the negligentindifference to the Light in all its blaze. The men of these three little fishing towns were not sinners aboveall the Galileans of their day. Their crime was that they didnothing. No persecution is recorded as having been raised againstHim by them; there were no angry antagonisms, no scornful words, noviolent opposition. They simply stolidly stood like some black rockin the sunshine, and let the sunshine pour down upon them, andremained grim and black as ever. That was all. That is to say, the thing that brings down the severest rebuke is notthe 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 themessage of God's word. It is not a difficult thing to incur thiscondemnation. You have simply to do what some of you are doing, andhave been doing all your lives, as to Christianity, and that is--nothing!You have simply to acquiesce politely and respectfully, as many of youdo, and say you are Christians; and there an end. You have simply totake my words (as I fear so many of those that listen to them do) asmatters of course, the proper things to be said on a Sunday, and for meto say, which may be very true in some vague, general way, but whichhave 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, andestate; and the negative sin of simple indifference avails to put abarrier between you and Jesus Christ, through which none of His blessingcan 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 mandoes _not_ take the medicine, by doing nothing he has committedsuicide. And simple passivity, that is to say (to translate it outof Latin into good, honest English), doing nothing, is all that isneeded 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 andclean-living native of Capernaum saying, 'What! those foul beasts inSodom better off than I? Impossible!' Well, Jesus Christ says soupon very intelligible grounds. The measure of light is the measureof responsibility. That is one ground. And the not preferring Him isthe 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, asof a disposition not stiff enough to take any impression, is foundmost deeply seated, and hopeless, amongst--shall I venture?--amongstpeople like _you_, who have been listening, listening, listening, untilyour systems have become so habituated to this Christian preachingthat it does not produce the least effect. It all runs off you likerain off waterproof. You have waterproofed your consciences and yourspiritual susceptibilities by long habit of listening and doing nothing. And some of you have come to this point, that you positively ratherlike the titillation and excitement, slight though it may be, whichis 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 hebelieved what he was saying. And so perhaps some of you are feelinghere to-night. Ah! my dear friends, it is possible for a man to live by the side ofNiagara until he cannot hear the cataract; and it is an awful thingfor men and women to live under the sound of Christian teachinguntil it produces no more effect upon their wills and natures thanthe ringing of the church bells, to which they pay no attention. You do not know the despair that comes over us preachers time aftertime, as we look down upon the faces of our congregations, and feel, 'What _shall_ I do to put a sharp enough point upon this truthto get it into the heart of some man that has been sitting there aslong as I have been standing here, and is never a bit the better forit?' Our most earnest preaching is like putting a red-hot iron intoa pond: the cold water puts it out and closes above it, and there isno more heard nor seen of it. Our old Puritan forefathers used totalk about 'gospel-hardened hearers. ' I believe that there arepeople listening to me now who have become so inured to Christianpreaching that, like artillery horses, they will not move a muscleor quiver if a whole battery of cannon is fired off under theirnoses. God knows I despair sometimes, many a time, when I think ofthe hundreds of people to whom I speak, year after year, and howthere seems next to nothing in the world to come of it all. III. Now lastly, notice here the rebuke of this negligence of thelight. 'He began to upbraid the cities. ' But oh! we shall misunderstand Himand His purpose if we think that that upbraiding was anything butthe sorrowful expression of His own loving heart, which warned ofwhat 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 ownheart felt the woe, as He laid bare the sin and foreannounced theretribution. I do not feel that I dare dwell upon, or that it beseems me to saymuch about, this solemn thought. Only, dear friends, I do desire, ifI 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. Beneaththe broad folds of that 'more tolerable' there lie infinite degreesof retribution. The same deed done by a group of men may beindefinitely varied in its culpability, according to the motives andthe clearness of knowledge which accompany or prompt the doing ofit. And so, just because the life beyond is the accurate outcome andissue of the whole character and conduct, estimated according tomotive and knowledge, therefore there must be differences infinitelywide between the fate of the servant that knew his Lord's will, andthe servant that knew not. Where do you think we gospel-drenched English men and women willstand in that allocation of culpability? I do not presume to saymore, but I beseech you, --let no present controversies about theduration and the possible termination of retribution in anotherstate, or the possible prolongation of a probation into anotherstate, blind you to the fact that however these questions besettled, this is a truth, independent of them, but being forgottenamidst the dust of controversy, that the next life is a life ofretribution, and that there you and I will give account of ourdeeds, and chiefly of our attitude to Jesus. And now let me say, in one word, --hoisting the danger-signal is thework of kindness, and Jesus Christ was never more loving than whenfrom His lips there came these words, heavy with His own sorrow, andstern with the prophecy of retribution. I know that Christianteachers have often spoken of the solemn things beyond, in tonesmuch to be deplored, and which weaken the force of their message. But surely, surely, if we believe in a judgment to come, and if webelieve that some of those that listen to us are in peril of it, surely, surely, the plainest duty is that with tears in our voiceand pleading tenderness in our tone, seeing the sword coming, weshould give warning, and beseech men to flee for refuge to the hopeof 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 yethat labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. ' Dear friends, we stand in the blaze of the light. Our familiaritywith Jesus Christ may be our ruin. We are tempted to pay no heed toHis words because we know them so well. Neglect of Christ on yourpart will bring deeper woes on your head than the people ofCapernaum pulled down upon theirs. The brighter the sunshine, thelouder the thunder and the fiercer the lightning; the longer thesummer day, the longer the winter night; the closer the comet comesto the sun, the further away it plunges, at the other extremity ofits orbit, into space and darkness. So I beseech you, listen as ifyou had never heard it before, and listen as if your lives dependedupon it (as indeed they do) to that merciful invitation, 'Come untoMe, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, ' and then you will getrest for your souls here, and at that day when Sodom and Capernaumand Manchester--they and we--shall stand before His throne, you maylift up your eyes, and be glad to see who it is that sits on thetribunal, and that you learned to know and love the face of yourSaviour, 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 toheaven and sighed. Sorrow filled His soul in the act of workingdeliverance. The thought of the depth of the miseries He had come toheal, and of the ocean of them which He was then diminishing but byone poor drop, saddened Him. When Jesus thought of the woes that hadfallen on the impenitent Sodom, and of the worse that still remainedto 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. DidHe lift up His solemn thanksgiving to God, for the woes that hadfallen 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, butfor that full and universal offer and possibility of salvation, which forms the reason for both the revelation to babes and thehiding from the wise. If we attend to the connection of this passagewe get light on its force. It begins with a clear prophecy ofendless woe and sorrow upon the rejecters. Then comes my text, alleviating the terror of that thought of destruction by showing theprinciples on which the reception and rejection are especiallybased, the sort of people who receive and who reject. Then followsthe reason why the wise are shut out and the babes let in. Thatreason is not only God's inscrutable decree, but something in thevery nature of the Gospel. God is hidden from all human sight. Thereis one divine Revealer apart from whom all is darkness. 'Neitherdoth any man know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever theSon willeth to reveal Him. ' That is the characteristic which shutsout the wise and lets in the simple. Then follows the great call to all to come to Him. The practicalissue of all these solemn thoughts is that the Gospel is a Gospelfor all the world, and that the one qualification for coming withinthe terms of its offer is to be 'weary and heavy laden. ' Thus allends in the broad universality of the message, in its adaptation toall, in its offer to all; and thus it is shown that every apparentexclusion of any is but the result of its free offer to all, andthat to say 'Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent'is but to say, 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to thewaters. ' Well then might joy fill the heart of the Man of Sorrows. Well might He lift up His solemn thanksgiving to God and say, 'Ithank 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 thehiding if we understand what it is which is offered. It is of such anature as necessarily to involve a twofold effect, caused by atwofold attitude towards it. 1. The Gospel addresses itself to all men--man as man--not to whatis sectional or accidental, not to classes, not to schools, not tothe _élite_. It is broad and universal. It speaks no dialect ofa province, but the universal language. It is addressed to Man asMan. 'We have all of us one human heart. ' It appeals to the nobleand the peasant, to the beggar on the dunghill and to the prince onhis throne, in precisely the same fashion. It is equal as theprovidence of God, impartial as the light, universal as the airwhich reddens equally the blood that flows in long-descended veinsand that of the foundling on the streets. In its sublimeuniversality there are no distinctions. Death and the Gospel know noranks. In both, 'the rich and the poor meet together, the Lord isthe Maker of them all. ' 'In Christ Jesus there is neithercircumcision nor uncircumcision. ' The blue sky which bends above allalike 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, butdeliverance, and in form it is not a theory but a fact, not a systemof _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 fromthe characteristics. The persons who receive must be those who consent to take thestation which the Gospel assigns. They must be babes, by which ismeant not such as are innocent, but such as are reliant on a higherPower, self-distrustful, willing to obey. These qualifications are all moral. The organ for reception of theGospel is the heart, not the head. To receive it by faith is aspiritual, not an intellectual process. Ignorance is noqualification nor no disqualification. Ignorance or knowledge isimmaterial. The one condition is to be willing to accept. III. The disqualification of the wise as necessarily resulting fromthe 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 nothingto do in the matter. Its presence or its absence is quiteindifferent here as in many other spheres of experience. The joys ofthe affections, the joys of common emotions, the joys of bodilylife--all these are utterly independent of the culture of theunderstanding. Hence 'wisdom' becomes a barrier, because its possessors areaccustomed to think it the master key. Not intellect, but the prideof intellect, trusting in it, glorying in wisdom is thedisqualification. It is not true that there is any discord between religion andcultivated thought. The loftier the soul, the loftier all itsattributes, the nobler should be, may be, its religion. It is nottrue that there is any natural affinity between ignorance andreligion, between narrow understandings and deep faith. That is notthe Bible truth. The religion of Christ is not like owls that lovethe twilight, but like eagles that 'purge their sight at the veryfountain itself of heavenly radiance. ' Take history: the great names--an Augustine and a Luther, a Danteand a Milton, a Bacon and a Pascal--are enough to show that there isno antagonism. On the other hand, names enough rise to show thatthere is no alliance. The inference is that the intellect has littleto 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 apparentexclusion is the result of the universality, and that 'Come unto Me'is Christ's commentary on my text. Well then may we rejoice when wethink of a gospel for the world. Whatever you are, it is for you ifyou are a man. However foolish, though you cannot read a letter andknow 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 isa 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 adeeper chamber in your heart than any into which knowledge canpenetrate. Christ brings a gospel for all. When we think of it, withits sublime disregard of all peculiarities, we may well rejoice withhim who said, 'Ye see your calling, brethren, ' and with Him, theloftiest, the incarnate, Wisdom who said, 'I thank Thee, Father. 'For if you rightly grasp the bearing of this text, and mark whatfollows it in our Lord's heart and thoughts, you will see these deepeyes of solemn joy turned from the heaven to you, filmy withcompassion, and those hands, then lifted in rapt devotion, stretchedout to beckon you and all the world to His breast, and hear thevoice that rose in that burst of thanksgiving melting intotenderness as it woos you, be you wise or ignorant, to come to Himand 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 inthese wonderful words. A divine penetration into man's truecondition, and a divine pity, are expressed in them. Jesus lookswith clearsighted compassion into the inmost history of all hearts, and sees the toil and the sorrow which weigh on every soul. And noless remarkable is the divine consciousness of power, to succour andto help, which speaks in them. Think of a Jewish peasant of thirtyyears old, opening his arms to embrace the world, and saying to allmen, 'Come and rest on My breast. ' Think of a man supposing himselfto be possessed of a charm which could soothe all sorrow and liftthe weight from every heart. A great sculptor has composed a group where there diverge from thecentral figure on either side, in two long lines, types of all thecruel 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 droppingbenediction, Christ the Consoler. The artist has but embodied theclaim which the Master makes for Himself here. No less remarkable isHis own picture of Himself, as 'meek and lowly in heart. ' Did everanybody before say, 'I am humble, ' without provoking the comment, 'He that says he is humble proves that he is not'? But Jesus Christsaid 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 ourLord contained in these marvellous words, as to try, as well as Ican, to re-echo, however faintly, the invitation that sounds inthem. There is a very striking reduplication running through themwhich is often passed unnoticed. I shall shape my remarks so as tobring out that feature of the text, asking you to look first with meat the twofold designation of the persons addressed; next at thetwofold invitation; and last at the twofold promise of rest. I. Consider then the twofold designation here of the personsaddressed, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden. ' The one word expresses effort and toil, the other a burden andendurance. The one speaks of the active, the other of the passive, side of human misery and evil. Toil is work which is distasteful initself, or which is beyond our faculties. Such toil, sometime orother, more or less, sooner or later, is the lot of every man. Allwork becomes labour, and all labour, sometime or other, becomestoil. The text is, first of all, and in its most simple and surfacemeaning, an invitation to all the men who know how ceaseless, howwearying, how empty the effort and energy of life is, to come tothis Master and rest. You remember those bitter words of the Book of Ecclesiastes, wherethe preacher sets forth a circle of labour that only comes back tothe point where it began, as being the law for nature and the lawfor man. And truly much of our work seems to be no better than that. We are like squirrels in a cage, putting forth immense musculareffort, and nothing to show for it after all. 'All is vanity, andstriving after wind. ' Toil is a curse; work is a blessing. But all our work darkens intotoil; and the invitation, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour, 'reaches to the very utmost verge of the world and includes everysoul. And then, in like manner, the other side of human experience is setforth in that other word. For most men have not only to work, but tobear; not only to toil, but to sorrow. There are efforts that needto be put forth, which task all our energy, and leave the musclesflaccid 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 aforge-hammer; to labour whilst memories and thoughts that mightenfeeble any worker, are busy with us. A burden of sorrow, as wellas effort and toil, is, sooner or later, the lot of all men. But that is only surface. The twofold designation here before usgoes a great deal deeper than that. It points to two relationshipsto God and to God's law of righteousness. Men labour with vague andyet with noble effort, sometimes, to do the thing that is right, andafter all efforts there is left a burden of conscious defect. In thepurest and the highest lives there come both of these things. AndJesus Christ, in this merciful invitation of His, speaks to all themen that have tried, and tried in vain, to satisfy their consciencesand 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 yourshoulders. Come unto Me, and I will give you rest. ' I should be sorry to think that I was speaking to any man or womanwho had not, more or less, tried to do what is right. You havelaboured at that effort with more or less of consistency, with moreor less of earnestness. Have you not found that you could notachieve it? I am sure that I am speaking to no man or woman who has not upon hisor her conscience a great weight of neglected duties, of actualtransgressions, of mean thoughts, of foul words and passions, ofdeeds that they would be ashamed that any should see; ashamed thattheir dearest should catch a glimpse of. My friend, universalsinfulness is no mere black dogma of a narrow Calvinism; it is nouncharitable indictment against the race; it is simply putting intodefinite words the consciousness that is in every one of yourhearts. 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 burdenon your back whether you realise the fact or no, a burden that clogsall your efforts, and that will sink you deeper into the darknessand 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, sometimesforgetting it, but often reminded of its pressure by galledshoulders 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 ifyou saw your name written on the pages of your New Testament, whenHe says to you, 'Come unto Me, _all_ ye that labour and areheavy laden. ' For the 'all' is but the sum of the units; and I, andthou, 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 twothings are not the same. 'Coming unto Me, ' as is quite plain to themost superficial observation, is the first step in the approach to acompanionship, which companionship is afterwards perfected and keptup by obedience and imitation. The 'coming' is an initial act whichmakes a man Christ's companion. And the 'Take My yoke upon you, andlearn of Me, ' is the continuous act by which that companionship ismanifested and preserved. So that in these words, which come sofamiliarly to most of our memories that they have almost ceased topresent a sharp meaning, there is not only a merciful summons to theinitial act, but a description of the continual life of which thatact 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 meaningin that invitation, by another word of His: 'He that cometh unto Meshall never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst';where the parallelism of the clauses teaches us that to come toChrist is simply to put our trust in Him. There is in faith a truemovement of the whole soul towards the Master. I think that thismetaphor teaches us a great deal more about that faith that we arealways talking about in the pulpit, and which, I am afraid, many ofour congregations do not very distinctly understand, than many abook of theology does. To 'come to Him' implies, distinctly, thatHe, and no mere theological dogma, however precious and clear, isthe Object on which faith rests. And, therefore, if Christ, and not merely a doctrinal truth aboutChrist, be the Object of our faith, then it is very clear thatfaith, which grasps a Person, must be something more than the mereact of the understanding which assents to a truth. And what more isit? How is it possible for one person to lay hold of and to come toanother? By trust and love, and by these alone. These be the bondsthat bind men together. Mere intellectual consent may be sufficientto fasten a man to a dogma, but there must be will and heart at workto 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 morethan our brains that we grasp Him and draw near to Him. That is tosay, your will is engaged in your confidence. Trust Him as you trustone another, only with the difference befitting a trust directed toan absolute and perfect object of trust, and not to a poor, variablehuman heart. Trust Him as you trust one another. Then, just ashusband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend, pass throughall intervening hindrances and come together when they trust andlove, so you come closer to Christ as the very soul of your soul byan inward real union, than you do even to your dear ones, if yougrapple Him to your heart with the hoops of steel, which, by simpletrust in Him, the Divine Redeemer forges for us. 'Come unto Me, 'being translated out of metaphor into fact, is simply 'Believe onthe Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. ' And still further, we have here, not only the initial act by whichcompanionship and union with Jesus Christ is brought about, but thecontinual course by which it is kept up, and by which it ismanifested. The faith which saves a man's soul is not all which isrequired for a Christian life. 'Take My yoke upon you, and _learnof Me_. ' The yoke is that which, laid on the broad forehead orthe thick neck of the ox, has attached to it the cords which arebound to the burden that the animal draws. The burden, then, whichChrist gives to His servants to pull, is a metaphor for the specificduties which He enjoins upon them to perform; and the yoke by whichthey are fastened to their burdens, 'obliged' to their duties, isHis authority, So to 'take His yoke' upon us is to submit our willsto His authority. Therefore this further call is addressed to allthose who have come to Him, feeling their weakness and their needand their sinfulness, and have found in Him a Saviour who has madethem restful and glad; and it bids them live in the deepestsubmission 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 getChrist's will for His children completely expressed. There are someof you who think that Christianity is only a means by which you mayescape the penalty of your sins; and you are ready enough, or fancyyourselves so, to listen when He says, 'Come to Me that you may bepardoned, ' but you are not so ready to listen to what He saysafterwards, when He calls upon you to take His yoke upon you, toobey Him, to serve Him, and above all to copy Him. And I beseech youto remember that if you go and part these two halves from oneanother, as many people do, some of them bearing away the one halfand some the other, you have got a maimed Gospel; in the one case afoundation without a building, and in the other case a buildingwithout a foundation. The people who say that Christ's call to theworld is 'Come unto Me, ' and whose Christianity and whose Gospel isonly a proclamation of indulgence and pardon for past sin, have laidhold 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 aproclamation of the duty of pure living after the pattern of JesusChrist our great Example, have laid hold of the other half of thetruth. And both halves bleed themselves away and die, being tornasunder; put them together, and each has power. That separation is one reason why so many Christian men and womenare such poor Christians as they are--having so little realreligion, and consequently so little real joy. I could lay myfingers upon many men, professing Christians--I do not say whetherin this church or in other churches--whose whole life shows thatthey do not understand that Jesus Christ has a twofold summons toHis servants; and that it is of no avail once, long ago, to havecome, or to think that you have come, to Him to get pardon, unlessday by day you are keeping beside Him, doing His commandments, andcopying 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 theslight diversity of language in the two verses, so as that in theone case the promise runs, 'I will _give_ you rest, ' and in theother, 'Ye shall _find_ rest. ' That sounds as if the rest thatwas contingent upon the first of the invitations was in a certainand more direct and exclusive fashion Christ's gift than the restwhich was contingent upon the second. It may be so, but I attach noimportance to that criticism; only I would have you observe that ourLord distinctly separates here between the rest of 'coming, ' and therest of wearing His 'yoke. ' These two, howsoever they may be likeeach other, are still not the same. The one is the perfecting andthe prolongation, no doubt, of the other, but has likewise in itsome other, I say not more blessed, elements. Dear brethren, hereare two precious things held out and offered to us all. There isrest in coming to Christ; the rest of a quiet conscience which gnawsno more; the rest of a conscious friendship and union with God, inwhom alone are our soul's home, harbour, and repose; the rest offears dispelled; the rest of forgiveness received into the heart. Doyou want that? Go to Christ, and as soon as you go to Him you willget that rest. There is rest in faith. The very act of confidence is repose. Lookhow that little child goes to sleep in its mother's lap, secure fromharm because it trusts. And, oh! if there steal over our hearts sucha sweet relaxation of the tension of anxiety when there is some dearone on whom we can cast all responsibility, how much more may we bedelivered from all disquieting fears by the exercise of quietconfidence in the infinite love and power of our Brother Redeemer, Christ! He will be 'a covert from the storm, and a refuge from thetempest'; as 'rivers of water in a dry place, and the shadow of agreat rock in a weary land. ' If we come to Him, the very act ofcoming brings repose. But, brethren, that is not enough, and, blessed be God! that is notall. There is a further, deeper rest in obedience, and emphaticallyand most blessedly there is a rest in Christ-likeness. 'Take My yokeupon you. ' There is repose in saying 'Thou art my Master, and toThee I bow. ' You are delivered from the unrest of self-will, fromthe unrest of contending desires, you get rid of the weight of toomuch liberty. There is peace in submission; peace in abdicating thecontrol of my own being; peace in saying, 'Take Thou the reins, anddo Thou rule and guide me. ' There is peace in surrender and intaking His yoke upon us. And most especially the path of rest for men is in treading inChrist's footsteps. 'Learn of Me, ' it is the secret of tranquillity. We have done with passionate hot desires, --and it is these thatbreed all the disquiet in our lives--when we take the meekness andthe lowliness of the Master for our pattern. The river will nolonger roll, broken by many a boulder, and chafed into foam overmany 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 inceasing 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, mingledwith fire, ' that lies pure, transparent, waveless before the Throneof God, over which no tempests rave, and which, in its deepestdepths, 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 isconstructed, not on chronological, but on logical lines. It groupstogether incidents related in subject, though separated in time. Thus we have the collection of Christ's sayings in the Sermon on theMount, followed by the collection of doings in chapters viii. Andix. , the collected charge to His ambassadors in chapter x. , thecollection of instances illustrative of the relations of differentclasses to the message of the Kingdom and its King in chapter xi. , and now in this chapter a series of incidents setting forth thegrowing bitterness of antagonism on the part of the guardians oftraditional and ceremonial religion. This is followed, in the nextchapter, with a series of parables. The present lesson includes two Sabbath incidents, in the first ofwhich the disciples are the transgressors of the sabbatic tradition;in the second, Christ's own action is brought into question. Thescene of the first is in the fields, that of the second is in thesynagogue. In the one, Sabbath observance is set aside at the callof personal needs; in the other, at the call of another's calamity. So the two correspond to the old Puritan principle that the Sabbathlaw allowed of 'works of necessity and of mercy. ' I. The Sabbath and personal needs. This is a strange sort of Kingwho cannot even feed His servants. What a glimpse into the penury oftheir usual condition the quiet statement that the disciples werehungry gives us, especially if we remember that it is not likelythat the Master had fared better than they! Indeed, His reference toDavid and his band of hungry heroes suggests that 'He was anhungred' as well as 'they that were with Him. ' As they traversedsome field path through the tall yellowing corn, they gathered a fewears, as the merciful provision of the law allowed, and hastilybegan to eat the rubbed-out grains. As soon as they 'began, ' theeager Pharisees, who seem to have been at their heels, call Him to'behold' this dreadful crime, which, they think, requires Hisimmediate remonstrance. If they had had as sharp eyes for men'snecessities as for their faults, they might have given them foodwhich it was 'lawful' to eat, and so obviated this frightfuliniquity. But that is not the way of Pharisees. Moses had notforbidden such gleaning, but the casuistry which had spun itsmultitudinous webs over the law, hiding the gold beneath their dirtyfilms, had decided that plucking the ears was of the nature ofreaping, and reaping was work, and work was forbidden, which beingsettled, of course the inferential prohibition became more importantthan the law from which it was deduced. That is always the case withhuman conclusions from revelation; and the more questionable theseare, the more they are loved by their authors, as the sickly childof a family is the dearest. Our Lord does not question the authority of the tradition, nor askwhere Moses had forbidden what His disciples were doing. Still lessdoes He touch the sanctity of the Jewish Sabbath. He accepts Hisquestioners' position, for the time, and gives them a perfect answeron their own ground. Perhaps there may be just a hint in the double'Have ye not read?' that they could not produce Scripture for theirprohibition, as He would do for the liberty which He allowed. Hequotes two instances in which ceremonial obligations gave way beforehigher law. The first, that of David and his followers eating theshew-bread, which was tabooed to all but priests, is perhaps chosenwith some reference to the parallel between Himself, the true King, now unrecognised and hunted with His humble followers, and thefugitive 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, 'Ifthis is David, where is Saul, and where is Doeg, watching him toaccuse him?' This example serves our Lord's purpose of showing thateven a divine prohibition, if it relates to mere ceremonial matter, melts, like wax, before even bodily necessities. What a thrill ofholy horror would meet the enunciation of the doctrine that such acarnal thing as hunger rightfully abrogated a sacred ritualproscription! The law of right is rigid; that of external ceremoniesis flexible. Better that a man should die than that the one shouldbe broken; better that the other should be flung to the winds thanthat a hungry man should go unfed. It may reasonably be doubtedwhether all Christian communities have learned the sweep of thatprinciple yet, or so judge of the relative importance of keeping uptheir appointed forms of worship, and of feeding their hungrybrother. The brave Ahimelech, 'the son of Ahitub, ' was ahead of agood many people of to-day. The second example comes still closer to the question in hand, andsupplies the reference to the Sabbath law, which the former had not. There was much hard work done in the temple on the Sabbath--sacrificesto be slain, fires and lamps to be kindled, and so on. That was notSabbath desecration. Why? Because it was done in the temple, and as apart of divine service. The sanctity of the place, and the consequentsanctity of the service, exempted it from the operation of the law. The question, no doubt, was springing to the lips of some scowlingPharisee, 'And what has that to do with our charge against yourdisciples?' when it was answered by the wonderful next words, 'Inthis place'--here among the growing corn, beneath the free heaven, faraway from Jerusalem--'is one greater than the temple. ' Profound words, which could only sound as blasphemy or nonsense to the hearers, butwhich touch the deepest truths concerning His person and His relationsto 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, theplace of sacrifice. Then, where He stands is holy ground, and all workdone with reference to Him is worship. These poor followers of His arepriests; and if, for His sake, they had broken a hundred Sabbathregulations, 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 tounmask the real motives of His assailants. Their murmuring came notfrom more religion, but from less love. If they had had a littlemore milk of human kindness in them, it would have died on theirlips; if they had grasped the real meaning of the religion theyprofessed, they would have learned that its soul was 'mercy'--thatis, of course, man's gentleness to man--and that sacrifice andceremony were but the body, the help, and sometimes the hindrance, of that soul. They would have understood the relative importance ofdisposition and of external worship, as end and means, and not havevisited a mere breach of external order with a heat of disapprobationonly warranted by a sin against the former. Their judgment would havebeen liker God's if they had looked at those poor hungry men withmerciful eyes and with merciful hearts, rather than with eager scrutinythat delighted to find them tripping in a triviality of outwardobservance. What mountains of harsh judgment by Christ's own followerson each other would have been removed into the sea if the spirit ofthese great words had played upon them! The 'for' at the beginning of verse 8 seems to connect with the lastwords of the preceding verse, 'I call them guiltless, for, ' etc. Itstates more plainly still the claim already put forward in verse 6. 'The Son of Man, ' no doubt, is equivalent to 'Messiah'; but it ismore, as revealing at once Christ's true manhood and His unique andcomplete manhood, in which the very ideal of man is personallyrealised. It can never be detached from His other name, the 'Son ofGod. ' They are the obverse and reverse of the same golden coin. Heasserts His power over the Sabbath, as enjoined upon Israel. His isthe authority which imposed it. It is plastic in His hands. Thewhole order of which it is part has its highest purpose inwitnessing of Him. He brings the true 'rest. ' II. The Sabbath, and works of beneficence. Matthew appears to havebrought together here two incidents which, according to Luke, wereseparated in time. The scene changes to a synagogue, perhaps that ofCapernaum. Among the worshippers is a man with 'a withered hand, 'who seems to have been brought there by the Pharisees as a bait totry to draw out Christ's compassion. What a curious state of mindthat was, --to believe that Christ could work miracles, and to wantHim to do one, not for pity's sake, nor for confirmation of faith, but to have material for accusing Him! And how heartlessly carelessof the poor sufferer they are, when they use him thus! He for hispart stands silent. Desire and faith have no part in evoking thismiracle. Deadly hatred and calculating malignity ask for it, and foronce they get their wish. Having baited their hook, and set the manwith his shrunken hand full in view, they get into their corners andwait the event. Matthew tells us that they ask our Lord the questionwhich Luke represents Him as asking them. Perhaps we may say that Hegave voice to the question which they were asking in their hearts. Their motive is distinctly given here. They wanted material for alegal process before a local tribunal. The whole thing was anattempt to get Jesus within the meshes of the law. Again, as in theformer case, it is the traditional, not the written, law, whichhealing would have broken. The question evidently implies that, inthe judgment of the askers, healing was unlawful. Talmudicalscholars tell us that in later days the rabbis differed on thepoint, but that the prevalent opinion was, that only sicknessesthreatening immediate danger to life could lawfully be treated onthe Sabbath. The more rigid doctrine was obviously held by Christ'squestioners. It is a significant instance of the absurdity andcruelty which are possible when once religion has been made a matterof outward observance. Nothing more surely and completely ossifiesthe heart and blinds common sense. In His former answer Jesus had appealed to Scripture to bear out Histeaching that Sabbath observance must bend to personal necessities. Here He appeals to the natural sense of compassion to confirm theprinciple that it must give way to the duty of relieving others. Hisquestion is as confident of an answer as the Pharisees' had been. But though He takes it for granted that His hearers could onlyanswer it in one way, the microscopic and cold-blooded ingenuity ofthe rabbis, since His day, answers it in another. They say, 'Don'tlift the poor brute out, but throw in a handful of fodder, andsomething for him to lie upon, and let him be till next day. ' Aremarkable way of making 'thine ox and thine ass' keep the Sabbath!There is a delicacy of expression in the question; the owner of 'onesheep' 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 heartas much touched by their sorrow and needs as if each were His onlypossession. The question waits for no answer; but Christ goes on (asif there could be but one reply) to His conclusion, which He bindsto His first question by another, equally easy to answer. Man'ssuperiority 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 tothe Pharisees gives an unexpected turn to the reply. He does notsay, 'It is lawful to heal, ' but, 'It is lawful to do well, ' thus atonce showing the true justification of healing, namely, that it wasa beneficent act, and widening the scope of His answer to cover awhole class of cases. 'To do well' here means, not to do right, butto do good, to benefit men. The principle is a wide one: thecharitable succour of men's needs, of whatever kind, is congruouswith the true design of that day of rest. Have the churches laidthat lesson to heart? On the whole, it is to be observed that ourLord here distinctly recognises the obligation of the Sabbath, thatHe claims power over it, that He permits the pressure of one's ownnecessities and of others' need of help, to modify the manner of itsobservance, and that He leaves the application of these principlesto the spiritual insight of His followers. The cure which follows is done in a singular fashion. Without awhisper of request from the sufferer or any one else, He heals himby a word. His command has a promise in it, and He gives the powerto do what He bids the man do. 'Give what Thou commandest, ' says St. Augustine, 'and command what Thou wilt. ' We get strength to obey inthe act of obedience. But beyond the possible symbolicalsignificance of the mode of cure, and beyond the revelation ofChrist's power to heal by a word, the manner of healing had aspecial reason in the very cavils of the Pharisees. Not even theycould accuse Him of breaking any Sabbath law by such a cure. Whathad He done? Told the man to put out his hand. Surely that was notunlawful. What had the man done? Stretched it forth. Surely thatbroke no subtle rabbinical precept. So they were foiled at everyturn, driven off the field of argument, and baffled in their attemptto find ground for laying an information against Him. But neitherHis gentle wisdom nor His healing power could reach these hearts, made stony by conceit and pedantic formalism; and all that theircontact with Jesus did was to drive them to intenser hostility, andto send them away to plot His death. That is what comes of makingreligion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is alwaysblind as an owl to the light of God and true goodness; keen-sightedas a hawk for trivial breaches of his cobweb regulations, and cruelas a vulture to tear with beak and claw. The race is not extinct. Weall 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 Christand His work was due to the ingenious malice of an ecclesiasticaldeputation, sent down from Jerusalem to prevent the simple folk inGalilee from being led away by this new Teacher. They must have beenvery hard put to it to explain undeniable but unwelcome facts, whenthey hazarded such a preposterous theory. Formal religionists never know what to make of a man who is inmanifest touch with the unseen. These scribes, like Christ's othercritics, judged themselves in judging Him, and bore witness to thevery truths that they were eager to deny. For this ridiculousexplanation admits the miraculous, recognises the impossibility ofaccounting for Christ on any naturalistic hypothesis, and by itsvery outrageous absurdity indicates that the only reasonableexplanation of the facts is the admission of His divine message andauthority. So we may learn, even from such words as these, how theglory of Jesus Christ shines, though distorted and blurred, throughthe fogs of prejudice and malice. I. Note, then, first, the unwelcome and undeniable facts that insistupon explanation. I have said that these hostile critics attest the reality of themiracles. I know that it is not fashionable at present to attachmuch weight to the fact that none of all the enemies that saw themever had a doubt about the reality of Christ's miracles. I knowquite well that in an age that believed in the possibility of thesupernatural, as this age does not, credence would be more easy, andthat such testimony is less valuable than if it had come from a juryof scientific twentieth century sceptics. But I know, on the otherhand, that for long generations the expectation of the miraculoushad died out before Christ came; that His predecessor, John theBaptist, made no such claims; and that, at first, at all events, there was no expectation of Jesus working miracles, to lead to anyinitial ease of acceptance of His claims. And I know that there werenever sharper and more hostile eyes brought to bear upon any man andhis work than the eyes of these ecclesiastical 'triers. ' It wouldhave been so easy and so triumphant a way of ending the wholebusiness if they could have shown, what they were anxious to be ableto show, that the miracle was a trick. And so I venture to thinkthat not without some weight is the attestation from the camp of theenemy, 'This man casteth out demons. ' But you have to remember that amongst the facts to be explained isnot only this one of Christ's works having passed muster with Hisenemies, but the other of His own reiterated and solemn claim tohave the power of working what we call miracles. Now, I wish todwell on that for one moment, because it is fashionable to put one'sthumb upon it nowadays. It is not unusual to eliminate from theGospel narrative all that side of it, and then to run over ineulogiums about the rest. But what we have to deal with is thisfact, that the Man whom the world admits to be the consummate flowerof humanity, meek, sane, humble, who has given all generationslessons in self-abnegation and devotion, claimed to be able to raisethe dead, to cast out demons, and to do many wonderful works. Andthough we should be misrepresenting the facts if we said that He didwhat His followers have too often been inclined to do, _i. E. _rested the stress of evidence upon that side of His work, yet it isan equal exaggeration in the other direction to do, as so many areinclined to do to-day, _i. E. _ disparage the miraculous evidenceas no evidence at all. 'Go and tell John the things that ye see andhear, '--that is His own answer to the question, 'Art Thou He thatshould come?' And though I rejoice to believe that there are farloftier and more blessed answers to it than these outward signs andtokens, they _are_ signs and tokens; and they are part of thewhole facts that have to be accounted for. I would venture to widen the reference of my text for a moment, andinclude not only the actual miracles of our Lord's earthly life, butall the beneficent, hallowing, elevating, ennobling, refiningresults which have followed upon the proclamation of His truth inthe world ever since. I believe, as I think Scripture teaches me tobelieve, that in the world today Christ is working; and that it is amistake to talk about the results of 'Christianity, ' meaning therebysome abstract system divorced from Him. It is the working of JesusChrist 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 suppressedancient evils; that has barred the doors of old temples of devildom, of lust, and cruelty, and vice; and that is still working in theworld for the elevation and the deifying of humanity. And I claimthe whole difference between 'B. C. And A. D. '--the whole differencebetween Christendom and Heathendom--as being the measure of thecontinuous power with which Jesus Christ has grappled with andthrottled the snakes that have fastened on men. That continuousoperation of His in delivering from the powers of evil has, indeed, not yielded such results as might have been expected. But just as onearth He was hindered in the exercise of His supernatural power bymen's unbelief, so that 'He could do no mighty works, save that Helaid His hands on a few sick folk' here and there, 'and healedthem, ' so He has been thwarted by His Church, and hindered in theworld, from manifesting the fulness of His power. But yet, sorrowfully admitting that, and taking as deserved the scoffs of themen that say, 'Your Christianity does not seem to do so very muchafter all, ' I still venture to allege that its record is unique; andthat these are facts which wise men ought to take into account, andhave some fairly plausible way of explaining. II. Secondly, note the preposterous explanation. 'This man doth notcast out demons, but by Beelzebub, the prince of the demons. ' Thatis the last resort of prejudice so deep that it will father anabsurdity rather than yield to evidence. And Christ has nodifficulty in putting it aside, as you may remember, by a piece ofcommon sense: 'If Satan cast out Satan, he is divided againsthimself, and his kingdom cannot stand. ' There is an old play whichhas for its title, _The Devil as an Ass. _ He is not such an assas that, to build up with one hand and cast down with the other. Asthe proverb has it, 'Hawks do not pick out hawks' eyes. ' But thisplainly hopeless attempt to account for Christ and His work may beturned into a witness for both, and yield not unimportant lessons. This explanation witnesses to the insufficiency of all explanationswhich omit the supernatural. These men felt that they had to do witha Man who was in touch with a whole world of unseen powers; and thatthey had here to deal with something to which ordinary measuringlines were palpably inapplicable. And so they fell back upon 'byBeelzebub'; and they thereby admitted that humanity withoutsomething more at the back of it never made such a man as that. AndI beg you to lay that to heart. It is very easy to solve aninsoluble problem if you begin by taking all the insoluble elementsout of it. And that is how a great deal of modern thinking does withChristianity. Knock out all the miracles; pooh-pooh all Christ'sclaims; say nothing about Incarnation; declare Resurrection to beentirely unhistorical, and you will not have much difficulty inaccounting for the rest; and it will not be worth the accountingfor. But here is the thing to be dealt with, that _whole_ life, the Christ of the Gospels. And I venture to say that any explanationprofessing to account for Him which leaves out His coming from anunseen world, and His possession of powers above this world of senseand nature, is ludicrously inadequate. Suppose you had a chain whichfor thousands of years had been winding on to a drum, and link afterlink had been rough iron, and all at once there comes one of puregold, would it be reasonable to say that it had been dug from thesame mine, and forged in the same fires, as its black and ponderouscompanions? Generation after generation has passed across the earth, each begetting sons after its own likeness; and lo! in the midst ofthem starts up one sinless Man. Is it reasonable to say that He isthe product of the same causes which have produced all the millions, and never another like Him? Surely to account for Jesus without thesupernatural is hopeless. Further, this explanation may be taken as an instance showing theinadequacy of all theories and explanations of Christ andChristianity from an unbelieving point of view. It was the firstattempt of unbelievers to explain where Christ's power came from. Like all first attempts, it was crude, and it has been amended andrefined since. Earlier generations did not hesitate to call theApostles liars, and Christ's contemporaries did not hesitate to callHim 'this deceiver. ' We have got beyond that; but we still are metby explanations of the power of the Gospel and of Christ, itssubject and Author, which trace these to ignoble elements, and donot shrink from asserting that a blunder or a hallucination lies atthe foundation. Now, I am not going to enter upon these matters at any length, but Iwould just recall to you our Lord's broad, simple principle: 'Acorrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither doth a good treebring forth evil fruit. ' And I would apply that all round. Christianteachers have often made great mistakes, as it seems to me, bytracing the prevalence of the power of some heathen religions totheir vices and lies. No system has ever had great moral power inthis world but by reason of its excellences and truths. Mohammedanism, for instance, swept away, and rightly, a mere formal superstition whichcalled itself Christianity, because it grasped the one truth: 'There isno God but God'; and it had faith of a sort. Monasticism held thefield in Europe, with all its faults, for centuries, because it enshrinedthe great Christian truth of self-sacrifice and absolute obedience. And you may take it as a fixed rule, that howsoever some 'mixture offalsehood doth ever please, ' as Bacon says, in his cynical way, thereason for the power of any great movement has been the truth that wasin it and not the lie; and the reason why great men have exercisedinfluence has been their greatness and their goodness, and not theirsmallnesses 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 sosuperhuman, so universal and yet so individual--where did He comefrom? and where did the Gospel, which flows from Him, and which hasdone such things in the world as it has done--where did it comefrom? 'Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?' If itis true that Jesus Christ is either mistakenly represented in theGospels, or that He made enthusiastic claims which cannot beverified; and if it is true that the faith in a Resurrection onwhich Christianity is suspended, and which has produced such fruitsas we know have been produced, is a delusion; then all I can say isthat the noblest lives that ever were lived in the world have foundtheir impulse in a falsehood or a dream; and that the richestclusters that ever have yielded wine for the cup have grown upon athorn. If like produces like, you cannot account for Christ andChristianity by anything short of the belief in His Divine mission. Serpents' eggs do not hatch out into doves. This Man, when Heclaimed to be God's Son and the world's Saviour, was no brain-sickenthusiast; and the results show that the Gospel which His followersproclaim rests upon no lie. Again, this explanation is an instance of the credulity of unbelief. Think of the mental condition which could swallow such anexplanation of such a Worker and such work. It is more difficult tobelieve the explanation than the alternative which it is framed toescape. So it is always. The difficulties of faith are small bycomparison with those of unbelief, gnats beside camels, and thatthat is so is plain from the short duration of each unbelievingexplanation of Jesus. One can remember in the compass of one's ownlife more than one assailant taking the field with much trumpetingand flag-waving, whose attack failed and is forgotten. The child'sstory tells of a giant who determined to slay his enemy, andbelaboured an empty bed with his club all night, and found his foeuntouched and fresh in the morning. The Gospel is here; what hasbecome of its assailants? They are gone, and the limbo into whichthe scribes' theory has passed will receive all the others. So wemay be quite patient, and sure that the sieve of time, which isslowly and constantly working, will riddle out all the rubbish, andcast it on the dunghill where so many exploded theories rotforgotten. III. And now, one word about the last point; and that is--the trueexplanation. Now, at this stage of my sermon, I must not be tempted to say a wordabout the light which our Lord throws, in these declarations in thecontext, into that dim unseen world. His words seem to me to be toosolemn and didactic to be taken as accommodations to popularprejudice, 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 allthings in heaven and earth, as to venture to put aside these solemnwords of His--which lift a corner of the veil which hides theunseen--and to dismiss them as unworthy of notice. Is it not astrange thing that a world which is so ready to believe in spiritualcommunications when they are vouched for by a newspaper editor, isso unwilling to believe them when they are in the Bible? And is itnot a strange thing that scientists, who are always tauntingChristians with the importance they attach to man in the plan of theuniverse, and ask if all these starry orbs were built for him, should be so incredulous of teachings which fill the waste placeswith 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 tospeak about a conflict that He wages with a strong man; and about Hisbinding the strong man, and spoiling his house. All which, beingturned into modern language, is just this, that the Lord, by Hisincarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and government atthe right hand of God, has broken the powers of evil in their centralhold. He has crushed the serpent's head; and though He may still, asMilton puts it, 'swinge the scaly horror of his folded tail, ' it isbut the flurries of the dying brute. The conquering heel is firm onhis 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 heldcaptive of the devil. And you and I may, if we will, pass into 'theliberty 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--thatcovers all the facts, and will hold water. All others fail, and theymostly fail by boldly eliminating the very facts that need to beaccounted for. Let us rather look to Him, thankful that our Brotherhas conquered; and let us put our trust in that Saviour. For, if Hisexplanation is true, then a very solemn personal consideration arisesfor each of us, 'If I, by the Spirit of God, cast out demons, thenthe Kingdom of God is come unto you, ' it stands beside us; it callsfor our obedience. Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ alone, can cast theevils out of our natures. It is the Incarnate Christ, the DivineChrist, the crucified Christ, the ascended Christ, the indwellingChrist, who will so fill our hearts that there shall be no achingvoids there to invite the return of the expelled tyrants. If anyother reformation pass upon us than the thorough one of receiving Himby faith into our hearts, then, though they may be swept and garnished, they will be empty; and the demons will come back. With Jesusinside--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 treeand its fruit. In the Sermon on the Mount He applies it as a test tofalse teachers, who hide, beneath the wool of the sheep's clothing, the fangs and paws of ravening wolves. He says, 'By their deeds yeshall know them; for as is the tree so is its fruit. ' That is arough and ready test, which applies rather to the teacher than tohis doctrine, but it applies, to some extent, to the doctrine too, on the hypothesis that the teacher's life fairly represents it. Ofcourse, 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 isthe way by which the masses generally judge of systems and of theirapostles. A saintly life has more power than dusty volumes ofcontroversy. But in our text Christ applies the same thoughts in rather a deeperfashion. Here the lesson that He would have us draw is of theconnection between character and conduct; how what we do isdetermined by what we are, and how, not of course with the sameabsolute regularity and constancy, but still somewhat in the samefashion as the fruit is true to the tree, so, after all allowancemade for ups and downs, for the irregular play of will andconscience, for the strife that is waged within a man, for thetemptations of external circumstances, and the like--still, ingeneral, as is the inner man, so is the outward manifestation. Thefacts of a life are important mainly as registering and makingvisible the inner condition of the doer. Now, that seems veryelementary. Everybody believes that 'out of the heart are the issuesof life, ' as a wise man said long ago, but it is one of the truthsthat, if grasped and worked into our consciousness, and out in ourlives, would do much to revolutionise them. And so, though it is avery old story, and though we all admit it, I wish now to come faceto face with the consequences of this thought, that behind actionlies character, and that Doing is the second step, and Being is thefirst. I. I would ask you to notice how here we are confronted with thegreat problem for every man. 'Make the tree good. ' It takes a good man to do good things. So howshallow is all that talk, 'do, do, do, ' this, that, and the otherthing. All right, but _be_; that is the first thing; or, asChrist said, 'Make the tree good, and the fruit' will take care ofitself. So do you not see how, if that is true about us, we are eachbrought 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 thatrises from some spring will bring up with it, in solution, a traceof a bed of salt through which it has come, and of all the mineralsin the soil through which it has passed. And as its sparkling waterscome out into the light, if one could analyse them completely, onemight register a geological section of the strata through which ithas risen. So, our acts bear in them a revelation of all the hiddenbeds through which they have risen; and sometimes they are bitterand salt, but they are always true to the self whose apocalypse theyare to the world, or at all events to God. Therefore, brethren, I have to urge this, that we shall not be doingour true work as men and women, if we are simply trying to better ouractions, important as these are. By this saying the centre of gravityis shifted, and in one aspect, the deeds are made less important. Thecondition 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 allthat it is our highest duty and truest wisdom to aim at in life--'Makethe tree good. ' If you have ever tried it honestly, and have not been contented withthe superficial cleaning up of outsides, which consists in shiftingthe dirt into another place only, not in getting rid of it, I knowwhat met you almost as soon as you began, like some great black rockthat rises in a mountain-pass, and forbids all farther advance--theconsciousness that you were _not_ good met you. I am not goingto talk theological technicalities. Never mind about phrases--theyhave been the ruin of a great deal of earnest preaching--call it whatyou like, here is a fact, that whenever a man sets himself, withanything like resolute determination and rigid self-examination, tothe task of getting himself right, he finds that he is wrong. Thatbeing the case, each of us has to deal with a tremendous problem; andthe more earnestly and honestly we try to deal with it, the more weshall feel how grave it is. You can cure a great deal, I know. Godforbid that I should say one word that seems to deny a man's power todo much in the direction of self-improvement, but after all that isdone, again you are brought short up on this fact, the testimony ofconscience. And so I see men labouring at a task as vain as that ofthose who would twist the sands into ropes, according to the oldfable. I see men seeking after higher perfection of purity than theywill ever attain. That is the condition of us all, of course, for ourideal must always outrun our realisation, else we may as well lie downand die. But there is a difference between the imperfect approximation, which we feel to be imperfect, and yet feel to be approximation, andthe despairing consciousness, that I am sure a great many of myaudience have had, more or less, that I have a task set for me that isfar beyond my strength. 'Talk about making the tree good! I cannot doit. ' So men fold their hands, and the foiled endeavour begets despair. Or, as is the case with some of you, it begets indifference, and youdo not care to try any more, because you have tried so often, and havemade 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 treehaving an element of badness, if I may so say, in and amongst anygoodness that it has. I do not care which of the two forms ofstatement 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 tellyou 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 Iprescribe 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 oftelling that men are bad. The worst man in the world knows his duty agreat deal more than the best man in the world does it. And whether itis the law of the land, or whether it is the law of society, or thelaw 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 todo, and they do not put out a finger to help us to do it. A lame mandoes not get to the city because he sees a guide-post at the turningwhich tells him which road to take. The people who do not believe incertain modern agitations about the restrictions of the liquor trafficsay, 'You cannot make people sober by Act of Parliament, ' which isabsolutely true, although it does not bear, I think, the inference thatthey would draw from it, and it just puts into a rough form the fatalweakness of this would-be gardener and improver of the nature of thetrees. 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 usfrom seeing the large truth in them? 'If there had been a law givenwhich could have given life, then righteousness should have been bythe law, ' which being translated into modern English is just this, If Law could impart a power to obey its behests, then it is all thatwe want to make us right. But until it can do that it fails in twopoints. It deals with conduct, and we need to have character dealtwith; and it does not lift the burden that it lays on me with one ofits fingers. So we may rule Law out of court. And then comes another, and he says, 'I am Culture, and intellectualacquirement; or my name is Education, and I am going to make thetree good in the most scientific fashion, because what makes men badis that they do not know, and if they only knew they would do theright. ' Now, I thoroughly believe that education diminishes crime. Ibelieve it weans from certain forms of evil. I believe that, otherthings being equal, an educated man, with his larger interests andhis cultivated tastes, has a certain fastidiousness developed whichkeeps him from being so much tempted by the grosser forms oftransgression. I believe that very largely you will empty your gaolsin proportion as you fill your schools. And let no man say that I aman obscurantist, or that I am indifferent to the value of educationand the benefits of intellectual culture, when I declare that allthese may be attained, and the nature of the tree remain exactlywhat it was. You may prune, you may train along the wall, you mayget bigger fruit, you will not get better fruit. Did you ever hearthe exaggerated line that describes one of the pundits of science as'the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind'? The plain fact is thatthe cultivation of the understanding has little to do with thepurifying 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 themind, and lift the taste. ' That is the popular gospel of this day, ina great many quarters. Yes, and have we never heard of a period inEuropean history which was, as they call it, 'the Renaissance' of artand the death of morality? Do we not know that side by side there havebeen cultivated in all ages, and are being cultivated to-day, the mostexclusive devotion to the beauty that can be expressed by art, and themost intense indifference to the beauty of holiness? Ah! brethren, itwants something far deeper-going than pictures to purge the souls ofmen. And whilst, as before, I thankfully acknowledge the refininginfluence of this new cult, I would protest against the absurdity ofputting it upon a pedestal as the guide and elevator of corruptedhumanity. And then come others, and they say, 'Environment is the thing thatis 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 thepeople out of the slums, I say. Only do not let us exaggerate. Youcannot change a man, as deeply as we need to be changed, by anychange of his circumstances. 'Take the bitter tree, ' as I rememberan old Jewish saying has it, 'take the bitter tree and plant it inEden, and water it with the rivers there; and let the angel Gabrielbe the gardener, and the tree will still bear bitter fruit. ' Are allthe people who live in good houses good? Will a 'living wage'--eightshillings a day and eight hours' play--will these change a man'scharacter? Will these go deep enough down to touch the springs ofevil? You cannot alter the nature of a set of objects by arrangingthem in different shapes, parallelograms, or squares, or circles, orany others. As long as you have the elements that are in humannature to deal with, you may do as you like about the distributionof wealth, and the relation of Capital to Labour, and the variouscognate questions which are all included in the vague word Socialism;and human nature will be too strong for you, and you will have theold mischiefs cropping out again. Brethren, you cannot put outVesuvius by bringing to bear on it the squirts of all the fireengines in creation. The water will go up in steam, and do little ornothing to extinguish the fire. And whilst I would thankfully helpin all these other movements, and look for certain limited resultsof good from them, I, for my part, believe, and therefore I am boundto declare, that neither singly, nor all of them in combination, will they ever effect the change on human nature which Jesus Christregarded as the only possible means for securing that human natureshould bear good fruit. For, if there were no other reason, there are two plain ones which Ionly touch. God is the source of all good, of all creatural purityas well as all creatural blessedness. And if a life has a blank wallturned to Him, and has cut itself off from Him, I do not care howyou educate it, fill it full of science, plunge it into anatmosphere of art, make the most perfect arrangements for social andeconomical and political circumstances, that soul is cut off fromthe possibility of good, because it is cut off from the fontalsource of all good. And there is another reason which is closelyconnected with this, and that is that the true bitter tang in us allis self-centring regard. That is the mother-tincture that, variouslycoloured and compounded, makes in all the poisonous element that wecall sin, and until you get something that will cast that evil outof a man's heart, you may teach and refine and raise him and arrangethings for him as you like, and you will not master the source ofall 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. Christsaid, 'Make the tree good, ' and proceeds to do it. And how does Hedo it? He does it by coming to us; to every soul of man on the earth, andoffering, first, forgiveness for all the past. I do not know thatamongst all the bonds by which evil holds a poor soul that strugglesto get away from it, there is one more adamantine and unyieldingthan the consciousness that the past is irrevocable, and that 'whatI have written I have written, ' and never can blot out. But JesusChrist deals with that consciousness. It is true that 'whatsoever aman soweth that shall he also reap, ' and the Christian doctrine offorgiveness does not contradict that solemn truth, but it assures usthat God's heart is not turned away from us, notwithstanding thepast, and that we can write the future better, and break altogetherthe fatal bond that decrees, apart from Him, that 'to-morrow shallbe as this day, and much more abundant, ' and that past sin shallbeget a progeny of future sins. That fruitfulness of sin is at anend, if we take Christ for our Saviour. He makes the tree good in another fashion still; for the verycentre, as it seems to me, of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is thatinto our spirits He will breathe a new life kindred with His own, anew nature which is free from the law and bonds of past sin, and ofpresent and future death. The tree is made good because He makesthose who believe in Him 'new creatures in Christ Jesus. ' Now, donot turn away and say that that is mysticism. Be it mysticism ornot, 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, howeversinful he may have been, and however deep the marks of the fettersmay have been upon his limbs. Christ makes the tree good in yet another fashion, because He brings tothe reinforcement of the new life which He imparts the mightiestmotives, and sways by love, which leads to the imitation of the Beloved, which leads to obedience to the Beloved, which leads to shunning as theworst of evils anything that would break the communion with the Beloved, and which is in itself the decentralising of the sinful soul from itsold centre, and the making of Christ the Beloved the centre round whichit moves, and from which it draws radiance and light and motion. By allthese methods, and many more that I cannot dwell upon now, the problemis 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 thepractice? I do not see such a mighty difference between youChristians and us. ' Well, for myself and my brethren, I accept therebuke. There is not such a difference as there ought to be. But doyou know why? Not because our great Gardener cannot change thenature of the plant, but because we do not submit ourselves to Hispower as we ought to do. Debit us with as many imperfections andinconsistencies as you like, do not lay them to the charge ofChrist. And yet we are willing to accept the test of Christianity which liesin its power to change men. I point to the persecutor on the road toDamascus. I point to the Bedfordshire tinker, to him that wrote_Pilgrim's Progress_. I point to the history of the ChristianChurch 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 peoplelifted from the very depths of degradation and sin, and made honest, sober, respectable, hard-working, though not very intelligent orrefined, Christian people. I suppose that there is no man in anofficial position like mine who cannot look back over his ministryand remember, some of them dozens, some of them scores, some of themhundreds, of cases in which the change was made on the most hopelesspeople, by the simple acceptance of the simple gospel, 'Christ diedfor me, and Christ lives in me. ' I know that I can recall such, andI am sure that my brethren can. People who are not Christians talk glibly about the failure ofChristianity to transform men. They have never seen thetransformations because they have never put themselves in the way ofseeing them. They are being worked to-day; they might be worked hereand now. Try the power of the Gospel for yourselves. You cannot make the treegood, but you can let Jesus Christ do it. The Ethiopian cannotchange 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 betinkering at your acts. Take the comprehensive way, and let Himchange your character. I believe that in some processes of dyeing, apiece of cloth, prepared with a certain liquid, is plunged into avat full of dye-stuffs of one colour, and is taken out tinged ofanother. The soul, wet with the waters of repentance, and plungedinto the 'Fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, ' the crimsonfountain 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 fruitunto 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 influenceon his fellows, who made such claims as to himself in suchunmistakable language as Jesus Christ does. To say such things ofoneself 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 notonly that He claims official attributes as a fanatical or dishonestpretender to inspiration may do. He does that, but He does more--Hedeclares Himself possessed of virtues which, if a man said he hadthem, it would be the best proof that he did not possess them anddid not know himself. 'I am the way and the truth and the life. ' 'Iam the light of the world'--a 'greater than the temple, ' a greaterthan Jonah, a 'greater than Solomon, ' and then withal 'I am meek andlowly of heart. ' And the world believes Him, and says, Yes! it istrue. These three comparisons of Jesus with Temple, Jonas, and Solomon, carry great claims and great lessons. By the first Jesus assertsthat He is in reality all that the Temple was in shadowy symbol, andsets Himself above ritual, sacrifices, and priests. By the second heasserts His superiority not only to one prophet but to them all. Bythe third He asserts His superiority to Solomon, whom the Jewsreverenced as the bright, consummate flower of kinghood. Now we may take this comparison as giving us positive thoughts aboutour Lord. The points of comparison may be taken to be three, withJonah as one of an order, with Jonah in his personal character as aservant 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. Andover against all these august and venerable names, the teachers ofwisdom, the speakers of the oracles of God, this Nazarene peasantstands there before Pharisees and Scribes, and asserts His superiority. It is either the most insane arrogance of self-assertion, or it is asober truth. If it be true that self-consciousness is ever the diseaseof the soul, and that the religious teacher who begins to think ofhimself is lost, how marvellous is this assertion! Compare it with Paul's, 'Unto me who am less than the least of allsaints'--'I am not a whit behind the chief of the Apostles'--'thoughI be nothing'--'Not I, but Christ in me. ' And yet this is meekness, for it is infinite condescension in Him to compare Himself with anyson of man. (_a_) The contrast is suggested between the prophets and thetheme of the prophets. 'The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. ' Though undoubtedlythe prophet order had other work than prediction to do, yet the soulof their whole work was the announcement of the Messiah. In testimony whereof, Elijah, who was traditionally the chief of theprophets, stood beside Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, andpassed away as lost in His light. (_b_) The contrast is suggested between the recipients of theword of God and the Word of God. The relation of the prophets to their message is contrasted with Hiswho was the Truth, who not merely received, but was, the Word ofGod. There is nothing in Christ's teaching to show that He was consciousof standing in a human relation to the truths which He spoke. Hisown personality is ever present in His teaching instead of beingsuppressed--as in all the prophets. His own personality is Histeaching, 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 ofGod's Name and the complete revealer of it. The foundation was laid by the prophets, Jesus Christ Himself beingthe 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 choseninstruments of God's hand. Take the story--his shrinking from the message given him. We knownot why; but perhaps from faint-hearted fear, or from a sense of hisunworthiness and unfitness for the task. His own words about God aslong-suffering seem to suggest another reason, that he feared to gowith a message of judgment which seemed to him so unlikely to beexecuted by the long-suffering God. If so, then what made himrecreant was not so much fear from personal motives as intellectualperplexity and imperfect comprehension of the ways of God. Then wehear of his pitiable flight with its absurdity and its wickedness. Then comes the prayer which shows him to have been right and true atbottom, and teaches us that what makes a good man is not the absenceof faults, but the presence of love and longing after God. Then wesee the boldness of his mission. Then follows the reaction from thatlofty height, the petulance or whatever else it was with which hesees the city spared. Even the mildest interpretation cannot acquithim of much disregard for the poor souls whom he had brought torepentance, and of dreadful carelessness for the life and happinessof his fellows. Now Jonah's behaviour is but a specimen of the vacillations, thealternations of feeling which beset every man; the loftiest, thetruest, 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 andfaithfulness in His prophetic office. In Him is no trace ofshrinking even when the grimness of the Cross weighed most on Hisheart. No confusion of mind as to the Father's will, or as to theunion in Him of perfect righteousness and infinite mercy, everdarkened His clear utterances or cast a shadow over his own soul. Hewas never weakened by the collapse that follows on great effort orstrong emotion. He never failed in his mission through lack of pity. But there is no need to draw out the comparison. We look on allGod's instruments, and see them all full of faults and flaws. Hereis one stainless name, one life in which is no blot, one heart inwhich are no envy, no failings--one obedience which never varied. Hesays of Himself, 'I do always those things which please Him, ' andwe, thinking of all the noblest examples of virtue that the worldhas ever seen, and seeing in them all some speck, turn to this wholeand perfect chrysolite and say, Yes! 'a greater than they!' III. The bearer of a transitory message of repentance to one Gentilepeople, and the bearer of an eternal message of grace and love tothe whole earth. Jonah is remarkable as having had the sphere of his activity whollyoutside Israel. The nature of his message; a preaching of punishment; a call torepentance. The sphere of it--one Gentile city. The effect of it--transitory. Weknow what Nineveh became. Jesus is greater than Jonah or any prophet in this respect, that Hismessage is to the world, and in this, that what He preaches andbrings far transcends even the loftiest and most spiritual words ofany of them. His voice is sweetest, tenderest, clearest and fullest of all thathave ever sounded in men's ears. And just because it is so, thehearing of it brings the most solemn responsibility that was everlaid on men, and to us still more gravely and truly may it be saidthan to those who heard Jesus speak on earth, 'The men of Ninevehshall 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 anymight have been selected, it is that great name. To the Jews Solomonis an ideal figure, who appealed so strongly to popular imaginationas to become the centre of endless legends; whose dominion was thevery apex of national glory, in recounting whose splendours thehistorical books seem to be scarce able to restrain their triumphand pride. I. The Man. The story gives us a richly endowed and many-sidedcharacter. It begins with lovely, youthful enthusiasm, with aprofound sense of his own weakness, with earnest longings afterwisdom and guidance. He lived a pure and beautiful youth, and allhis earlier and middle life was adorned with various graces. Thereis a certain splendid largeness about the character. He had a richvariety of gifts: he was statesman, merchant, sage, physicist, builder, one of the many-sided men whom the old world produced. Andon this we may build a comparison and contrast. The completeness of Christ's Humanity transcends all other men, eventhe most various, and transcends all gathered together. Every typeof excellence is in Him. We cannot say that His character is any onething in special, it falls under no classification. It is a purewhite light in which all rays are blended. This all-comprehensivenessand symmetry of character are remarkably shown in four brief records. But we have to take into account the dark shadows that fell onSolomon's later years. He clearly fell away from his earlyconsecration and noble ideals, and let his sensuous appetites gainpower. He countenanced, if he did not himself practise, idolatry. Asa king he became an arbitrary tyrant, and his love of building ledhim to oppress his subjects, and so laid the foundation for therevolt under Jeroboam which rent the kingdom. So his history isanother illustration of the possible shipwreck of a great character. It is one more instance of the fall of a 'son of the morning. ' Weneed not elaborate the contrast with Christ's character. In Him isno falling from a high ideal, no fading of morning glory into acloudy noon or a lurid evening. There is no black streak in thatflawless white marble. Jesus draws the perfect circle, like Giotto'sO, while all other lives show some faltering of hand, and consequentirregularity of outline. Greater than Solomon, with his over-cloudedglories and his character worsened by self-indulgence, is Jesus, 'the Sun of righteousness, ' the perfect round of whose lustrouslight is broken by no spots on the surface, no indentations in thecircumference, nor obscured by any clouds over its face. II. The Teacher. Solomon was traditionally regarded as the author of much of the Bookof Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes was written as by him. Possibly theattribution 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 ofSheba to hear him, and that is the point of the comparison of ourtext. If we take these two books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes intoaccount, as popularly attributed to him, they suggest points ofcomparison and contrast with Jesus as a teacher, which we maybriefly point out. Now, Proverbs falls into two very distinctportions, the former part being a connected fatherly admonition tothe pursuit of wisdom, and the latter a collection of prudentialmaxims, in which it is rare for any two contiguous verses to haveanything to do with each other. In the former part Wisdom is setforth as man's chief good, and the Wisdom which is so set forth ismainly moral wisdom, the right disposition of will and heart, andalmost identical with what the Old Testament elsewhere callsrighteousness. But it is invested, as the writer proceeds, with moreand more august and queenly attributes, and at last stands forth asbeing, if not a divine person, at least a personification of adivine attribute. Bring that ancient teaching and set it side by side with Jesus, andwhat can we say but that He is what the old writer, be he Solomon oranother, dimly saw? He is the 'wisdom' which was traditionallycalled the 'wisdom of Solomon, ' and which the Queen came from far tohear. Jesus is greater, as the light is more than the eye, or as thetheme is more than the speaker. 'The power of God and the wisdom ofGod' is greater than the sage or seer who celebrates it. What istrue of Solomon or whoever wrote that praise of Wisdom, is true ofall teachers and wise men, they are 'not that light, ' they are 'sentto bear witness of that light. ' Jesus is Wisdom, other men are wise. Jesus is the greatest teacher, for He teaches us Himself. He islesson as well as teacher. Unless He was a great deal more thanTeacher, He could not be the perfect Teacher for whom the worldgroans. The second half of Proverbs is, as I have said, mostly a collectionof prudential and moral maxims, with very little reference to God orhigh ideals of duty in them. They may represent to us the impotenceof wise saws to get themselves practised. A guide-post is not aguide. It stretches out its gaunt wooden arms towards the city, butit cannot bend them to help a lame man lying at its foot. Men do notgo wrong for lack of knowing the road, nearly so often as for lackof inclination to walk in it. We have abundant voices to tell uswhat we ought to do. But what we want is the swaying of inclinationto do it, and the gift of power to do it. And it is preciselybecause Jesus gives us both these that He is what no collection ofthe wisest sayings can ever be, the efficient teacher of allrighteousness, and of the true wisdom which is 'the principalthing. ' As for Ecclesiastes, though not his, it represents not untruly thetone which we may suppose to have characterised his later days inits dwelling on the vanity of life. The sadness of it may becontrasted with the light thrown by the Gospel on the darkestproblems. Solomon cries, 'All is vanity'--Jesus teaches His scholarsto sing, 'All things work together for good. ' III. The Temple builder. In this respect 'a greater than Solomon is here, ' inasmuch as Jesusis Himself the true Temple, being for all men, which Solomon'sstructure only shadowed, the meeting-place of God and man, in whomGod dwells and through whom we can draw near to Him, the place wherethe true Sacrifice is once for all offered, by which Sacrifice sinis truly put away. And, further, Jesus is greater than Solomon inthat He is, through the ages, building up the great Temple of HisChurch of redeemed men, the eternal temple of which not one stoneshall ever be taken down. IV. The peaceful King. There were no wars in Solomon's reign. But a dark shadow broodedover 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 manwho trusts and obeys Him, and with the peace among men which theacceptance of His rule brings, and will one day bring perfectly, toa regenerated humanity dwelling on a renewed earth. He is King ofrighteousness, and after that also King of peace. Surely from all these contrasts it is plain that 'a greater thanSolomon 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 beregarded as grouped together by Matthew. They were spokenconsecutively, as is obvious from the notes of time in verses 36 and53. They are a great whole, setting forth the 'mystery of thekingdom' in its method of establishment, its corruption, its outwardand inward growth, the conditions of entrance into it, and its finalpurification. The sacred number seven, impressed upon them, is thetoken of completeness. They fall into two parts: four of them beingspoken to the multitudes from the boat, and presenting the moreobvious aspects of the development of the kingdom; three beingaddressed to the disciples in the house, and setting forth truthsabout it more fitted for them. The first parable, which concerns us now, has been generally calledthe Parable of the Sower, but he is not the prominent figure. Thesubject is much rather the soils; and the intention is, not so muchto declare anything about him, as to explain to the people, whowere looking for the kingdom to be set up by outward means, irrespective of men's dispositions, that the way of establishing itwas by teaching which needed receptive spirits. The parable is bothhistory and prophecy. It tells Christ's own experience, and itforetells His servants'. He is the great Sower, who has 'come forth'from the Father. His present errand is not to burn up thorns or topunish the husbandmen, but to scatter on all hearts the living seed, which is here interpreted, in accordance with the dominant idea ofthis Gospel, as being 'the word of the kingdom' (ver. 19). All whofollow Him, and make His truth known, are sowers in their turn, andhave to look for the same issue of their work. The figure is commonto all languages. Truth, whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual, is seminal, and, deposited in the heart, understanding, orconscience, grows. It has a mysterious vitality, and its issue isnot a manufacture, but a fruit. If all teachers, especiallyreligious teachers, would remember that, perhaps there would befewer failures, and a good deal of their work would be modified. Wehave here four sowings and one ripening--a sad proportion! We arenot told that the quantity of seed was in each case the same. Ratherwe may suppose that much less fell on the wayside, and on the rockysoil, and among the thorns, than on the good ground. So we cannotsay that seventy-five per cent, of it was wasted; but, in any case, the proportion of failure is tragically large. This Sower was underno illusion as to the result of His work. It is folly to sow on the hard footpath, or the rocky ground, oramong thorns; but Christ and His servants have to do that, inendless hope that these unreceptive hearts may become good soil. Onelesson of the parable is, Scatter the seed everywhere, on the mostunlikely places. I. Our Lord begins with the case in which the seed remains quiteoutside the soil, or, without metaphor, in which the word findsabsolutely no entrance into the heart or mind. A beaten path runs bythe end, or perhaps through the middle, of the cornfield. It is ofexactly the same soil as the rest, but many passengers have troddenit hard, and the very foot of the sower, as he comes and goes in hiswork, has helped. Some of the seed, sown broadcast, of course fallsthere, and lies where it falls, having no power to penetrate thehard 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 exposedgrain. 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 brieflytouch its main features. Notice, then, that our Lord begins with thecase 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 induration. A minute or two finishes it. Notice especially that thepath has been made hard by external pressure. It is not rock, butsoil like the other parts of the field. It represents the case ofmen whose insensibility to the word is caused by outward thingshaving made a thoroughfare of their natures, and trodden them intoincapacity to receive the message of Christ's love. The heavybaggage-wagons of commerce, the light cars of pleasure, merrydancers, and sad funeral processions, have all used that way, andeach footfall has beaten the once loose soil a little firmer. We aremade insensitive to the gospel by the effect of innocent andnecessary things, unless we take care to plough up the path alongwhich they travel, and to keep our spirits susceptible by a distincteffort. How many hearers of every teacher are there, who never takein his words at all, simply because they are so completelypreoccupied! Notice what becomes of the seed that lies thus bare. 'Immediately, 'says Mark, 'Satan cometh. ' His agents are these light-wingedthoughts that flutter round the hearer as soon as the sermon or thelesson is over. Talk of the weather, criticism of the congregation, or of the sower's attitude as he flung the seed, or politics, orbusiness, drive away the remembrance of even the text, before manyof our hearers are out of sight of the church. Then the whirl oftraffic begins again, and the path is soon beaten a little harder. If the seed had got ever so little way into the ground, the sharpbeaks of the thieves would not have carried it off so easily. Impressions so slight as Christ's word makes on busy men are quicklyrubbed out. But if the seed sown vanishes thus swiftly, the fault isnot in it, but in ourselves. Satan may seek to snatch it away, butwe can hinder him. Our Lord uses a singular expression, 'This is he that was sown bythe way side, ' which appears to identify the man with the seedrather than with the soil. It has been suggested by somecommentators that this expression is to be regarded as conveying thetruth that the seed sown in the heart and growing up there becomesthe life-spring of the individual, and that therefore we may speakof him or of it as bearing the fruit. But this explanation will notavail for the case where there is no entrance of the word into theheart, and so no new birth by the word. More probably we are toregard the expression simply as a conversational shorthand form ofspeech, not strictly accurate, but quite intelligible. II. The next variety of soil differs from the preceding in having itshindrance deep seated. Many a hillside in Galilee--as in Scotland orNew England--would show a thin surface of soil over rock, like skinstretched tightly on a bone. No roots could get through the rock norfind nourishment in it; while the very shallowness of earth and theheat of the underlying stone would accelerate growth. Such prematureand feeble shoots perish as quickly as they spring up; the fierceEastern sun makes a speedy end of them, and a few days sees theirspringing and withering. It is a case of 'lightly come, lightly go. 'Quick-sprouting herbs are soon-dying herbs. A shallow pond is up inwaves under a breeze which raises no sea on the Atlantic, and it iscalm again in a few minutes. Readily stirred emotion is transient. Brushwood catches fire easily, and burns itself out quickly. Coaltakes longer to kindle, and is harder to put out. The persons meant are those of excitable temperament, whose feelings lieon the surface, and can be got at without first passing through theunderstanding or the conscience. Such people are easily played on bythe epidemic influence of any prevalent enthusiasm or emotion, as everyrevival of religion shows. Their very 'joy' in hearing the word issuspicious; for a true reception of it seldom begins with joy, butrather with 'the sorrow which worketh repentance not to be repented of. 'Their immediate reception of it is suspicious, for it suggests thatthere has been no time to consult the understanding or to form adeliberate purpose; stable resolutions are slowly formed. It is thesunny side of religion which, has attracted them. They know nothing ofits difficulties and depths. Hence, as soon as they find out therealities of the course which they have embraced so lightly, theydesert, like John Mark running away as soon as home comforts at Cypruswere left behind. The Christian life means self-denial, toil, hardresistance to many fascinations. It means sweat and blood, or it meansnothing. Whether there be 'persecution' or no, there will be affliction, 'because of the word, ' and all the joyful emotion will ooze out at theman's finger-ends. The same superficial excitability which determinedhis swift reception of the word will determine his hasty casting of itaside, and immediately he stumbles. All his acts will be done in ahurry, and none of his moods will last. Feeling is in its place downin the engine-room, but it makes a poor pilot. Very significant isthat phrase, 'No root in himself. ' His roots are in the accidents ofthe moment. His religion has never really struck root in him, but onlyin the superficial layer of him. His conscience, will, understanding, are unpenetrated by its fibres. So it is easily pulled up, as well assoon withered. There is another profound truth in this picture. The hard, impenetrable rock lies right under the thin skin of soil. The naturewhich is over-emotional on its surface is utterly hard at its core. The most heartless people are those whose feelings are always readyto gush; the most unimpressible are those who are most easilybrought 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 areal contact with the word, which has lain longer in their hearts, and has had some growth. We may regard it as either better or worsethan the former, according as we consider that it is better toaccept and feel than not to accept at all, or that it is worse tohave in some measure possessed and felt than not to have receivedthe word of the kingdom. III. In one part of the field was a patch where the soil was neitherrammed solid, as on the footpath, nor thin, as where the rockcropped out, but where there had been a tangle of thorns, which growluxuriantly in Palestine. These had been cut down, but not stubbedup, as is plain from the very fact that the seed reached the ground, as also from the description of them as 'springing up. ' The twogrowths advance together. In this case, the seed has a longer lifethan in the former. It roots and grows, and even, according to theother evangelist's version, fruits, though it does not mature itsfruit. There is no question of 'falling away' here. Only thehardier growth, which had the advantage of previous possession, andwhich pushes up its shoots above ground all round the more tenderplant, gets the start of it, and smothers its green blades, overtopping it, and keeping it from sun and air, as well as drawingto itself the nourishment from the soil. The main point here issimultaneousness of the two growths. This man is, as James callshim, a 'double-minded man. ' He is trying to grow both corn and thornon the same soil. He has some religion, but not enough to makethorough work of it. He is endeavouring to ride on two horses atonce. Religion says 'either--or'; he is trying 'both--and. ' Thehuman heart has only a limited amount of love and trust to give, andChrist 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'sreligion has not been powerful enough to grub up the roots of thethorns. They were cut down when the seed was sown, for a littlewhile, at the beginning of his course; the new life in him seemed toconquer, but the roots of the old lay hid, and, in due time, showedagain above ground. 'Ill weeds grow apace'; and these, as is theirnature, grow faster than the good seed. So the only thing to do isto get them out of the ground to the last fibre. Christ specifies what He deems thorns. We can all understand carebeing so called; but riches? Yes, they too have sharp prickles, asanybody will find who stuffs a pillow with them. But our Lordchooses His words to point the lesson that not outward things, butour attitude to them, make the barrenness of this soil. It is not'this world, ' but 'the care of this world, ' not 'riches, ' but 'thedeceitfulness of riches, ' that choke the word. These two seemopposites, but they are really the same thing on two opposite sides. The man who is burdened with the cares of poverty, and the man whois deceived by the false promises of wealth, are really the sameman. The one is the other turned inside out. We make the world ourgod, whether we worship it by saying, 'I am desolate without thee, 'or by fancying that we are secure with it. Note that the issue inthis case is--unfruitfulness. The man may, and I suppose usuallydoes, keep up a profession of Christianity all his life. He verylikely does not know that the seed is choked, and that he has becomeunfruitful. But he is a stunted, useless Christian, with all the sapand nourishment of his soul given to his worldly position, and hisreligion is a poor pining growth, with blanched leaves and abortivefruit. How much of Christ's field is filled with plants of thatsort! IV. The parable tells us nothing about the comparative acreage ofthe path and the rocky and thorny soils on the one hand, and of thefertile soil on the other. It is not meant to teach the proportionof success to failure, but to exhibit the fact that the reception ofthe word depends on men's dispositions. The good soil has none ofthe faults of the rest of the field. It is loose, and thus unlikethe path; deep, and thus unlike the rocky bit; clean, and thusunlike the thorn brake. The interpretation given of it by our Lordseems at first sight incomplete. It is all summed up in one word, 'understandeth. ' Then, did not the second and third classes, at allevents, understand? They received the word, and it had some growthin them. The distinction between them and the good-soil hearer issurely of a moral nature, rather than of so purely intellectual akind as 'understanding' suggests. Hence, Luke's keep fast 'in anhonest and good heart' may seem a more adequate statement. ButBiblical usage does not regard 'understanding' as a purelyintellectual process, but rather as the action of the whole moraland spiritual nature. It knows nothing of dividing a man up intowater-tight compartments, one of which may be full of evil, and theother clean and receptive of good. According to it, we 'understand'religious truth by our hearts and moral nature in conjunction withthe dry light of intellect. So the word here is used in a pregnantsense, and includes the grasp of the truth with the whole being, thecomplete reception of the word of the kingdom not merely into theintellect, but into the central self which is the undivided fountainfrom which flow the issues of life, whether these be calledintellect, or affection, or conscience, or will. Only he who hasthus become one with the word, and housed it deep in his inmostsoul, 'understands' it, in the sense in which our Lord here usesthat expression. 'Thy word have I hid in mine heart' exactlycorresponds to the 'understanding' which is here given as thedistinctive mark of the good soil. The result of that reception into the depths of the spirit is thathe 'verily beareth fruit. ' The man who receives the word isidentified with the plant that springs from the seed which hereceives. The life of a Christian is the result of the growth in himof a supernatural seed. He bears fruit, yet the fruit comes not fromhim, but from the seed sown. 'I live; yet not I, but Christ livethin me. ' Fruitfulness is the aim of the sower, and the test of thereception of the seed. If there is not fruit, manifestly there hasbeen no real understanding of the word. A touchstone, that, whichwill produce surprising results in detecting spurious Christianity, if it be honestly applied! There is variety in the degree of fruitfulness, according to thegoodness of the soil; that is to say, according to the thoroughnessand depth of the reception of the word. The great Husbandman doesnot demand uniform fertility. He is glad when He gets anhundredfold, but He accepts sixty, and does not refuse thirty, onlyHe arranges them in descending order, as if He would fain have thehighest rate from all the plants, and, not without disappointment, gradually stretches His merciful allowance to take in even thelowest. 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 cannotchange. But men can plough up the trodden ways, and blast away therock, and root out the thorns, and, with God's help, can open thedoor of their hearts, that the Sower and His seed may enter in. Weare responsible for the nature of the soil, else His warning werevain, '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 veryvarious connections. He sometimes, as in the instance before us, appended it to teaching which, from its parabolic form, requiredattention to disentangle the spiritual truth implied. He sometimesused it to commend some strange, new revolutionary teaching to men'sinvestigation--as, for instance, after that great declaration of thenullity of ceremonial worship, how that nothing could defile a manexcept what came from his heart. In other connections, which I neednot now enumerate, we find it. Like printing a sentence in italics, or underscoring it, this saying calls special attention to the thinguttered. It is interesting to notice that our Lord, like the rest ofus, had to use such means of riveting and sharpening the attentionof His hearers. There is also a striking reappearance of theexpression in the last book of Scripture. The Christ who speaks tothe seven churches, from the heavens, repeats His old word spoken onearth, and at the end of each of the letters says once more, as ifeven the Voice that spoke from heaven might be listened tolistlessly, 'He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saithto the churches. ' I. We all have ears. Now, it is a very singular instance of the superficial, indolent wayin which people are led away by sound rather than by sense, thatthis saying of my text has often been taken to mean that there is acertain class that can listen, and that it is their business tolisten, and there is another class that cannot, and so they areabsorbed from all responsibility. The opposite conclusion is thecorrect one. Everybody has ears, therefore everybody is bound tohear. Which being translated, is that there is not a man or womanamong us that has not the capacity of hearing in the sense ofunderstanding, and of hearing in the sense of obeying the word thatJesus Christ speaks to us all. Every one of us, whatever may be ourdiversities of education, temperament, natural capacity in regard toother subjects of study and apprehension, has the ears that arecapable of receiving the message that comes to us all in JesusChrist. For what is it that He addresses? Universal human nature, theuniversal human wants, and mainly and primarily, as I believe, thesense of sin which lies dormant indeed, but capable of beingawakened, 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 ofliving by, the great Incarnate Word and His message to the world. Sothat instead of there being a restriction implied in the wordsbefore us, there is the broadest implication of the universality ofChrist's message. And just as every man comes into the world with apair of ears on his head, so every man comes into the world with thecapacity of listening to, and accepting, that gracious Lord. That isthe first thing that our Master distinctly declares here, that weall 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, capacityand responsibility go together; and the power that we possess is themeasure of the obligation under which we come. All our naturalfaculties, for instance, are given to us with the implied command, 'See that you make the best use of them. ' So that even these bodilyorgans of ours, much more the higher faculties and capacities of thespirit of which the body is partly the symbol and partly theinstrument, are intrusted to us on terms of stewardship. And just asit is criminal for a man to go through life with a pair of ears onhis head, and a pair of eyes in his forehead, neither of which heeducates and cultivates, so is it criminal for a man having thecapacity of grasping the great Revelation of God, who 'at sundrytimes and in divers manners hath spoken unto the Fathers by theprophets, but in these last days hath spoken unto us by the Son, ' toturn away from that Voice, and pay no heed to it. It is universally true that obligation goes with capacity. It isespecially true with regard to our relation to Jesus Christ. We areall bound to 'hear Him, ' as the great Voice said on the Mount ofTransfiguration. The upshot of all that manifestation of the divineglory welling up from the depths of Christ's nature, andtransfiguring His countenance, the upshot of all that solemn andmysterious communion with the mighty dead, Moses and Elias, the endof all that encompassing glory that wrapped Him, was the Voice fromHeaven which proclaimed, 'This is My beloved Son; hear ye Him. 'Moses with his Law, Elijah with his Prophecy, faded away and werelost. But there stood forth singly the one Figure, relieved againstthe background of the glory-cloud, the Christ to whom we are allbound to turn with the vision of longing eyes, with the listening ofdocile ears, with the aspiration of yearning affection, with thesubmission of absolute obedience. 'Hear ye Him. ' For just as truly as light is meant for the eye, sotruly are the words of the Incarnate Word, and the life which isspeech and revelation, meant to be the supreme objects of ourattention, of our contemplative regard, and of our practicalsubmission. We are bound to hear because we have ears; and of allthe voices that are candidates for our attention, and of all themusic that sounds through the universe, no voice is so sweet andweighty, no words so fundamental and all-powerful, no music somelodious, so deep and thunderous, so thrilling and gracious, as arethe words of that Word who was made flesh and dwelt among us. We arebound to hear, and we hear to most profit when it is Him that wehear. III. We shall not hear without an effort. Christ says in my text, 'Let him hear, ' as if the possession of theear did not necessarily involve that there should be hearing. And soit is; 'Having ears, they hear not, ' is a description verified in agreat many other walks of life than in regard to religious matters. But it is verified there in the most conspicuous and in the mosttragic fashion. I wonder how many of us there are who, though wehave heard with the hearing of the outward ear, have not heard inthe sense of attending, have scarcely heard in the sense ofapprehending, 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 ina man's ears, making him deaf to the message of life in JesusChrist, in order to bring out how needful it is that these should becounteracted by an effort of will, and the vigorous concentration ofthought and heart upon that message. What is it that keeps men from hearing? Being busy with other thingsis one hindrance. There is an old story of St. Bernard riding alongby a lake on his way to a Council, and being so occupied withthoughts and discussions, that after the day's travel he lifted uphis eyes and said, 'Where is the lake?' And so we, many of us, goalong all our days on the banks of the great sea of divine love, andwe 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 beentravelling by the side of the flashing waters all the day long. Everybody knows how possible it is to be so engrossed with one'soccupations or thoughts as that when the clock strikes in the nextsteeple, we hear it and do not hear it. We have read of soldiersbeing so completely absorbed in the fury of the fight that athunderstorm has rattled over their heads, and no man heard theroll, and no man saw the flash. Many of us are so swallowed up inour trade, in our profession, in our special branch of study, in ouroccupations and desires, that all the trumpets of Sinai might beblown into our ears, and we should hear them as though we heard themnot; and what is worse, that the pleading voice of that great Lordwho 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, andproduces no effect, any more than does the idle wind whistlingthrough an archway. Brethren, you have the need, the sin, theweakness, the transiency, to which the Gospel appeals. You have thefaculties to which it addresses itself. Jesus Christ is speaking toevery 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, orthe more refined sounds of some profession or study, have so takenup your attention that you have none to spare for that whichrequires 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 allyour days. You do not know the despair that sometimes comes over men inmy position when we face our congregations of people that are familiarto weariness with everything that we have to say, and because they aresuperficially so familiar with it, fancy that there is no need forthem to give heed any more. What can a poor man like me do to getthrough that crust of familiarity with the mere surface of Christiantruth and teaching which is round many of you? You come and listen tome, and say, 'Oh! he has nothing original to say. We have heard it allbefore. ' Yes, your ears have heard it. Have _you_ heard? 'Jesus Christdied for me, ' you have been told that ever since you were a littlechild; and so the thousand-and-first, the million-and-first, repetitionof it has little power over you. If once, just once, that truth couldget through the crust of familiarity, and touch your heart, your bareheart, with its quick naked point of fire-shod love, I think theremight be a wound made that would mean healing. But some of you willgo 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 awall, or run off you like water from the sea-bird's plumes, justbecause you think you have heard it all before--and you have neverheard 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 hisears. And some of you, I am afraid, are not ignorant of what it isto have made distinct and conscious efforts to get rid of theimpressions of religion, and of Christ's voice to us. And then there are some of us who, out of sheer listlessness, do nothear. It is not because we are too busy. It is not because we haveany intellectual objection to the message. It is not because we havemade any definite effort to get away from it. It is not even becausewe have been so accustomed to hear it, that it is impossible to makean impression on our listless indifference. Go down into MorecambeBay when the tide is making; and, as the water is beginning topercolate through the sand, try to make an impression with a stickupon the tremulous jelly. As soon as you take out the point theimpression is lost. And there are many of us like that, who, out ofsheer stolid listlessness, retain no fragment of the truth that issounding in our ears. Dear friends, 'If the word spoken by angelswas steadfast, how shall we escape if we'--what? Reject? Deny? Fightagainst? Angrily repel? No;--'if we _neglect_ so great salvation?' Thatis the question for you negligent people, for you people who think youknow all about it and there an end, for you people who are so busywith your daily lives that, amidst the hubbub of earth, heaven's silentvoice is inaudible to your ears. Neglect stops the ears and ruins theman. But you will not hear, though you have ears, unless you make aneffort of will and concentration of attention. IV. And now the last thing that I have to say is:--If we do nothear, we shall become deaf. That is what Christ said in the context. The sentence which I havetaken as my text was spoken at the close of the Parable of theSower; and when His disciples came and asked Him why He spake inparables, His answer was in effect that the people to whom He spokehad not profited by what they had heard, 'hearing, they heard not, 'and therefore He spoke in parables which veiled as well as revealedthe truth. It was not given to them to know the mysteries of theKingdom, because they had not given heed to what had been made knownto them. The great law was taking effect which gives to him that hasand takes from him that has not; and that law applied not only tothe form of Christ's teaching, but also to the faculty of receivingit. That diminished capacity is sometimes represented as men's ownact, and sometimes as the divinely inflicted penalty of not hearing, but in either case the same fact is in view--namely, the loss ofsusceptibility by neglect, the dying out of faculties by disuse. Just as in the bodily life capacities untrained and unexercisedbecome faint and disappear; just as the Indian _fakir_, whoholds his arm up above his head for years, never using the muscles, has the muscles atrophied, and at last cannot bring his arm down tohis side;--so the people who neglect to use the ears that God hasgiven them by degrees will lose the capacity of hearing at all. Which, being put into plain English, just comes to this: that if wedo not listen to Jesus Christ when He calls to us in His love, weshall gradually have the capacity of hearing diminished until--I donot know if it ever reaches that point here--until its ultimateextinction. Dear friends, this word of the love and pity and pardon andpurifying power of God manifest in Jesus Christ for us all, which Iam trying to preach to you now, is not without an effect even on themen by whom it is most superficially and perfunctorily heard. Iteither softens or hardens. As the old mystics used to say, the sameheat that melts wax hardens clay into brick. The same light thatbrings blessing to one eye brings pain to another. You have heard, and hearing you have not heard; and you will cease to be able tohear at all; and then the thunders may rattle over your heads, andbe inaudible to you; and that Voice which is as loud as the sound ofmany waters, and sweet as harpers harping on their harps, and whichsays to each of us, 'Come to Me, and I will be thy peace and thyrest and thy strength, ' will no more be audible in your atrophiedears. Dear friends! I do not know, as I have said, whether thatultimate tragic result is ever wholly reached in this world. I amsure that it is not reached with some of you as yet. And I beseechyou to obey that voice which says, 'This is My beloved Son; hearHim, ' and to let there not be only outward hearing, but to let therebe inward acceptance, attention, apprehension, and obedience. Andthen we shall be able to say, 'Blessed are our ears, for they hear;blessed are our eyes, for they see. ' 'Many prophets and righteousmen desired to hear the things that ye hear, and heard them not, take care that, since you are thus advanced in the outwardpossession of the perfect word of God, there be also the yieldingto, 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 repetitionof sayings which seem to have been, if we may use the expression, favourites with Him; as, for instance, 'There are first which shallbe last, and there are last which shall be first'; or, again, 'Theservant is not greater than his master, nor the disciple than hislord. ' My text is one of these. It is here said as part of theexplanation why He chose to speak in parables, in order that thetruth, revealed to the diligent and attentive, might be hidden fromthe careless. Again, we find it in two other Gospels, in a somewhatsimilar connection, though with a different application, where Jesusenunciates it as the basis of His warning, 'Take heed how'--or, inanother version, 'what'--'ye hear. ' Again He employs it in thisGospel in the parable of the talents, as explaining the principle onwhich the retribution to the slothful servant was meted out. And wefind it yet once more in the parable of the pounds in Luke's Gospel, which, though entirely different in conception and purpose from thatof the talents, is identical in the portion connected with theslothful servant. So there are two very distinct directions in which this sayinglooks, as it was used by our Lord--one in reference to the attitudeof men towards the Revelation of God, and one in reference to thesolemn subject of future retribution. I wish, now, mainly to try andillustrate the great law which is set forth here, and to follow outthe various spheres of its operation, and estimate the force of itsinfluence. For I think that large and very needful lessons for usall may be drawn therefrom. The principle of my text shapes alllife. It is a paradox, but it is a deep truth. It sounds harsh andunjust, but it contains the very essence of righteous retribution. The paradox is meant to spur attention, curiosity, and inquiry. Thekey to it lies here--to use is to have. There is a possession whichis no possession. That I have rights of property in a thing, ascontradistinguished to your rights, does not make it in any deep andreal sense mine. What I use I have; and all else is, as one of theother evangelists has it, but 'seeming' to have. So much, then, by way of explanation of our text. Now, let me askyou to look with me into two or three of the regions where we shallfind 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 acomplaint that is made against the present social arrangements anddistribution of wealth, that money makes money; that wealth has atendency to clot; the rich man to get richer, and the poor man toget poorer. Just as in a basin of water when the plug is out, andcircular motion is set up, the little bits of foreign matter thatmay be there all tend to get together, so it is in regard to theseexternal possessions. 'To him that hath shall be given'; and peoplegrumble about that and say, 'It never rains but it pours, and theman that needs more money least gets it most easily. ' Of course. Treasure used grows; treasure hoarded rusts and dwindles. Themillionaire will double his fortune by a successful speculation. Theman with half a dozen large shops drives the poor little tradesmanout of the field. So it is all round: 'To him that hath shall begiven; 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 topowers of body. That is a threadbare old illustration. Theblacksmith's arm we have all heard about; the sailor's eye, thepianist's wrist, the juggler's fingers, the surgeon's deft hand--allthese come by use. 'To him that hath shall be given. ' And the sameman who has cultivated one set of organs to an almost miraculousfineness or delicacy or strength will, by the operation of the otherhalf of the same principle, have all but atrophied another set. Sowith the blacksmith's arm, which has grown muscular at the expenseof his legs. Part of the physical frame has monopolised what mighthave been distributed throughout the whole. Use is strength; usemakes growth. We have what we employ. And even in regard to ourbodily frame the organs that we do not use we carry about with usrather as a weight attached to us than as a possession. Again, come a little higher. This great principle largely goes todetermine our position in the world and our work. The man that can doa thing gets it to do. In the long run the tools come to the hand thatcan use them. So here is one medical man's consulting-room crammedfull of patients, and his neighbour next door has scarcely one. Thewhole world runs to read A's, B's, or C's books. The brieflessbarrister complains that there is no middle course between havingnothing to do and being overwhelmed with briefs. 'To him that hathshall be given'--the man can do a thing, and he gets it to do--'andfrom 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--todo in making men's characters. For it operates in its most intensefashion, and with results most blessed or most disastrous, in theinner life. The great example that I would adduce is conscience. Useit, obey it, listen for its voice, never thwart it, and it grows andgrows and grows, and becomes more and more sensitive, more and moreeducated, more and more sovereign in its decisions. Neglect it, stillmore, go in its teeth, and it dwindles and dwindles and dwindles; andI suppose it is possible--though one would fain hope that it is a veryexceptional case--for a man, by long-continued indifference to thevoice within that says 'Thou shalt' or 'Thou shalt not, ' to come atlast to never hearing it at all, or to its never speaking at all. Itis 'seared as with a hot iron, ' says one of the Apostles; and inseared flesh there is no feeling any more. Are any of you, dearfriends, bringing about such a state? Are you doing what you know youought not to do? Then you will be less and less troubled as the daysgo on; and, by neglecting the voice, you will come at last to be likethe 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 stiflewhat is the truest echo of God's voice that you will ever hear? Doyou not think that it would be wiser to get the blessed half of thislaw on your side, instead of the dreadful one? Listen to that voice. Never, as you value yourselves, neglect it. Cultivate the habit ofwaiting for its monitions, its counsels prohibitory or commendatory, and then you will have done much to secure that your spirit shall beenriched by the operations of this wide-spread law. Take another illustration. People who, by circumstances, are placedin some position of dependence and subordination, where they haveseldom to exercise the initiative of choice, but just to do whatthey are bid, by degrees all but lose the power of making up theirminds about anything. And so a slave set free is proverbially ahelpless creature, like a bit of driftwood; and children who havebeen too long kept in a position of pupilage and subordination, whenthey 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 awoman that has been accustomed to leave everything in her husband'shands, when the clods fall on his coffin finds herself utterlyhelpless and bewildered, just because in the long, happy years shenever found it necessary to exercise her own judgment or her ownwill about practical matters. So do not get into the habit of letting circumstances settle whatyou are to do, or you will lose the power of dominating them, beforevery long. And if a man for years leaves himself, as it were, to beguided by the stream of circumstances, like long green weeds in ariver, he will lose the power of determining his own fate, and theWill will die clean out of him. Cultivate it, and it will grow. Again, this same principle largely settles our knowledge, ourconvictions, the operations and the furniture of our understandings. If a man holds any truth slackly, or in the case of truths that aremeant 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 actupon them, do not take them for guides of your life--and they willsoon relieve you of their unwelcome presence. If you wish mind andknowledge to grow, grip with a grip of iron what you do know, andlet it dominate you, as it ought. He that truly _has_ hislearning 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 havebeen indefinitely enlarged, we see the working of a principle whichhas much to do in making men what they are. What you use youincrease, what you leave unused you lose. There are grey heads in mypresent audience who, when they were young men, had dreams andaspirations that they bitterly smile at now. There are men here whobegan life with possibilities that have never blossomed or fruited, but have died on the stem. Why? Because they were so much occupiedwith 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 thusbeen shed away from them. You make your characters by the parts ofyourselves that you choose to cultivate and employ. Do you thinkthat God gave us whatever of an intellectual and emotional and moralkind is in us, in order that it might be all used up in our dailybusiness? A very much scantier outfit would have done for all thatis wanted for that. But there are abortive and dormant organs inyour spiritual nature, as there are in the corporeal, which tell youwhat you were meant for, and which it is your sin to leaveundeveloped. 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 twohalves of yourselves you will foster, and on which you will frown. So much, then, for the first general application of these words. Nowlet me turn for a moment to another. II. I would note, secondly, the application of this two-fold law inregard to God's revelation of Himself. That is the bearing of it in the immediate context from which ourtext is taken. Our Lord explains that teaching by parable--atransparent veil over a truth--was adopted in order that the veiledtruth might be a test as well as a revelation. And although I do notbelieve that the Christian revelation has been made in any degreeless plain and obvious than it could have been made, I cannot butrecognise the fact that the necessities of the case demand that, when God speaks to us, He should speak in such a fashion as that itis possible to say, 'Tush! It is not God that is speaking; it isonly Eli!' and so to turn about the young Samuel's mistake the otherway. I do not believe that God has diminished the evidence of HisRevelation in order to try us; but I do maintain that the Revelationwhich He has made does come to us, and must come to us, in such aform as that, not by mathematical demonstration but by moralaffinity, we shall be led to recognise and to bow to it. He thatwill be ignorant, let him be ignorant, and he that will come askingfor truth, it will flood his eyeballs with a blessed illumination. The veil will but make more attractive to some eyes the outlines ofthe fair form beneath it, whilst others are offended at it and say, 'Unless we see the truth undraped, we will not believe that it istruth at all. ' So, brethren, let me remind you--what is really but a repetition inreference to another subject of what I have already said, --that inregard to God's speech to men, and especially in regard to what I, for my part, believe to be the complete and ultimate and perfectspeech of God to men, in Jesus Christ our Saviour, the principle ofmy text holds good. 'To him that hath shall be given. ' If you will make that truth yourown by loyal faith and honest obedience, if you will grapple it toyour heart, then you will learn more and more. Whatever tiny cornerof the great whole you have grasped, hold on by that and draw itinto yourselves, and you will by degrees get the entire, glorious, golden web to wrap round you. 'If any man wills to do His will heshall know. ' That is Christ's promise; and it will be fulfilled tous all. 'To him that hath shall be given. ' If, on the other hand, you 'have' Christian truth and Christ, who isthe Truth, in the fashion in which so many of us have it and Him, asa form, as a mere intellectual possession, so that we can, when wego to church, repeat the creed without feeling that we are telling alie, but that when we go to market we do not carry the Commandmentswith us--if that is our Christianity, then it will dribble away intonothing. We shall not be much the poorer for the loss of such a shampossession, but it will go. It drops out of the hands that are notclasped to hold it. It is just that a thing so neglected shall someday be a thing withdrawn. So in regard to Revelation and a man'sperception and reception of it, my text holds good in both itshalves. 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 fivetimes in which the saying appears in the three Gospels: in theparable of the talents and in the parallel portion of the parable ofthe pounds. I do not venture into the regions of speculation aboutthat future, but from the words before us there come clearly enoughtwo aspects of it. The man with the ten talents received more; theman that had hid the talent or the pound in the ground was deprivedof that which he had not used. Now, with regard to the former there is no difficulty in translatingthe representations of the parables, sustained as they are bydistinct statements of other portions of Scripture. They come tothis, that, for the life beyond, indefinite progress in all that isnoble and blessed and Godlike in heart and character, in intellectand power, are certain; that faith, hope, love, here cultivated butputting forth few blossoms and small fruitage, there, in that higherhouse where these be planted, will flourish in the courts of theLord, and will bear fruit abundantly; that here the few thingsfaithfully administered will be succeeded yonder by the many thingsroyally ruled over; that here one small coin, as it were, is putinto our palm--namely the present blessedness and peace and strengthand purity of a Christian life; and that yonder we possess theinheritance of which what we have here is but the earnest. It usedto be the custom when a servant was hired for the next term-day togive him one of the smallest coins of the realm as what was called'arles'--wages in advance, to seal the bargain. Similarly, in buyingan estate a bit of turf was passed over to the purchaser. We get theearnest here of the broad acres of the inheritance above. 'To himthat hath shall be given. ' And the other side of the same principle works in some terrible waysthat we cannot speak about. 'From him that hath not shall be takenaway even that which he hath. ' I have spoken of the terrible analogyto this solemn prospect which is presented us by the imperfectexperiences of earth. And when we see in others, or discover inourselves, how it is possible for unused faculties to die entirelyout, I think we shall feel that there is a solemn background of veryawful truth, in the representation of what befell the unfaithfulservant. Hopes unnourished are gone; opportunities unimproved aregone, capacities undeveloped are gone; fold after fold, as it were, is peeled off the soul, until there is nothing left but the nakedself, pauperised and empty-handed for evermore. 'Take it from him';he never was the better for it; he never used it; he shall have itno 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 bythe hearing of the ear and by outward profession. And then death willcome to you, as a nurse might to a child that came in from the fieldswith its hands full of worthless weeds and grasses, to empty them inorder to fill them with the flowers that never fade. You can choosewhether Death--and Life too, for that matter--shall be the porterthat will open to you the door of the treasure-house of God, or therobber 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 isnot one man in ten thousand who sees the things before his eyes. Isnot this the distinction, for instance, of the poet or painter, andman of science--just that they do see? How true is this about theeye of the mind, what a small number really understand what theyknow! But these illustrations are of less moment than the saddestexample--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 farthe largest proportion of our nation. It is the true enemy of souls. I do not believe that any large proportion of Englishmen are actualdisbelievers, who reject Christianity as unworthy of credence, orattach themselves to any of the innumerable varieties of deisticaland pantheistical schools. I am not saying at present whether itwould be a more or less hopeful state if it were so, but only thatit is not so, and that a complacent taking for granted of religioustruth, a torpor of soul, an entire carelessness about God andChrist, and the whole mighty scheme of the Gospel, is thecharacteristic of many in all classes of English society. We have ithere in our churches and chapels as the first foe we have to fightwith. Disbelief slays its thousands, and dissipation its tens ofthousands, but this sleek, well-to-do carelessness, its millions. Assome 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 ofalienation, the spirit of slumber--but we may find proximate andspecial causes. There is the indifference springing from the absorbing interests ofthe present. A man has only a certain quantity of interest to putforth. 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 anythingelse, or for reflection upon Christian truth in connection with ourown conduct. Then there is the indifference caused by fear of what the results ofattention might be. It is sometimes broken in upon, and men are indanger of having their eyes opened, then with an effort they flingthemselves 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 inthe truth. That is a favourite way of breaking the force of allunwelcome moral truth, and especially of the Gospel. A man says, 'Ohyes, it is true, ' and because it is, therefore he thinks he has doneenough when he has acknowledged it. Many do not seem to dream thatthe Word has any personal application to them at all. Then there is the indifference which comes from long familiaritywith the truth. It is this which haunts our congregations and makesit 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 bya forge, the sound of the blow of the hammer only lulls them tosleep. The Gospel is so familiar to them that there is no longer anypower about it. The vulgar emotion of wonder is not excited, and theother of love and admiration has not taken its place. Men who live in mountain scenery do not know its beauties, and aswith all other operations of the listless eye so with this, the oldis deemed to be uninteresting, and the common is the commonplace. Aseven in the piece of earth that you have trodden on longest, youwould find marvels that you do not dream of if you would look, sohere. You have heard too much and reflected too little. Oh, brethren, it oppresses a man who has to speak to you when hereflects how often you have heard it all, how the flow of the riveronly seems to have worn your souls smooth enough to let it glidepast without one stoppage. III. The contrasts it suggests. Contrast the indolence here with the earnestness in life. The samemen who sit with faces stolid and expressionless over a sermon--meetthem 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 ofintense 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 arehere, and we may well be ashamed. It is as if a burning mountainwith its cataract of fire were suddenly quenched and locked ineverlasting frost, and all the flaming glory running down itsheaving sides turned into a slow glacier. There comes ice instead offire, frost instead of flame, snow instead of sparks. It is as ifsome magician waved a wand and stiffened men into a paralysis. Religion seems to numb men instead of inspiring them. It is an awfulthought of how they serve themselves and the world, how they canlove one another, how they can be stirred to noble enthusiasm, andhow little of all this ever comes to God. Contrast the indifference of the men and the awfulness of the thingsthey are indifferent about. God--Christ--their souls--heaven--hell. The grandest things men can think about, the mightiest realities inthe universe, the eternal, the most powerful, these it is which someof you, seeing, see not. Contrast men's indifference and the earnestness of the rest of thecreation. God rose early and sent His prophets. He so loved theworld 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 flashthrough all her golden glories with light, what makes hell look onwith the lurid scowl of baffled malignity, that is what _you_are careless about. My friend, you and other men like you are theonly beings in the universe careless about the salvation of yoursouls. IV. The end to which it conducts. That end is certain ruin. Ah, dear friends, you do not need to domuch to ruin your own souls. You have only to continue indifferentand you will do it effectually. Negligence is quite enough. Ruin iswhat it will certainly end in. And remember that when the possibility of salvation ends, yourindifference will end too. The poor toad that is fascinated by theserpent, and drops powerless into the cruel jaws, wakes from thestupor when it feels the pang. And the lifelong torpor will bedissolved for you when you pass into another world. What an awfulawaking that will be when men look back and see by the light ofeternity what they were doing here! Oh! friends, would to God thatany poor word of mine could rouse you from this drugged and opiatesleep! Believe me, it is merciful violence which would rouse you. Anything rather than that the poison should work on till the heavyslumber darkens into death. Let me implore you, as you value yourown souls, as you would not fling away your most precious jewel to'awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christshall give thee light. ' Beware of the treacherous indifference whichcreeps 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 amiscellaneous crowd on the beach, the last three to the disciples inthe house. The difference of audience is accompanied with a diversityof subject. The former group deals with the growth of the kingdom, asit might be observed by outsiders, and especially with aspects of thegrowth on which the multitude needed instruction; the latter, withtopics 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 personof 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. Theidentification of the seed sown with the persons receiving it, whichwas hinted at in the first, is predominant in the second. But whilethe former described the various results of the seed, the latterdrops out of sight the three failures, and follows its fortunes inhonest and good hearts, showing the growth of the kingdom in themidst of antagonistic surroundings. It may conveniently be consideredin three sections: the first teaching how the work of the sower iscounter-worked by his enemy; the second, the patience of the sowerwith the thick-springing tares; and the third, the separation at theharvest. I. The work of the sower counter-worked by his enemy, and themingled crops. The peculiar turn of the first sentence, 'The kingdom of heaven islikened unto a man that sowed, ' etc. , suggests that the main purposeof the parable is to teach the conduct of the king in view of thegrowth of the tares. The kingdom is concentrated in Him, and the'likening' is not effected by the parable, but, as the tenses ofboth verbs show, by the already accomplished fact of His sowing. OurLord veils His claims by speaking of the sower in the third person;but the hearing ear cannot fail to catch the implication throughoutthat He Himself is the sower and the Lord of the harvest. The fieldis 'his field, ' and His own interpretation tells us that it means'the world. ' Whatever view we take of the bearing of this parable onpurity of communion in the visible Church, we should not slur overChrist's own explanation of 'the field, ' lest we miss the lessonthat He claims the whole world as His, and contemplates the sowingof the seed broadcast over it all. The Kingdom of Heaven is to bedeveloped on, and to spread through, the whole earth. The worldbelongs to Christ not only when it is filled with the kingdom, butbefore the sowing. The explanation of the good seed takes the samepoint 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. Menbecome children of the kingdom by taking the Gospel into theirhearts, and thereby receive a new principle of growth, which intruth 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 theheart, makes men 'children of the kingdom, ' the other, by puttingevil principles therein, makes men 'children of evil. ' Honestexposition cannot eliminate the teaching of a personal antagonist ofChrist, nor of his continuous agency in the corruption of mankind. It is a glimpse into a mysterious region, none the less reliablebecause so momentary. The sulphurous clouds that hide the fire inthe crater are blown aside for an instant, and we see. Who woulddoubt the truth and worth of the unveiling because it was short andpartial? '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, norprinciples, nor movements, nor individuals, bear unmingled crops ofgood. Not merely creatural imperfection, but hostile adulteration, marks them all. The purest metal oxidises, scum gathers on the mostlimpid water, every ship's bottom gets foul with weeds. The historyof every reformation is the same: radiant hopes darkened, progressretarded, a second generation of dwarfs who are careless orunfaithful guardians of their heritage. There are, then, two classes of men represented in the parable, andthese two are distinguishable without doubt by their conduct. Taresare said to be quite like wheat until the heads show, and then thereis a plain difference. So our Lord here teaches that the children ofthe kingdom and those of evil are to be discriminated by theiractions. We need not do more than point in a sentence to Hisdistinct separation of men (where the seed of the kingdom has beensown) into two sets. Jesus Christ holds the unfashionable, 'narrow'opinion that, at bottom, a man must either be His friend or Hisenemy. We are too much inclined to weaken the strong line ofdemarcation, and to think that most men are neither black nor white, but grey. The question has been eagerly debated whether the tares are bad menin the Church, and whether, consequently, the mingled crop is adescription of the Church only. The following considerations mayhelp to an answer. The parable was spoken, not to the disciples, butto the crowd. An instruction to them as to Church discipline wouldhave been signally out of place; but they needed to be taught thatthe kingdom was to be 'a rose amidst thorns, ' and to grow up amongantagonisms which it would slowly conquer, by the methods which thenext two parables set forth. This general conception, and notdirections about ecclesiastical order, was suited to them. Again, the designation of the tares as 'the children of evil' seems muchtoo wide, if only a particular class of evil men--namely, those whoare within the Church--are meant by it. Surely the expressionincludes all, both in and outside the Church, who 'do iniquity. 'Further, the representation of the children of the kingdom, asgrowing among tares in the field of the world, does not seem tocontemplate them as constituting a distinct society, whether pure orimpure; but rather as an indefinite number of individuals, intermingled in a common soil with the other class. 'The kingdom ofheaven' is not a synonym for the Church. Is it not an anachronism tofind the Church in the parable at all? No doubt, tares are in theChurch, and the parable has a bearing on it; but its primary lessonseems to me to be much wider, and to reveal rather the conditions ofthe growth of the kingdom in human society. II. We have the patience of the husbandman with the quick-springingtares. The servants of the householder receive no interpretation from ourLord. Their question is silently passed by in His explanation. Clearly then, for some reason, He did not think it necessary to sayany more about them; and the most probable reason is, that they andtheir words have no corresponding facts, and are only introduced tolead up to the Master's explanation of the mystery of the growth ofthe tares, and to His patience with it. The servants cannot besupposed to represent officials in the Church, without hopelesslydestroying the consistency of the parable; for surely all thechildren of the kingdom, whatever their office, are represented inthe 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, strangefact that, where good was sown, evil springs. The deepest of allmysteries 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 wickednesscome from? That is a wider and sadder question than, How are churchesnot free from bad members? Perhaps Christ's answer may go as fartowards the bottom of the bottomless as those of non-Christian thinkers, and, if it do not solve the metaphysical puzzles, at any rate givesthe historical fact, which is all the explanation of which the questionis 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 putemphasis on the householder's will. His answer forbidding thegathering up of the tares is based, not upon any chance of mistakingwheat for them, nor upon any hope that, by forbearance, tares maychange into wheat, but simply on what is best for the good crop. There was a danger of destroying some of it, not because of itslikeness to the other, but because the roots of both were sointerlaced that one could not be pulled up without dragging theother after it. Is this prohibition, then, meant to forbid the attempt to keep theChurch pure from un-Christian members? The considerations alreadyadduced are valid in answering this question, and others may beadded. The crowd of listeners had, no doubt, many of them, beeninfluenced by John the Baptist's fiery prophecies of the King whoshould come, fan in hand, to 'purge His floor, ' and were looking fora kingdom which was to be inaugurated by sharp separation and swiftdestruction. Was not the teaching needed then, as it is now, thatthat is not the way in which the kingdom of heaven is to be foundedand grow? Is not the parable best understood when set in connectionwith the expectations of its first hearers, which are ever floatinganew before the eyes of each generation of Christians? Is it notChrist's _apologia_ for His delay in filling the _rōle_ which John haddrawn out for him? And does that conception of its meaning make itmeaningless for us? Observe, too, that the rooting up which is forbiddenis, by the proprieties of the emblem, and by the parallel which itmust necessarily afford to the final burning, something very solemnand destructive. We may well ask whether excommunication is asufficiently weighty idea to be taken as its equivalent. Again, howdoes the interpretation which sees ecclesiastical discipline herecomport with the reason given for letting the tares grow on? By thehypothesis in the parable, there is no danger of mistake; but is thereany danger of casting out good men from the Church along with thebad, except through mistake? Further, if this parable forbids castingmanifestly evil men out of the Church, it contradicts the divinelyappointed law of the Church as administered by the apostles. If itis to be applied to Church action at all, it absolutely forbids theseparation 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 interpretationwhich lands us in such a conclusion cannot be right. We conclude, then, that the intermingling which the parable means is that of goodmen and bad in human society, where all are so interwoven thatseparation is impossible without destroying its whole texture; thatthe rooting up, which is declared to be inconsistent with the growthof the crop, means removal from the field, namely, the world; thatthe main point of the second part of the parable is to set forth thepatience of the Lord of the harvest, and to emphasise this as thelaw of the growth of His kingdom, that it advances amidst antagonism;and that its members are interlaced by a thousand rootlets with thosewho are not subjects of their King. What the interlacing is for, andwhether tares may become wheat, are no parts of its teaching. Butthe lesson of the householder's forbearance is meant to be learnedby us. While we believe that the scope of the parable is wider thaninstruction in Church discipline, we do not forget that a fair inferencefrom it is that, in actual churches, there will ever be a mingling ofgood and evil; and, though that fact is no reason for giving up theattempt to make a church a congregation of faithful men, and of suchonly, it is a reason for copying the divine patience of the sower inecclesiastical dealings with errors of opinion and faults ofconduct. III. The final separation at the harvest. The period of development is necessarily a time of intermingling, inwhich, side by side, the antagonistic principles embodied in theirrepresentatives work themselves out, and beneficially affect eachother. But each grows towards an end, and, when it has been reached, the blending gives place to separation. John's prophecy is plainlyquoted in the parable, which verbally repeats his 'gather the wheatinto his barn, ' and alludes to his words in the other clause aboutburning the tares. He was right in his anticipations; his error wasin expecting the King to wield His fan at the beginning, instead ofat the end of the earthly form of His kingdom. At the consummationof 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 orseparate them, and all other ties will snap. This marshallingaccording to religious character is the main thought of the solemnclosing words of the parable and of its interpretation, in which ourLord presents Himself as directing the whole process of judgment bymeans of the 'angels' who execute His commands. They are 'Hisangels, ' and whatever may be the unknown activity put forth by themin the parting of men, it is all done in obedience to Him. Whatstupendous claims Jesus makes here! What becomes of the tares istold first in words awful in their plainness, and still more awfulin their obscurity. They speak unmistakably of the absoluteseparation of evil men from all society but that of evil men; of aclose association, compelled, and perhaps unwelcome. The tares aregathered out of 'His kingdom, '--for the field of the world has thenall become the kingdom of Christ. There are two classes among thetares: men whose evil has been a snare to others (for the 'thingsthat offend' must, in accordance with the context, be taken to bepersons), and the less guilty, who are simply called 'them that doiniquity. ' Perhaps the 'bundles' may imply assortment according to sin, as inDante'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 ofthe parable, but yet let us not forget that it occurs not only inthe parable, but in the interpretation; and let us learn that theprose reality of 'everlasting destruction, ' which Christ heresolemnly announces, is awful and complete. For a moment He passesbeyond the limits of that parable, to add that terrible clause about'weeping and gnashing of teeth, ' the tokens of despair and rage. Sospoke the most loving and truthful lips. Do we believe His warningsas well as His promises? The same law of association according to character operates in theother region. The children of the kingdom are gathered together inwhat is now 'the kingdom of My Father, ' the perfect form of thekingdom of Christ, which is still His kingdom, for 'the throne ofGod 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 anew splendour, caught from Him, and blaze out like the sun; for soclose is their association, that their myriad glories melt as into asingle great light. Now, amid gloom and cloud, they gleam like tinytapers far apart; then, gathered into one, they flame in theforehead 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, knowingnothing of the differences, the vulgar differences, between thesmall and great! A poor woman, with her morsel of barm, kneading itup among three measures of meal, in some coarse earthenware pan, stands to Him as representing the whole process of His work in theworld. Matthew brings together in this chapter a series of sevenparables of the kingdom, possibly spoken at different times, andgathered here into a sequence and series, just as he has done withthe great procession of miracles that follows the Sermon on theMount, and just as, perhaps, he has done with that sermon itself. The two first of the seven deal with the progress of the Gospel inindividual minds and the hindrances thereto. Then there follows apair, of which my text is the second, which deal with thegeographical expansion of the kingdom throughout the world, in theparable of the grain of mustard-seed growing into the great herb, and with the inward, penetrating, diffusive influence of thekingdom, working as an assimilating and transforming force in themidst of society. I do not purpose to enter now upon the wide and difficult questionof the relation of the kingdom to the Church. Suffice it to say thatthe two terms are by no means synonymous, but that, at the sametime, inasmuch as a kingdom implies a community of subjects, thechurches, in the proportion in which they have assimilated theleaven, and are holding fast by the powers which Christ has lodgedwithin them, are approximate embodiments of the kingdom. Theparable, then, suggests to us, in a very striking and impressiveform, the function and the obligations of Christian people in theworld. Let me deal, in a purely expository fashion, with the emblem beforeus. 'The kingdom of heaven is like leaven. ' Now of course, leaven isgenerally in Scripture taken as a symbol of evil or corruption. Forexample, the preliminary to the Passover Feast was the purging ofthe houses of the Israelites of every scrap of evil ferment, and thebread which was eaten on that Feast was prescribed to be unleavened. But fermentation works ennobling as well as corruption, and our Lordlays hold upon the other possible use of the metaphor. The parableteaches that the effect of the Gospel, as ministered by, andresiding 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 Icould touch upon; and the first of them is that significantdisproportion between the apparent magnitude of the dead mass thatis to be leavened, and the tiny piece of active energy which is todiffuse itself throughout it. We get there a glimpse into our Lord's attitude, measuring Himselfagainst the world and the forces that were in it. He knows that inHim, the sole Representative, at the moment, of the kingdom ofheaven upon earth--because in Him, and in Him alone, the divine willwas, absolutely and always, supreme--there lie, for the timeconfined to Him, but never dormant, powers which are adequate to thetransformation of humanity from a dead, lumpish mass into anaggregate all-penetrated by a quickening influence, and, if I mightso say, fermented with a new life that He will bring. A tremendousconception, and the strange thing about it is that it looks as ifthe Nazarene peasant's dream was going to come true! But He wasspeaking to the men whom He was charging with a delegated task, andto 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 haveMe, and that is enough, and you may be sure that the tiny morsel ofyeast will penetrate the whole mass. ' Small beginnings characterisethe causes which are destined to great endings; the things that areushered into the world large, generally grow very little further, and speedily collapse. 'An inheritance may be gotten hastily at thebeginning, but the end shall not be blessed. ' The force which isdestined to be worldwide, began with the one Man in Nazareth, andalthough 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 Lordhere offers. If we are adherents of unpopular causes, if we have to'stand alone with two or three, ' do not let us count heads, butmeasure forces. 'What everybody says must be true, ' is a cowardlyproverb. It may be a correct statement that an absolutely universalopinion is a true opinion, but what most people say is usuallyfalse, and what the few say is most generally true. So if we have tofront--and if we are true men we shall sometimes have to front--anembattled mass of antagonism, and we be in a miserable minority, never mind! We can say, 'They that be with us are more than theythat be with them. ' If we have anything of the leaven in us, we aremightier than the lump of dough. But there is another point here, and that is the contact that isnecessary between the leaven and the dough. We have passed from theold monastic idea of Religion being seclusion from life. But thatmistake dies hard, and there are many very Evangelical and veryProtestant--and in their own notions superlatively good--people, whohold a modern analogue of the old monastic idea; and who think thatChristian men and women should be very tepidly interested inanything except what they call the preaching of the Gospel, and thesaving of men's souls. Now nobody that knows me, and the trend of mypreaching, 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 themetaphor in the parable. The dough is not kept on one shelf and theleaven on another; the bit of leaven is plunged into the heart ofthe mass, and then the woman kneads the whole up in her pan, and sothe influence is spread. We Christians are not doing our duty, norare we using our capacities, unless we fling ourselves frankly andenergetically into all the currents of the national life, commercial, political, municipal, intellectual, and make ourinfluence felt in them all. The 'salt of the earth' is to be rubbedinto the meat in order to keep it from putrefaction; the leaven isto be kneaded up into the dough in order to raise it. Christianpeople are to remember that they are here, not for the purpose ofisolating themselves, but in order that they may touch life at allpoints, and at all points bring into contact with earthly life thebetter 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-lacedand pharisaical. I do not keep myself apart from any movements ofhumanity. I count nothing that belongs to men alien to a Christian. 'All right! but when you go into these movements, when you go intoParliament, when you become a city Councillor, when you mingle withother men in commerce, when you meet other students in the walks ofintellect, do you take your Christianity there, or do you leave itbehind? The two things are equally necessary, that Christians shouldbe in all these various spheres of activity, and that they should bethere, distinctly, manifestly, and, when need be, avowedly, asChristian men. Further, there is another thought here, on which I just say oneword, and that is the effect of the leaven on the dough. It is to assimilate, to set up a ferment. And that is whatChristianity 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 Christianmen are true to themselves and to their Lord. Do you not think thatthere would be a ferment if Christian principles were applied, say, for instance, to national politics? Do you not think there would bea ferment if Christian principles were brought to bear upon all thetransactions on the Exchange? Is there any region of life into whichthe introduction of the plain precepts of Christianity as thesupreme law would not revolutionise it? We talk about England as aChristian country. Is it? A Christian country is a country ofChristians, and Christians are not people that only say 'I havefaith in Jesus Christ. ' but people that do His will. That is theleaven that is to change, and yet not to change, the whole mass; tochange it by lightening it, by putting a new spirit into it, leavingthe substance apparently unaffected except in so far as thesubstance has been corrupted by the evil spirit that rules. Brethren, if we as Christians were doing our duty, it would be trueof us as it was of the early preachers of the Cross, that we are menwho turn the world upside down. But there is one more point on which I touch. I have alreadyanticipated some of what I would say upon it, but I must dwell uponit for a little longer; and that is, the manner in which the leavenis to work. Here is a morsel of barm in the middle of a lump of dough. It worksby contact, touches the particles nearest it, and transforms theminto vehicles for the further transmission of influence. Eachparticle touched by the ferment becomes itself a ferment, and so theprocess goes on, outwards and ever outwards, till it permeates thewhole mass. That is to say, the individual is to become thetransmitter of the influence to him who is next him. Theindividuality of the influence, and the track in which it is towork, viz. Upon those in immediate contiguity to the transformedparticle which is turned from dough into leaven, are taught us herein this wonderful simile. Now that carries a very serious and solemn lesson for us all. If youhave received, you are able, and you are bound, to transmit thisquickening, assimilating, transforming, lightening influence, andyou need never complain of a want of objects upon which to exerciseit, for the man or woman that is next you is the person that youought 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 andobligations of the Church in the world, would fain keep its work topurely evangelistic effort upon individual souls in presenting tothem the Gospel of Jesus Christ the Saviour. But whilst I vehementlyprotest against the notion that that is the whole function of theChristian Church, I would as vehemently protest against the notionthat the so-called social work of the Church can ever be efficientlydone except upon the foundation laid of this evangelistic work. First and foremost amongst the ways in which this great obligationof leavening humanity is to be discharged, must ever stand, as Ibelieve, the appeal to the individual conscience and heart, and thepresentation to single souls of the great Name in which are storedall the regenerative and quickening impulses that can ever alleviateand bless humanity. So that, first and foremost, I put the preachingof the Gospel, the Gospel of our salvation, by the death and in thelife 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 todischarge its function; and I put foremost amongst these, what Ihave already touched upon, and therefore need not dilate on now, theduty of Christians as Christians to take their full share in all thevarious forms of national life. I need not dwell upon the evilsrampant 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, thehydra-headed serpent that is poisoning the English nation. Now itseems to me to be a deplorable, but a certainly true thing, that notonly are these evils not attacked by the Churches as they ought tobe, but that to a very large extent the task of attacking them hasfallen into the hands of people who have little sympathy with theChurch and its doctrines. They are fighting the evils on principlesdrawn from Jesus Christ, but they are not fighting the evils to theextent that they ought to do, with the Churches alongside. I beseechyou, in your various spheres, to see to it that, as far as you canmake it so, Christian people take the place that Christ meant themto take in the conflict with the miseries, the sorrows, the sinsthat honeycomb England to-day, and not to let it be said that theChurches shut themselves up and preach to people, but do not lift afinger 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 takentogether, our Lord utilises two very familiar facts of old-worldlife, both of them arising from a similar cause. In the days whenthere were no banks and no limited liability companies, it wasdifficult for a man to know what to do with his little savings. Inold times government meant oppression, and it was dangerous to seemto have any riches. In old days war stalked over the land, and men'sproperty must be portable or else concealed. So, on the one hand wefind the practice of hiding away little hoards in some suitableplace, beneath a rock, in the cleft of a tree, or a hole dug in theground, and then, perhaps, the man died before he came back for hiswealth. Or, again, another man might prefer to carry his wealthabout with him. So he went and got jewels, easily carried, noteasily noticed, easily convertible into what he might require. And, says our Lord, these two practices, with which all the peopleto 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 tobe tempted to discuss what our Lord means by that phrase, sofrequent upon His lips, 'the kingdom of God' or 'of heaven. ' Sufficeit to say that it means, in the most general terms, a state or orderof things in which God is King, and His will supreme and sovereign. Christ came, as He tells us, to found and to extend that kingdomupon earth. A man can go into it, and it can come into a man, andthe conditions on which he enters into it, and it into him, are laiddown in this pair of parables. So I ask you to notice theirsimilarities and their divergences. They begin alike and they run onalike for a little way, and then they diverge. There is a fork inthe road, and they reunite at the end again. They agree in theirrepresentation of the treasure; they diverge in their explanation ofthe process of discovering it, and they unite at last in the finalissue. 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 inthe kingdom of God. It is not exactly said that the treasure is the kingdom, but thetreasure is found in the kingdom, and nowhere else. Let us put awaythe metaphor; it means that the only thing that will make us rich isloving submission to the supreme law of the God whom we love becausewe know that He loves us. You may put that thought into half adozen different forms. You may say that the treasure is the blessingthat comes from Christianity, or the inward wealth of a submissiveheart, or may use various modes of expression, but below them alllies this one great thought, that it is laid on my heart, dearbrethren, to try and lay on yours now, that, when all is said anddone, the only possession that makes us rich is--is what? GodHimself. For that is the deepest meaning of the treasure. Andwhatever other forms of expression we may use to designate it, theyall come back at last to this, that the wealth of the human soul isto have God for its very own. Let me run over two or three points that show us that. That treasureis the only one that meets our deepest poverty. We do not all knowwhat that is, but whether you know it or not, dear friend, the thingthat you want most is to have your sins dealt with, in the doubleway of having them forgiven as guilt, and in having them taken awayfrom you as tyrants and dominators over your wills. And it is onlyGod who can do that, 'God in Christ reconciling the world untoHimself, not imputing their trespasses unto them, ' and giving them, by a new life which He breathes into dead souls, emancipation fromthe tyrants that rule over them, and thus bringing them 'into theliberty of the glory of the sons of God. ' 'Thou sayest that Thou artrich and increased with goods . .. And knowest not that thou art poor. .. And naked. ' Brother, until you have found out that it is only Godwho will save you from being bankrupt, and enable you to pay yourdebts, which are your duties, you do not know where your true richesare. And if you have all that men can acquire of the lower things oflife, whether of what is generally called wealth or of other materialbenefits, and have that great indebtedness standing against you, youare but an insolvent after all. Here is the treasure that will makeyou rich, because it will pay your debts, and endow you with capacityenough to meet all future expenditure--viz. The possession of theforgiving and cleansing grace of God which is in Jesus Christ. Ifyou 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 youdo in consequence? Further, the possession of God, who belongs to all those that arethe subjects of the kingdom of God, is our true treasure, becausethat wealth, and that alone, meets at once all the diverse wants ofthe human soul. There is nothing else of which that can be said. There are a great many other precious things in this world--humanloves, earthly ambitions of noble and legitimate kinds. No one but afool will deny the convenience and the good of having a competencyof this world's possessions. But all these have this miserabledefect, or rather limitation, that they each satisfy some littlecorner 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 befed, yelping and growling while the keeper is at the den of anotherone. There is only one thing that, being applied, as it were, at thevery centre, will diffuse itself, like some fragrant perfume, through the whole sphere, and fill the else scentless air with itsrich and refreshing fragrance. There is but one wealth which meetsthe whole of human nature. You, however small you are, howeverinsignificant people may think you, however humbly you may think ofyourselves, you are so great that the whole created Universe, if itwere yours, would be all too little for you. You cannot fill abottomless bog with any number of cartloads of earth. And you knowas well as I can tell you that 'he that loveth silver shall not besatisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase, 'and that none of the good things here below, rich and precious asmany of them are, are large enough to fill, much less to expand, thelimitless desires of one human heart. As the ancient Latin fathersaid, 'Lord, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is unquiettill it attains to Thee. ' Closely connected with that thought, but capable of being dealt withfor 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 ourtext about the man that dissipated himself in seeking for manygoodly 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, forthere is rest; whereas in multiplicity there is restlessness andchange. ' The sky to-night may be filled with galaxies of stars. Better one sun than a million twinkling tininesses that fill theheavens, and yet do not scatter the darkness. Oh, brethren, to haveone aim, one love, one treasure, one Christ, one God--there is thesecret of blessedness. 'Unite my heart to fear Thy name'; and thenall the miseries of multiplicity, and of drawing our supplies from amultitude of separate lakes, will be at an end, when our souls areflooded from the one fountain of life that can never fail or beturbid. Thus, the unity of the treasure is the supreme excellence ofthe treasure. Nor need I remind you in more than a word of how this is our truetreasure, because it is our permanent one. Nothing that can be takenfrom me is truly mine. Those of you who have lived in a greatcommercial community as long as I have done, know that it is not fornothing that sovereigns are made circular, for they roll veryrapidly, and 'riches take to themselves wings and fly away. ' We canall 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 leftstranded in poverty. Nothing that can be stripped from you by theaccidents of life, or by inevitable death, is worth calling your'good. ' You must have something that is intertwined with the veryfibres of your being. And I, unworthy as I am, come to you, dearfriends, now, with this proffer of the great gift of wealth fromwhich 'neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, norpowers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nordepth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us. ' And Ibeseech you to ask yourselves, Is there anything worth callingwealth, except that wealth which meets my deepest need, whichsatisfies 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 afield. That is very largely local colouring, which gives veracityand vraisemblance to the fact of the story. And there has been agreat deal of very unnecessary and misplaced ingenuity spent intrying to force interpretations upon every feature of the parable, which I do not intend to imitate, but I just wish to suggest onething. Here was this man in the story, who had plodded across thatfield a thousand times, and knew every clod of it, and had neverseen the wealth that was lying six inches below the surface. Now, that is very like some of my present hearers. God's treasure comesto the world in a form which to a great many people veils, if itdoes not altogether hide, its preciousness. You have heard sermonstill you are sick of sermons, and I do not wonder at it, if you haveheard them and never thought of acting on them. You know all that Ican tell you, most of you, about Jesus Christ, and what He has donefor you, and what you should do towards Him, and your familiaritywith the Word has blinded you to its spirit and its power. You havegone over the field so often that you have made a path across it, and it seems incredible to you that there should be anything worthyour picking up there. Ah! dear friends, Jesus Christ, when He washere, 'in whom were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, 'had to the men that looked upon Him 'neither form nor comelinessthat they should desire Him, ' and He was to them a stumbling-blockand foolishness. And Christ's Gospel comes among busy men, worldlymen, men who are under the dominion of their passions and desires, men who are pursuing science and knowledge, and it looks to themvery homely, very insignificant; they do not know what treasure islying in it. You do not know what treasure is lying--may I ventureto say it?--in these poor words of mine, in so far as they trulyrepresent the mind and will of God. Dear brethren, the treasure ishid, but that is not because God did not wish you to see it; it isbecause you have made yourselves blind to its flashing brightness. 'If our Gospel be hid, it is hid to them . .. In whom the god of thisworld hath blinded their eyes. ' If your whole desires are passionatelyset on that which Manchester recognises as the _summum bonum_, or, if you are living without a thought beyond this present, how can youexpect to see the treasure, though it is lying there before your eyes?You have buried it, or, rather, you have made that which is itsnecessary envelope to be its obscuration. I pray you, look through theforms, look beneath the words of Scripture, and try and clear youreyesight from the hallucinations of the dazzling present, and you willsee the treasure that is hid in the field. III. Again, let me ask you to notice, further, the two ways offinding. The rustic in the first story, who, as I said, had plodded acrossthe 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 someshower of rain came on, and washed away a little of thesuperincumbent soil, and laid bare the bag. Now, that is what oftenhappens, for you have to remember that though you are not seekingGod, God is always seeking you, and so the great saying comes to betrue, 'I am found of them that sought Me not. ' There have been manycases like the one of the man who, breathing out threatenings andslaughter, with no thought in his mind except to bind the disciplesand bring them captive to Jerusalem, saw suddenly a light fromheaven flashing down upon him, and a Voice that pulled him up in themidst of his career. Ah! it would be an awful thing if no one foundChrist except those who set out to seek for Him. Like the dew on thegrass 'that waiteth not for men, nor tarrieth for the sons of men, 'He often comes to hearts that are thinking about nothing less thanabout Him. There are men and women listening to me now who did not come herewith any expectation of being confronted with this message to theirsouls; they may have been drawn by curiosity or by a hundred othermotives. If there is one such, to whom I am speaking, who has had nodesires after the treasure, who has never thought that God was hisonly Good, who has been swallowed up in worldly things and thecommon affairs of life, and who now feels as if a sudden flash hadlaid bare the hidden wealth in the familiar Gospel, I beseech such aone not to turn away from the discovered treasure, but to make ithis own. Dear friend, you may not be looking for the wealth, butChrist is looking for His lost coin. And, though it has rolled awayinto some dusty corner, and is lying there all unaware, I venture tosay that He is seeking you by my poor words to-night, and is sayingto you: 'I counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in the fire. ' But then another class is described in the other parable of themerchantman who was seeking many goodly pearls. I suppose he maystand as a representative of a class of whom I have no doubt thereare some other representatives hearing me now, namely, persons who, without yielding themselves to the claims of Christ, have beensearching, honestly and earnestly, for 'whatsoever things are lovelyand of good report. ' Dear brethren, if you have been smitten by thedesire 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 eyeslooking for something else than the world's gross good, and areseeking for the many pearls, I beseech you to lay this truth toheart, that you will never find what you seek, until you understandthat the many have not it to give you, and that the One has. Andwhen Christ draws near to you and says, 'Whatsoever things arelovely and of good report, whatsoever things are true, whatsoeverthings are venerable, if thou seekest them, take Me, and thou wiltfind them all, ' I beseech you, accept Him. There are two ways offinding the treasure. It is flashed on unexpectant eyes, and it isdisclosed to seeking souls. III. And now, lastly, let us look at the point where the parablesconverge. There are two ways of finding; there is only one way of getting. Theone man went and sold all that he had and bought the field. Nevermind about the morality of the transaction: that has nothing to dowith our Lord's purpose. Perhaps it was not quite honest of this manto bury the treasure again, and then to go and buy the field forless than it was worth, but the point is that, however a soul isbrought to see that God in Christ is all that he needs, there isonly 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 ofacquiring the treasure by anything that thou hast. We buy it when weacknowledge 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 wereyour good. That trust in Jesus Christ, which is the condition ofsalvation is selling 'all that thou hast. ' Self is 'all that thouhast. ' Abandon self and clutch Him, and the treasure is thine. Butthe initial act of faith has to be carried on through a life ofself-denial and self-sacrifice, and the subjection of self-will, which is the hardest of all, and the submission of one's selfaltogether to the kingdom of God and to its King. If we do thus weshall 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 secondbest in order to get the very best. Surely if the wealth which is inGod is more precious than all besides, you have the best of thebargain, if you part with the world and yourselves and get Him. Andif, on the other hand, you stick to the second best and cleave toyourselves and to this poor diurnal sphere and what it contains, then I will tell you what your epitaph will be. It is written in oneof the Psalms, 'He shall leave them in the midst of his days, and athis latter end shall be a fool. ' And there is a more foolish fool still--the man who, when he hasseen the treasure, flings another shovelful of earth upon it, andgoes away and does _not_ buy it, nor think anything more aboutit. Dear brother, do not do that, but if, by God's help, any poorwords of mine have stirred anything in your hearts of recognition ofwhat your true wealth is, do not rest until you have done what isneedful to possess it, given away yourselves, and in exchangereceived 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 itsgreatest men is exemplified in the fact that the martyrdom of Johnis only told incidentally, in explanation of Herod's alarm. But forthat he would apparently have dropped out of the narrative, as a mansinks in the sea, without a bubble or a ripple. Christ is the soletheme of the Gospels, and all others are visible only as His lightfalls 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 andcrowds of courtiers shut out truth. The first thing to note is thealarm of the conscience-stricken king. We learn from the otherevangelists that there was a difference of opinion among theattendants of Herod--not very good judges of a religious teacher--asto who this new miracle-working Rabbi might be, but the tetrarch hasno hesitation. There is no proof that Herod was a Sadducee; but heprobably 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 acoward of him, and his fear made that terrible which would else havebeen thought impossible. In his terror he makes confidants of hisslaves, overleaping the barriers of position, in his need of someears to pour his fears into. He was right in believing that he hadnot finished with John, and in expecting to meet him again withmightier power to accuse and condemn. 'If 'twere done when 'tisdone, ' says Macbeth; but it is not done. There is a resurrection ofdeeds as well as of bodies, and all our buried badnesses will frontus again, shaking their gory locks at us, and saying that we didthem. Instead of following closely the narrative, we may best gather upits 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 weakking is drawn in opposite directions by the stronger-willedtemptress at his side, and by the stern ascetic from the desert. HowJohn had found his way into 'kings' houses' we do not know; but, ashe carried thither his undaunted boldness of plain-spoken preachingof morality and repentance, it was inevitable that he should soonfind his way from the palace to the dungeon. There must have beensome intercourse between Herod and him before his imprisonment, orhe could not have shaken the king's conscience with his bluntdenunciations. From the account in Mark, it would appear that, afterhis imprisonment, he gained great influence over the tetrarch, andled him some steps on the way of goodness. But Herod was 'infirm ofpurpose, ' and a beautiful fiend was at his side, and she had an ironwill sharpened to an edge by hatred, and knew her own mind, whichwas murder. Between them, the weaker nature was much perplexed, andlike a badly steered boat, yawed in its course, now yielding to theimpulse from John, now to that from Herodias. Matthew attributes hishesitation as to killing John to his fear of the popular voice, which, no doubt, also operated. Thus he 'let I dare not wait upon Iwould, ' and had not strength of mind enough to hold to the one anddespise the other of his discordant counsellors. He was evidently asensual, luxurious, feeble-willed, easily frightened, superstitiousand cunning despot; and, as is always the case with such, he wasdriven farther in evil than he meant or wished. He was entrappedinto an oath, and then, instead of saying, 'Promises which shouldnot have been made should not be kept, ' he weakly consents, fromfantastic fear of what his guests will say of him, and unwillingly, out of pure imbecility, stains his soul for ever with blood. In thiswicked world, weak men will always be wicked men; for it is lesstrouble to consent than to resist, and there are more sirens towhisper '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 ofobedience to God's will, and yet leave it at last. What became ofall his eager listening, of his partial obedience, of his care tokeep 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 lefthim harder than before. Convictions not followed out ossify theheart. If he had sent for Christ, and told Him his fears, all mighthave been well. But he let them pass, and, so far as we know, theynever returned. He did meet Jesus at last, when Pilate sent him thePrisoner, as a piece of politeness, and in what mood?--childishpleasure at the chance of seeing a miracle. How did Jesus answer historrent of frivolous questions? 'He answered him nothing. ' That sadsilence speaks Christ's knowledge that now even His words would bevain to create one ripple of interest on the Dead Sea of Herod'ssoul. By frivolity, lust, and neglect he had killed the germ of abetter life, and silence was the kindest answer which perfect lovecould give him. He shows us, too, the intimate connection of all sins. The commonroot of every sin is selfishness, and the shapes which it takes areprotean and interchangeable. Lust dwells hard by hate. Sensualcrimes and cruelty are closely akin. The one vice which Herod wouldnot surrender, dragged after it a whole tangle of other sins. No sindwells alone. There is 'none barren among them. ' They aregregarious, and a solitary sin is more seldom seen than a singleswallow. Herod is an illustration, too, of a consciencefantastically sensitive while it is dead to real crimes. He has notwinges for his sin with Herodias, and no effective ones at killingJohn, but he thinks it would be wrong to break his oath. The twothings often go together; and many a brigand in Calabria, who wouldcut a throat without hesitation, would not miss mass, or rob withouta little image of the Virgin in his hat. We often make compensationfor easy indulgence in great sins by fussy scrupulosity about littlefaults, and, like Herod, had rather commit murder than not be politeto visitors. II. The next actors in the tragedy are Herodias and her daughter. Whata 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 havedone no harm, ' has won for the mother an immortality of ignominy. Herportrait is drawn in few strokes, but they are enough. In strength ofwill and unscrupulous carelessness of human life, she is the sister ofJezebel, and curiously like Shakespeare's awful creation, Lady Macbeth;but she adds a stain of sensuous passion to their vices, whichheightens the horror. Her first marriage was with her full uncle; andher second, if marriage it can be called when her husband and Herod'swife were both living, was with her step-uncle, and thus triplyunlawful. John's remonstrance awoke no sense of shame in her, but onlymalignant and murderous hate. Once resolved, no failures made herswerve from her purpose. Hers was no passing fury, but cold-blooded, deliberate determination. Her iron will and unalterable persistencewere accompanied by flexibility of resource. When one weapon failed, she drew another from a full quiver. And the means which were finallysuccessful show not only her thorough knowledge of the weak man shehad to deal with, but her readiness to stoop to any degradation forherself and her child to carry her point. 'A thousand claims to'abhorrence 'meet in her, as mother, wife, and queen. ' Many a shamelesswoman would have shrunk from sullying a daughter's childhood, bysending her to play the part of a shameless dancing-girl before acrew of half-tipsy revellers, and from teaching her young lips toask for murder. But Herodias sticks at nothing, and is as insensibleto the duty of a mother as to that of a wife. If we put together thesefeatures in her character, her hot animal passions, her cool inflexiblerevenge, her cynical disregard of all decency, her deadness to naturalaffection for her child, her ferocity and her cunning, we have ahideous picture of corrupted womanhood. We cannot but wonderwhether, in after days, remorse ever did its merciful work uponHerodias. She urged Herod to his ruin at last by her ambition, whichsought for him the title of king, and, with one redeeming touch offaithfulness, went with him into dreary exile in Gaul. Perhapsthere, among strangers, and surrounded by the wreck of her projects, and when the hot fire of passion had died down, she may haveremembered and repented her crime. The criminality of the daughter largely depends upon her age, ofwhich we have no knowledge. Perhaps she was too mere a child tounderstand the degradation of the dance, or the infamy of therequest which her, we hope, innocent and panting lips were tutoredto prefer. But, more probably, she was old enough to be her mother'sfellow-conspirator, rather than her tool, and had learned only toowell her lessons of impurity and cruelty. What chance had a younglife in such a sty of filth? When the mother becomes the devil'sdeputy, what can the daughter grow up to be, but a worse edition ofher? This poor girl, so sinning, and so sinned against, followed inHerodias's footsteps, and afterwards married, according to thecustom of the Herods, her uncle, Philip the tetrarch. She inheritedand was taught evil; that was her misfortune. She made it her own;that was her crime. As she stands there, shameless and flushed, inthat hideous banqueting-hall, with her grim gift dripping red bloodon the golden platter, and wicked triumph gleaming in her dark eyes, she suggests grave questions as to parents' responsibility forchildren's sins, and is a living symbol of the degradation of art tothe service of vice, and of the power of an evil soul to makehideous all the grace of budding womanhood. III. There is something dramatically appropriate in the silent deathin the dungeon of the lonely forerunner. The faint noise of revelrymay have reached his ears, as he brooded there, and wondered if thecoming King would never come for his enlargement. Suddenly a gleamof light from the opened door enters his cell, and falls on theblade of the headsman's sword. Little time can be wasted, forHerodias waits. With short preface the blow falls. The King hascome, and set His forerunner free, sending him to prepare His waybefore Him in the dim regions beyond. A world where Herod sits inthe festal chamber, and John lies headless in the dungeon, needssome one to set it right. When the need is sorest, the help isnearest. 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 birthdaywith drunken and bloody mirth; but it was a better birthday for hisvictim. IV. It needed some courage for John's disciples to come to thatgloomy, blood-stained fortress, and bear away the headless trunkwhich scornful cruelty had flung out to rot unburied. When reverentlove and sorrow had finished their task, what was the little flockwithout a shepherd to do? The possibility of their continuedexistence as a company of disciples was at an end. They show bytheir action that their master had profited from his last message toJesus. At once they turn to Him, and, no doubt, the bulk of themwere absorbed in the body of His followers. Sorrowful and bereavedsouls betake themselves naturally to His sweet sympathy forsoothing, and to His gentle wisdom for direction. The wisest thingthat any of us can do is to 'go and tell Jesus' our loneliness, andlet 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 contrastbetween these two groups of disciples at the graves of theirrespective masters. John the Baptist's followers venture into thevery jaws of the lion to rescue the headless corpse of theirmartyred teacher from a prison grave. They bear it away and lay itreverently in its unknown sepulchre, and when they have done theselast offices of love they feel that all is over. They have no longera centre, and they disintegrate. There was nothing to hold themtogether any more. The shepherd had been smitten, and the flock werescattered. As a 'school' or a distinct community they cease to be, and are mostly absorbed into the ranks of Christ's followers. Thatsorrowful little company that turned from John's grave, perhapsamidst the grim rocks of Moab, perhaps in his native city amongstthe hills of Judah, parted then, to meet no more, and to bear awayonly a common sorrow that time would comfort, and a common memorythat time would dim. The other group laid their martyred Master in His grave with astender hands and as little hope as did John's disciples. The bondthat held them together was gone too, and the disintegrating processbegan at once. We see them breaking up into little knots, and soonthey, too, will be scattered. The women come to the grave to performthe woman's office of anointing, and they are left to go alone. Other slight hints are given which show how much the ties ofcompanionship had been relaxed, even in a day, and how certainly andquickly they would have fallen asunder. But all at once a newelement comes in, all is changed. The earliest visitors to thesepulchre leave it, not with the lingering sorrow of those who haveno more that they can do, but with the quick, buoyant step of peoplecharged with great and glad tidings. They come to it wrapped ingrief--they leave it with great joy. They come to it, feeling thatall was over, and that their union with the rest who had loved Himwas little more than a remembrance. They go away, feeling that theyare all bound together more closely than ever. The grave of John was the end of a 'school. ' The grave of Jesus wasthe beginning of a Church. Why? The only answer is the message whichthe women brought back from the empty sepulchre on that Easter day:'The Lord is risen. ' The whole history of the Christian Church, andeven its very existence, is unintelligible, except on thesupposition of the resurrection. But for that, the fate of John'sdisciples would have been the fate of Christ's--they would havemelted away into the mass of the nation, and at most there wouldhave been one more petty Galilean sect that would have lived on fora generation and died out when the last of His companions died. Sofrom these two contrasted groups we may fairly gather some thoughtsas to the Resurrection of Christ, as attested by the very existenceof a Christian Church, and as to the joy of that resurrection. I. Now the first point to be considered is, that the conduct ofChrist's disciples after His death was exactly the opposite of whatmight have been expected. They held together. The natural thing for them to do would have beento disband; for their one bond was gone; and if they had actedaccording to the ordinary laws of human conduct, they would havesaid to themselves, Let us go back to our fishing-boats and ourtax-gathering, and seek safety in separation, and nurse our sorrowapart. A few lingering days might have been given to weep togetherat His grave, and to assuage the first bitterness of grief anddisappointment; but when these were over, nothing could haveprevented Christianity and the Church from being buried in the samesepulchre as Jesus. As certainly as the stopping up of the fountainwould empty the river's bed, so surely would Christ's death havescattered His disciples. And that strange fact, that it did notscatter them, needs to be looked well into and fairly accounted forin some plausible manner. The end of John's school gives a parallelwhich brings the singularity of the fact into stronger relief; andlooking at these two groups as they stand before us in these twotexts, the question is irresistibly suggested, Why did not the onefall away into its separate elements, as the other did? The keystoneof the arch was in both cases withdrawn--why did the one structuretopple into ruin while the other stood firm? Not only did the disciples of Christ keep united, but theirconceptions of Jesus underwent a remarkable change, after His death. We might have expected, indeed, that, when memory began to work, andthe disturbing influence of daily association was withdrawn, thesame idealising process would have begun on their image of Him, which reveals and ennobles the characters of our dear ones who havegone away from us. Most men have to die before their true worth isdiscerned. But no process of that sort will suffice to account forthe change and heightening of the disciples' thoughts about theirdead Lord. It was not merely that, when they remembered, they said, Did not our hearts burn within us by the way while He talked withus?--but that His death wrought exactly the opposite effect fromwhat it might have been expected to do. It ought to have ended theirhope that He was the Messiah, and we know that within forty-eighthours it was beginning to do so, as we learn from the plaintivewords of disappointed and fading hope: 'We _trusted_ that ithad been He which should have redeemed Israel. ' If, so early, thecold conviction was stealing over their hearts that their dearestexpectation was proved by His death to have been a dream, what couldhave prevented its entire dominion over them, as the days grew intomonths and years? But somehow or other that process was arrested, and the opposite one set in. The death that should have shatteredMessianic dreams confirmed them. The death that should have cast adeeper shadow of incomprehensibleness over His strange and loftyclaims poured a new light upon them, which made them all plain andclear. The very parts of His teaching which His death would havemade those who loved Him wish to forget, became the centre of Hisfollowers' faith. His cross became His throne. Whilst He lived withthem they knew not what He said in His deepest words, but, by astrange paradox, His death convinced them that He was the Son ofGod, and that that which they had seen with their eyes, and theirhands had handled, was the Eternal Life. The cross alone could neverhave done that. Something else there must have been, if the men weresane, to account for this paradox. Nor is this all. Another equally unlikely sequel of the death ofJesus is the unmistakable moral transformation effected on thedisciples. Timorous and tremulous before, something or other touchedthem into altogether new boldness and self-possession. Dependent onHis presence before, and helpless when He was away from them for anhour, they become all at once strong and calm; they stand before thefury of a Jewish mob and the threatenings of the Sanhedrim, unmovedand victorious. And these brave confessors and saintly heroes arethe men who, a few weeks before, had been petulant, self-willed, jealous, cowardly. What had lifted them suddenly so far abovethemselves? Their Master's death? That would more naturally havetaken any heart or courage out of them, and left them indeed assheep in the midst of wolves. Why, then, do they thus strangelyblaze up into grandeur and heroism? Can any reasonable account begiven of these paradoxes? Surely it is not too much to ask of peoplewho profess to explain Christianity on naturalistic principles, thatthey shall make the process clear to us by which, Christ being deadand buried, His disciples were kept together, learned to think moreloftily 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 wasnot the stream lost in the sand, when the head-waters were cut off? II. Notice then, next, that the disciples' immediate belief in theResurrection furnishes a reasonable, and the only reasonable, explanation of the facts. There is no better historical evidence of a fact than the existenceof an institution built upon it, and coeval with it. The ChristianChurch is such evidence for the fact of the Resurrection; or, to putthe conclusion in the most moderate fashion, for the belief in theResurrection. For, as we have shown, the natural effect of ourLord's death would have been to shatter the whole fabric: and ifthat effect were not produced, the only reasonable account of theforce that hindered it is, that His followers believed that He roseagain. Since that was their faith, one can understand how they werebanded more closely together than ever. One can understand how theireyes were opened to know Him who was 'declared to be the Son of Godwith power by the resurrection from the dead. ' One can understandhow, in the enthusiasm of these new thoughts of their Lord, and inthe strength of His victory over death, they put aside their oldfears and littlenesses and clothed themselves in armour of light. 'The Lord is risen indeed' was the belief which made the continuousexistence of the Church possible. Any other explanation of thatgreat outstanding fact is lame and hopelessly insufficient. We know that that belief was the belief of the early Church. Even ifone waived all reference to the Gospels, we have the means ofdemonstrating that in Paul's undisputed epistles. Nobody hasquestioned that he wrote the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Thedate most generally assumed to that letter brings it within aboutfive-and-twenty years of the crucifixion. In that letter, inaddition to a multitude of incidental references to the Lord asrisen, we have the great passage in the fifteenth chapter, where theapostle not only declares that the Resurrection was one of the twofacts which made his 'gospel, ' but solemnly enumerates the witnessesof the risen Lord, and alleges that this gospel of the Resurrectionwas common to him and to all the Church. He tells us of Christ'sappearance to himself at his conversion, which must have taken placewithin six or seven years of the crucifixion, and assures us that atthat early period he found the whole Church believing and preachingChrist's resurrection. Their belief rested on their allegedintercourse with Him a few days after His death, and it isinconceivable that within so short a period such a belief shouldhave sprung up and been universally received, if it had not begunwhen 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 ofJesus. Its own existence is the great witness to its faith. And itis important to observe that, even if we had not the documentaryevidence of the Pauline epistles as the earliest records, of theGospels, and of the Acts of the Apostles, we should still havesufficient proof that the belief in the Resurrection is as old asthe Church. For the continuance of the Church cannot be explainedwithout it. If that faith had not dawned on their slow, sad heartson that Easter morning, a few weeks would have seen them scattered;and if once they had been scattered, as they inevitably would havebeen, no power could have reunited them, any more than a diamondonce shattered can be pieced together again. There would have beenno motive and no actors to frame a story of resurrection, when oncethe little company had melted away. The existence of the Churchdepended on their belief that the Lord was risen. In the nature ofthe case that belief must have followed immediately on His death. It, and it only, reasonably accounts for the facts. And so, over andabove Apostles, and Gospels, and Epistles, the Church is the greatwitness, by its very being, to its own immediate and continuousbelief in the Resurrection of our Lord. III. Again, we may remark that such a belief could not haveoriginated or maintained itself unless it had been true. Our previous remarks have gone no farther than to establish thebelief in the Resurrection of Christ, as the basis of primitiveChristianity. It is vehemently alleged, and we may freely admit thatthe step is a long one from subjective belief to objective reality. But still it is surely perfectly fair to argue that a given beliefis of such a nature that it cannot be supposed to rest on anythingless solid than a fact; and this is eminently the case in regard tothe belief in Christ's Resurrection. There have been many attemptson the part of those who reject that belief to account for itsexistence, and each of them in succession has 'had its day, andceased to be. ' Unbelief devours its own children remorselessly, andthe succession to the throne of antichristian scepticism is won, asin some barbarous tribes, by slaying the reigning sovereign. Thearmies of the aliens turn their weapons against one another, andeach new assailant of the historical veracity of the Gospelscommences operations by showing that all previous assailants havebeen wrong, and that none of their explanations will hold water. For instance, we hear nothing now of the coarse old explanation thatthe story of the Resurrection was a lie, and became current throughthe conscious imposture of the leaders of the Church. And it washigh time that such a solution should be laid aside. Who, with halfan eye for character, could study the deeds and the writings of theapostles, and not feel that, whatever else they were, they wereprofoundly honest, and as convinced as of their own existence, thatthey had seen Christ 'alive after His passion, by many infallibleproofs'? 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 thatsway opinion and frame systems, could believe that the fair fabricof Christian morality was built on the sand of a lie, and cementedby the slime of deceit bubbling up from the very pit of hell? Do mengather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? That insolenthypothesis has had its day. Then when it was discredited, we were told that the mythicaltendency would explain everything. It showed us how good men couldtell lies without knowing it, and how the religious value of analleged fact in an alleged historical revelation did not in theleast depend on its being a fact. And that great discovery, whichfirst converted solid historical Christianity into a gaseouscondition, and then caught the fumes in some kind of retort, andprofessed to hand us them back again improved by the sublimation, has pretty well gone the way of all hypotheses. Myths are not madein three days, or in three years, and no more time can be allowedfor the formation of the myth of the Resurrection. What was theChurch to feed on while the myth was growing? It would have beenstarved to death long before. Then, the last new explanation which is gravely put forward, and isthe prevailing one now, sustains itself by reference to undeniablefacts in the history of religious movements, and of such abnormalattitudes of the mind as modern spiritualism. On the strength ofwhich analogy we are invited to see in the faith of the earlyChristians 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 byreligious ideas. But we have only to consider the details of thefacts in hand to feel that they cannot be accounted for on such aground. Do hallucinations lay hold on five hundred people at once?Does a hallucination last for a long country walk, and give rise toprotracted conversation? Does hallucination explain the story ofChrist eating and drinking before His disciples? The uncertaintwilight of the garden might have begotten such an airy phantom inthe brain of a single sobbing woman; but the appearances to beexplained are so numerous, so varied in character, embrace so manydetails, appeal to so many of the senses--to the ear and hand aswell as to the eye--were spread over so long a period, and weresimultaneously shared by so large a number, that no theory of such asort can account for them, unless by impugning the veracity of therecords. And then we are back again on the old abandoned ground ofdeceit and imposture. It sounds plausible to say, Hallucination is aproved cause of many a supposed supernatural event--why not of this?But the plausibility of the solution ceases as soon as you try it onthe actual facts in their variety and completeness. It has to beeked out with a length of the fox's skin of deceit before it coversthem; and we may confidently assert that such a belief as the beliefof the early Church in the Resurrection of the Lord was never theproduct either of deceit or of illusion, or of any amalgam of thetwo. What new solutions the fertility of unbelief may yet bring forth, and the credulity of unbelief may yet accept, we know not; but wemay firmly hold by the faith which breathed new hope and strange joyinto that sad band on the first Easter morning, and rejoice withthem 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-heartedunbelieving men that first received it. We may think for a moment of thejoy with which we ought to return from the empty sepulchre of the risenSaviour. How little these women knew that, as they went back from the gravein the morning twilight, they were the bearers of 'great joy whichshould be to all people'! To them and to the first hearers of theirmessage 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 filltheir minds, and it would not be until calmer moments that thestupendous significance of the fact would reveal itself. Mary's rapturous gesture to clasp Him by the feet, when thecertainty that it was in very deed He flooded her soul with dazzlinglight, reveals her first emotion, which no doubt was also the firstwith them all, 'Then we shall have Him with us again, and all theold joy of companionship will be ours once more. ' Nor were theywrong in thinking so, however little they as yet understood thefuture manner of their fellowship, or anticipated His leaving themagain so soon. Nor are we without a share even in that phase oftheir joy; for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us a livingLord for our love, an ever present Companion and Brother for ourhearts to hold, even if our hands cannot clasp Him by the feet. Adead Christ might have been the object of faint historicaladmiration, and the fair statue might have stood amidst others inthe galleries of history; but the risen, living Christ can love andbe loved, and we too may be glad with the joy of those who havefound a heart to rest their hearts upon, and a companionship thatcan never fail. As the early disciples learned to reflect upon the fact of Christ'sResurrection, its riches unfolded themselves by degrees, and theearliest aspect of its 'power' was the light it shed on His personand work. Taught by it, as we have seen, they recognised Him for theMessiah whom they had long expected, and for something more--theIncarnate Son of God. That phase of their joy belongs to us too. IfChrist, who made such avowals of His nature as we know that He did, and hazarded such assertions of His claims, His personality and Hisoffice, as fill the Gospels, were really laid in the grave and sawcorruption, then the assertions are disproved, the claimsunwarranted, the office a figment of His imagination. He may stillremain a great teacher, with a tremendous deduction to be made fromthe worth of His teaching, but all that is deepest in His own wordsabout Himself and His relation to men must be sorrowfully put on oneside. But if He, after such assertions and claims, rose from thedead, and rising, dieth no more, then for the last time, and in themightiest tones, the voice that rent the heavens at His baptism andHis transfiguration proclaims: 'This is My beloved Son; hear yeHim. ' Our joy in His Resurrection is the joy of those to whom He istherein declared to be the Son of God, and who see in Christ risentheir accepted Sacrifice, and their ever-living Redeemer. Such was the earliest effect of the Resurrection of Jesus, if wetrust the records of apostolic preaching. Then by degrees the joyfulthought took shape in the Church's consciousness that their Shepherdhad gone before them into the dark pen where Death pastured hisflocks, and had taken it for His own, for the quiet resting-placewhere He would make them lie down by still waters, and whence Hewould lead them out to the lofty mountains where His fold should be. The power of Christ's Resurrection as the pattern and pledge of oursis the final source of the joy which may fill our hearts as we turnaway from that empty sepulchre. The world has guessed and feared, or guessed and hoped, but alwaysguessed and doubted the life beyond. Analogies, poetic adumbrations, probabilities drawn from consciousness and from conscience, fromintuition and from anticipation, are but poor foundations on whichto build a solid faith. But to those to whom the Resurrection ofChrist is a fact their own future life is a fact. Here we have asolid certainty, and here alone. The heart says as we lay our dearones in the grave, 'Surely we part not for ever. ' The consciencesays, as it points us to our own evil deeds, 'After death thejudgment. ' A deep indestructible instinct prophesies in every breastof a future. But all is vague and doubtful. The one proof of a lifebeyond the grave is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Therefore letus be glad with the gladness of men plucked from a dark abyss ofdoubt and planted on the rock of solid certainty; and let us rejoicewith joy unspeakable, and laden with a prophetic weight of glory, aswe ring out the ancient Easter morning's greeting, 'The Lord isrisen 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 isone of their most striking characteristics that they are not, likethe pretended portents of false faiths, mere mighty deeds standingin no sort of intellectual relation to the message of which theyclaim to be the attestation, but that they have themselves adoctrinal significance. Our Lord's miracles have been called 'thegreat bell before the sermon, ' but they are more than that. They arethemselves no unimportant part of the sermon. In fact, it would notbe difficult to construct from them a revelation of His nature, person, and work, scarcely less full and explicit than thatcontained in His words, or even than that more systematic anddeveloped one which we receive in the writings of His apostles. This miracle, for instance, of the feeding of the five thousand withfive barley loaves and two small fishes, is one of the few which theApostle John relates in his Gospel, and his reason for selecting itseems to be the commentary with which our Lord followed it, andwhich John alone has preserved. That commentary is all the wonderfuldiscourse about Christ as the bread of life, and eating His flesh asour means of receiving His life into ourselves. We are warranted, then, in regarding this miracle as a symbolic revelation of Christas supplying all the wants of this hungry world. If so, we mayperhaps venture to take one more step, and regard the manner inwhich He dispenses His gifts as also significant. His agents are Hisdisciples, or as would appear probable from the twelve baskets fullof fragments, the twelve apostles, the nucleus and representativesof His Church. Thus we come to the point from which we wish toregard this narrative now. There are three stages in the words ofour text--the distribution, the meal, and the gathering up of theabundance that was left. These three stages may guide us to somethoughts regarding the work to which Christ calls His Church, thesuccess which attends it, and the results to the distributorsthemselves. I. Christ feeds the famishing world by means of His Church. 'He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the _disciples_ tothe multitude. ' One very striking feature in all our Lord's miraclesis economy of power. The miraculous element being admitted for somegood and sufficient reason, it is kept down to the lowest possiblepoint. Precisely so much of it as is needed is permitted, and notone hairsbreadth more. It does not begin to make its appearance atany point in the process where ordinary human agency can be used. Itdoes not produce a result beyond the actual necessity. It does notlast one instant longer than is required. It inosculates closelywith the natural order of things. Take an illustration from the beginning of miracles where Jesusmanifested forth His glory, at the marriage in Cana of Galilee--thatgreat miracle in which our Lord hallowed the ties of humanaffection, and consecrated the joy of united hearts. The necessityis felt before He supplies it. The servants fill the waterpots. Thewater is used as the material on which the miraculous poweroperates. Only so much as is drawn for present use becomes wine. Theservants are used as the agents for the distribution, and all isdone 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 atthe grave of Lazarus, where our Lord hallowed the breaking ofearthly 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 thegrief which He shares. He goes to the side of the grave--true humantears 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, andlife stirs in the sheeted dead. But there the miraculous ceases. Theman with his restored life has himself to come out of the grave, andhuman hands have tremblingly to lift the napkin from the veiled face(how they must have thrilled as they did it, wondering what namelesshorror they might see in the eyes that had looked on the innerchamber of death), and human help has to unfold the grave-clothesfrom the tightly swathed and stumbling limbs, 'Loose him, and lethim go. ' This marked characteristic of all our Lord's miracles is full ofinstruction, which it would lead us too far from our present purpose toindicate at any length. But we may just observe in passing, that itbrings these into striking parallel with the divine creative act, wherethere is ever the same precise adaptation of power employed to resultcontemplated, the same background of veiled omnipotence, the sameemergence of proportioned, adequate, but not superfluous force, sothat, in fact, economy of power may be said to be the very signatureand broad arrow of divinity stamped on all His works. Again, itpresents a broad contrast to the wild, reckless miracle-mongering offalse faiths, and is at once a test of the genuineness of all 'lyingsigns and wonders, ' and an indication of the self-restraint of theWorker, and of the fine sanity and truthfulness of the narrators, ofthese Gospel miracles. And yet, again, it is one phase of thedisciplinary character of the whole revelation of God in Christ--notobtrusive, 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 thissame characteristic in full prominence in it. The people are allowedto hunger. The disciples are permitted to feel themselves at theirwits' end. They are bid to bring their poor resources to Christ. Thelad who had come with his little store, perhaps a fisherman's boyfrom some of the lake villages who hoped to sell his loaves andfishes in the crowd, supplies the material on which Christ wills toexercise His miraculous power. The disciples' agency is pressed intothe service. Each man separately receives his portion, and when allare supplied, the fragments are carefully preserved for the use ofthose who had been fed by miracle, and of Him who had fed them! Besides the general lessons already referred to, as naturallyarising from this feature of the miracle, there is that one whichbelongs to it especially, namely, that Christ feeds the famishingworld by means of His Church. Precisely as in the miracles in general, so in the work of Christ as awhole, the field of supernatural intervention is rigidly confined, andfits in with the established order of things. The Incarnation andSacrifice of our Lord are the purely supernatural work of the divinePower and Mercy. He comes, enters into our human conditions, assumesour humanity, dies the death for us all. 'I have trodden the wine-pressalone. ' There is no question of any human agency co-operating there, any more than there is in the word 'Lazarus, come forth, ' or in themultiplication of the loaves. There, by Christ alone, is brought tous and is finished for us an eternal redemption, with which the wholerace 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, thisnew power having been introduced into the world, human agency ishenceforth called into operation to diffuse it, just as the servantsat Cana had to draw the wine which He had made, just as the disciplesat the Sea of Tiberias have to give to the multitude the bread whichwas blessed and broken by His hands. The supernaturally given Bread of Life is to be carried over theworld in accordance with the ordinary laws by which all other truthis diffused and all other gifts that belong to one man are held byhim in stewardship for all his fellows. True, there is ever in andwith that word of life a divine Spirit, which is the real cause ofits progress, which guards it from destruction though all men werefaithless, and keeps it alive though all Israel bowed the knee toBaal. But, however easy it may be for us to confuse ourselves withmetaphysical puzzles about the relation between the natural and thesupernatural elements--the human agency and the divine energiser--inthe successful discharge of the Church's work, practically thematter is very plain. The truth that it behoves us all to lay to heart is just this--thatChristian people are Christ's instruments for effecting therealisation of the purposes of His death. Not without them shall Hesee of the travail of His soul. Not without them shall the preachingbe fully known. Not without the people willing in the day of Hispower, and clothed in priestly beauty, shall the Priest King set Hisfeet upon His enemies. Not without the armies of heaven followingHim, shall the 'Word of God' ride forth to victory. Neither thedivine decree, nor the expansive power of the Truth, nor the crownedexpectancy of the waiting Lord, nor the mighty working of theComforter, are the complete means for the accomplishment of thedivine promise that all nations shall be blessed in Him. Could allthese be conceived of as existing without the service and energiesof God's Church proclaiming the name of Christ, they were notenough. He has willed that to us, less than the least of all saints, should this grace be given, that we should make known theunsearchable riches of Christ. God reveals His truth, that men whobelieve it may impart it. God gives the word, that, caught up bythose who receive it into an honest and good heart, it may be pouredforth, in mighty chorus from the lips of the 'great company of themthat publish it. ' 'He gave the loaves to the disciples, and the_disciples_ to the multitude. ' Christian men! learn your high vocation, and your solemnresponsibilities. 'What! came the word of God out from you, or cameit _unto_ you only?' For what did you receive it? For the samereason for which you have received everything else which youpossess--that you might share it with your brethren. How did youreceive it? As a gift, unmerited, the result of a miracle of divinemercy, that you might feel bound to give as ye have received, andspread the free divine gift by cheerful human work of distribution. From whom did you receive it? From Christ, who in the very act ofgiving binds you to live for Him and not for yourselves, and tomould your lives after the pattern of His. What a multitude ofmotives converge on the solemn duty of work for Christ, if we readin the light of this deeper meaning the simple words of our text, 'He gave the loaves to the disciples!' What manner of servant is hewho can bear to have no part in the blessed work that follows--'andthe disciples to the multitude'? It is further noticeable how these apostles were prepared for thework which they had to do. The first lesson which they had to learnwas the almost ludicrous disproportion between the resources attheir command and the necessities of the crowd. 'How many loaveshave ye? go and see. ' And this is the first lesson that we have tolearn in all our work for Christ and for our brethren, that inourselves we have nothing fit for the task before us. Think of whatthat task is as measured by the necessities and sorrows of men. Think of all the sighs that go up at every moment from burdenedhearts, of the tears that run down so many blanched and anxiouscheeks. Think of '_all_ the misery that is done under the sun!'If it could be made visible, what a dark pall would swathe theworld, 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 onepoor sufferer--a drop in the ocean--He looked up to heaven, as inmute appeal against all these heaped miseries of suffering man. And we, what can we do in ourselves? On what comparison of ourresources do we not feel utterly inadequate to the work? If we thinkof the proportion in numbers, we have to say, like the narrator ofthe wars in Israel, 'The children of Israel pitched before them liketwo little flocks of kids, but the Syrians filled the country. ' Ifwe think of the strength that we ourselves possess and look at ourown tremulous faith, at our own feeble love, at the uncertain holdwhich we ourselves have on the Gospel that we profess, at the mistsand darkness which cover so much of God's revelation from our ownunderstandings, at the sins and faults of our own lives, must we notcry out, Send whom Thou wilt send, O Lord, but take not me, sosinful, so little influenced by Thy grace, to be the messenger ofThy grace? 'Who is sufficient for these things?' And such contemplations, when they drive home to our hearts thewholesome lesson of our own weakness, are the beginning, and the onlypossible beginning, of divine strength. The only temper in which wecan serve God and bless man is that of lowliest self-abasement. Godworks 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 ourlips and the prophet strength flow into our souls. Be humble and self-distrustful, and then learn the further lesson ofthis narrative, and carry your poor inadequate resources to Christ. 'Bring them hither to Me. ' In His hands they become sufficient. Hemultiplies them. He gives wisdom, strength, and all that fits forthe task to which He calls us. Bring your little faith to Him and Hewill increase it. Bring your feeble love to Him, and ask Him tokindle it from the pure flame of His own, and He will make yourheart burn within you. Bring your partial understanding of His willand way to Him, and He will be to you wisdom. Bring all the povertyof your natures, all the insufficiency of your religious character, all the inadequacy of your poor work, to your Lord. Feel it all. Letthe conviction of your nothingness sink into your soul. Then waitbefore Him in simple faith, in lowly obedience, and power will cometo you equal to your desire and to your duties, and He will put Hisspirit upon you, and will anoint you to proclaim liberty to thecaptives and to give bread to all the hungry. 'Who is sufficient forthese things?' must ever precede, and will ever be followed by, 'oursufficiency is of God. ' Mark again that the disciples seem themselves to have partaken ofthe bread before they parted it among the multitudes. That is ourtrue preparation for the work of feeding the hungry. The Churchwhich feeds the world is able to do so, only because, and inproportion 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 ofthe word of life' who can declare it to others. Personal participationin the bread of life makes any man able to offer it to some faintingspirit. 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 weightyobligations. Your own personal experience of that precious bread hasfitted you to do something in offering it to others. The manner inwhich you do so must be determined by your character and circumstances. Every one has his proper walk; but something you can do. To some lipsyou can commend the food for all the world. Somewhere your word isa power. See that you do what you can do. Remember that Christ feedsthe world by His Church, and that every man who has himself eaten ofthe bread of life is thereby consecrated to carry it to those who yetare perishing in the far-off hunger-ridden land, and trying to filltheir 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 andgrudgingly the apostles doled out the supplies at first, and how theportion 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 sufficienthad been the share of each. May we not see in that scene a picture of the full supply for allthe wants of the whole world which there is in that Bread of Lifewhich 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 wholeworld arises from the obvious fact that it addresses itself touniversal wants, to the great rudimentary, universally diffusedcharacteristics 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 thetime and place of its earthly origin, which can hinder it in itsuniversal diffusion. It commits itself to no transient humanopinions. It addresses itself to no sectional characteristics ofclasses of men. It brushes aside all the surface distinctions whichseparate us from one another, and goes right down to the depths ofthe central identities in which we are all alike. However we maydiffer from one another, in training, in habits, in cast of thought, in idiosyncrasies of character, in circumstances, in age--all theseare but the upper strata which vary locally. Beneath all these therelie everywhere the solid foundations of the primeval rocks, andbeneath these, again, the glowing central mass, the flaming heart ofthe world. Christianity sends its shaft right down through all theseupper and local beds, till it reaches the deepest depths which arethe same in every man--the obstinate wilfulness of a nature aversefrom God, and the yet deeper-lying longings of a soul that flameswith the consciousness of God, and yearns for rest and peace. To thesense of sin, to the sense of sorrow, to the conscience never whollystifled, to the desires after good never utterly eradicated andnever 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 ofprogress, age of the world, or stage of civilisation, does itaddress itself, but to the common humanity which belongs to all, tothe wants and sorrows and inward consciousness which belong to manas man, be he philosopher or fool, king or slave, Eastern orWestern, 'pagan suckled in a creed outworn, ' or Englishman with thenew lights and material science of this twentieth century. Hence its universal adaptation to mankind. It alone of all so-calledfaiths overleaps all geographical limits and lives in all centuries. It alone wins its trophies and bestows its gifts on all sorts andconditions of men. Other plants which the 'Heavenly Father hath notplanted' have their zones of vegetation and die outside certaindegrees of latitude, but the seed of the kingdom is like corn, anexotic nowhere, for wherever man lives it will grow, and yet anexotic everywhere, for it came down from heaven. Other food requiresan educated palate for its appreciation, but any hungry man in anyland will relish bread. For every soul on earth this living dyinglove 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 waschildren. It is one great glory of Christianity that its mercifulmysteries can find their way to the hearts of the little children. Its mysteries, we say--for the Gospel has its mysteries no less thanthese old systems of heathenism which fenced round their deepesttruths with solemn barriers, only to be passed by the initiated. Butthe difference lies here--that its mysteries are taught at first tothe neophytes, and that the sum of them lies in the words which welearned at our mother's knees so long ago that we have forgottenthat they were ever new to us: 'God so loved the world that He gaveHis only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should notperish, but should have eternal life. ' The little child who haslearned his earliest lessons of what father and son, loving andgiving, trust and life mean, by the sweet experiences of his ownfather's home and his own mother's love, can grasp these blessedwords. They carry the deepest mysteries which will still gleambefore us unfathomed in all their profundity, unappropriated in alltheir blessedness, when millenniums have passed since we stood inthe inner shrine of heaven. Wonderful is the word which blesses thechild, which transcends the angel before the throne! This is the bread for the world--meant for it, and one day to bepartaken of by it. For these ordered fifties at their Christ-providedmeal are for us a prophecy of the day that shall surely dawn, whenall the hunger of wandering prodigals is over, and the deceivedheart of the idol-worshipper no longer drawing him aside to feed onashes, they shall come from the East and from the West, and fromthe North and from the South, and sit at the feast which the Lordhath prepared for all nations, and when all the earth shall be satisfiedwith the goodness of His house, even of His holy temple. III. The Bread which is given to the famishing is multiplied for thefuture of the Distributors. 'They took of the fragments that remained twelve baskets full. ' Morewas gathered than they had possessed at first. They preserved over, for their own sustenance and refreshment in days to come, a farlarger store than the five loaves and two small fishes with whichthey had begun. The fact contains a principle which is true aboutalmost all except material possessions, which is often in God'sprovidence made true about them, and which is emphatically trueabout spiritual blessings, about our religious emotions, ourChristian beliefs, the joys and powers which Christ comes to give. For all these, the condition of increase is diffusion. To impart toothers is to gain for oneself. Every honest effort to bring someother human heart into conscious possession of Christ's love deepensone's own sense of its preciousness. Every attempt to lead someother understanding to the perception of the truth, as it is inJesus, helps me to understand it better myself. If you would learn, teach. That will clear your mind, will open hidden harmonies, willreveal unsuspected deficiencies and contradictions in your ownconceptions, will help you to feel more the truths that come fromyour lips. It will perhaps shame your cold appreciation of them, when you see how others grasp at them from your teaching, or giveyou more confidence in the Gospel as the power of God untosalvation, when you behold it, even as ministered through you, mighty to pull down strongholds. At the lowest, it will keep yourown 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 tolove Him, You will catch new gleams from His gracious heart in thevery act of commending Him to others. If you would have your ownspiritual life strengthened and deepened, remember that not bysolitary meditation or raptures of silent communion alone can thatbe accomplished, but by these and by honest manful work for God inthe world. The Mount of Transfiguration must be left, although therewere there Moses and Elias, and the cloud of the divine glory andthe words of approval from heaven, because there were a demoniac boyand his weeping, despairing father needing Christ down below. Workfor God if you would live with God. Give the bread to the hungry, ifyou would have it for the food of your own souls. The refusal to engage in such service is one fruitful cause of thelow state of spiritual health in which so many Christians pass theirdays. They seem to think that they receive the bread from heavenonly for their own use, and that they have done all that they haveto do with it, when they eat it themselves. And so come all mannerof spiritual diseases. A selfish, that is an inactive, religion isalways more or less a morbid religion. For health you need exercise. 'In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; that law expressesnot only the fact that work is needed to get it, but that toil mustgive the appetite and fit the frame to digest it. There is such athing as a morbid Christianity brought on by want of healthyexercise. 'There is that scattereth and yet increaseth, and there is thatwithholdeth more than is meet, and it tendeth to poverty. ' Goodhusbandry does not grind up all the year's wheat for loaves forone's own eating, but keeps some of it for seed to be scattered inthe furrows. And if Christian men will deal with the great love ofGod, the great work of Christ, the great message of the Gospel, asif it were bestowed on them for their own sakes only, they will haveonly themselves to blame if holy desires die out in their hearts, and the consciousness of Christ's love becomes faint, and all theblessed words of truth come to sound far off and mythical in theirears. The standing water gets green scum on it. The close-shut barnbreeds weevils and smut. Let the water run. Fling the seedbroadcast. 'Thou shalt find it after many days, ' bread for thy ownsoul--even as these ministering apostles were enriched whilst theygave, and the full-handed liberality 'with which they carriedChrist's gifts among the crowd' had something to do in providing thelarge residue which filled their stores for days to come. Thus, then, this scene on the sweet springing grass down by the sideof blue Gennesaret is an emblem of the whole work of the Church inthis starving world. The multitudes famish. Tell Christ of theirwants. Count your own small resources till you have completelylearned your poverty, then take them to Jesus. He will accept them, and in His hands they will become mighty, being transfigured fromhuman thoughts and forces into divine words, into spiritual powers. On that bread which He gives, do you yourselves live. Then carry itboldly to all the hungry. Rank after rank will eat. All races, allages, from grey hairs to babbling childhood, will find there thefood of their souls. As you part the blessing, it will grow beneathHis eye; and the longer you give, the fuller-handed you will become. Nor shall the bread fail, nor the word become weak, till all theworld has tasted of its sweetness and been refreshed by its potentlife. This miracle is the lesson for the workers. There is anotherwondrous meal recorded in Scripture, which is the prophecy for theworkers when they rest. The little ship has been tossing all thenight on the waters of that Galilean lake. Fruitless has been thefishing. The morning breaks cold and grey, and lo! there stands onthe shore One who first blesses the toilers' work, and then bidsthem to His table. There, mysteriously kindled, burns the fire withthe welcome meal already laid upon it. They add to it thecontribution of their night of toil, and then, hushed and blessed inHis still company, they sup with Him and He with them. So when theweary work is over for the Church on earth, we shall be aware of Hismerciful presence on the shore, and, coming at the last safe toland, we shall 'rest from our labours, ' in that we see the 'fire ofcoals, and fish laid thereon and bread'; and our 'works shall followus, ' in that we are 'bidden to bring of the fish that we havecaught. ' Then, putting off the wet fisher's coat, and leaving behindthe tossing of the unquiet sea and the toil of the weary fishing, weshall sit down with Him at that meal spread by His hands, whoblesseth the works of His servants here below, and giveth to them afull 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 adangerous enthusiasm by a miracle so level to their tastes. Aprophet who could feed them was something like a prophet. So theydetermine to make him a king. Our Lord, fearing the outburst, resolves to withdraw into the lonely hills, that the fickle blazemay die down. If the disciples had remained with Him, He could nothave so easily stolen away, and they might have caught the popularfervour. To divide would distract the crowd, and make it easier forHim to disperse them, while many of them, as really happened, wouldbe likely to set off by land for Capernaum, when they saw the boathad gone. The main teaching of this miracle, over and above itsdemonstration of the Messianic power of our Lord, is symbolical. Allthe 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, whenthey started in the early evening. An hour or so might have done it, but, for some unknown reason, they lingered. Perhaps instead ofpulling across, they may have kept inshore, by the head of the lake, expecting Jesus to join them at some point. Thus, night finds thembut a short way on their voyage. The paschal moon would be shiningdown on them, and perhaps in their eager talk about the miracle theyhad just seen, they did not make much speed. A sudden breeze sprangup, as is common at nightfall on mountain lakes; and soon a gale, against which they could make no headway, was blowing in theirteeth. This lasted for eight or nine hours. Wet and weary, theytugged at the oars through the livelong night, the seas breakingover them, and the wind howling down the glens. They had been caught in a similar storm once before, but then He hadbeen on board, and it was daylight. Now it was dark, 'and Jesus hadnot yet come to them, ' How they would look back at the dim outlineof the hills, where they knew He was, and wonder why He had sent themout 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 Hispersonal presence, and a symbol of what is to be the life of His peopletill the end. He is on the mountain in prayer, and He sees the labouringboat and the distressed rowers. The contrast is the same as is given inthe last verses of Mark's Gospel, where the serene composure of theLord, sitting at the right hand of God, is sharply set over againstthe wandering, toiling lives of His servants, in their evangelisticmission. The commander-in-chief sits apart on the hill, directing thefight, and sending regiment after regiment to their deaths. Does thatmean indifference? So it might seem but for the words which follow, 'the Lord working with them. ' He shares in all the toil; and the liftingup of His holy hands sways the current of the fight, and inclines thebalance. His love appoints effort and persistent struggle as the lawof our lives. Nor are we to mourn or wonder; for the purpose of theappointment, so far as we are concerned, is to make character, and togive us 'the wrestling thews that throw the world. ' Difficulties makemen of us. Summer sailors, yachting in smooth water, have neither thejoy 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 ofthings is to be estimated by their power to 'strengthen us withstrength in our soul!' II. We have the approaching Christ. Not till the last watch of the night does He come, when they havelong 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 Hislove. Because He loved Mary and Martha and Lazarus, He stayed still, in strange inaction, for two days, after their message. Because Heloved Peter and the praying band, He let him lie in prison till thelast hour of the last watch of the last night before his intendedexecution, and then delivered him with a leisureliness (making himput on article after article of dress) which tells of consciousomnipotence. Heaven's clock goes at a different rate from our littletimepieces. God's day is a thousand years, and the longest tarryingis but 'a little while. ' When He has come, we find that it is 'rightearly, ' though before He came He seemed to us to delay. He comesacross the waves. Their restless and yielding crests are smoothedand made solid by the touch of His foot. 'He walketh on the sea ason a pavement' (Septuagint version of Job ix. 8). It is a revelationof divine power. It is one of the very few miracles affectingChrist's own person, and may perhaps be regarded as being, like theTransfiguration, a casual gleam of latent glory breaking through thebody of His humiliation, and so, in some sense, prophetic. But it isalso symbolic. He ever uses tumults and unrest as a means ofadvancing His purposes. The stormy sea is the recognised OldTestament emblem of antagonism to the divine rule; and just as Hewalked on the billows, so does He reach His end by the veryopposition to it, 'girding Himself' with the wrath of men, andmaking it to praise Him. In this sense, too, His 'paths are in thegreat waters. ' In another aspect, we have here the symbol ofChrist's using our difficulties and trials as the means of Hisloving approach to us. He comes, giving a deeper and more blessedsense of His presence by means of our sorrows, than in calm sunnyweather. It is generally over a stormy sea that He comes to us, andgolden 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; theyhad no expectation of His coming, and thought just what any rudeminds would have thought, that this mysterious Thing stalkingtowards them across the waters came from the unseen world, andprobably that it was the herald of their drowning. Terror frozetheir blood, and brought out a shriek (as the word might berendered) which was heard above the dash of waves and the ravingwind. They had gallantly fought the tempest, but this unmanned them. We too often mistake Christ, when He comes to us. We do notrecognise His working in the storm, nor His presence giving power tobattle with it. We are so absorbed in the circumstances that we failto see Him through them. Our tears weave a veil which hides Him, orthe darkness obscures His face, and we see nothing but thethreatening crests of the waves, curling high above our little boat. We mistake our best friend, and we are afraid of Him as we dimly seeHim; and sometimes we think that the tokens of His presence are onlyphantasms of our own imagination. They who were deceived by His appearance knew Him by His voice, asMary did at the sepulchre. How blessed must have been the momentwhen that astounding certitude thrilled through their souls! Thatlow voice is audible through all the tumult. He speaks to us by Hisword, and by the silent speech in our spirits, which makes usconscious that He is there. He does speak to us in the deepest ofour sorrows, in the darkest of our nights; and when we hear of Hisvoice, and with wonder and joy cry out, 'It is the Lord, ' our sorrowis 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 preachChrist first. If we have not Him with us, we do well to fear: Hispresence is the only rational foundation for calm fearlessness. Onlywhen the Lord of Hosts is with us, ought we not to fear, 'though thewaters roar . .. And be troubled. ' 'Through the dear might of Him thatwalked the waves' can we feeble creatures face all terrors, and feelno 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 mentionthe cessation of the tempest, but tells us that they wereimmediately at the shore. It does not seem necessary to supposeanother miracle, but only that the voyage ended very speedily. It isnot always true that His presence is the end of dangers anddifficulties, but the consciousness of His presence does hush thestorm. 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 longerthreatens. Nor is it always true that His coming, and ourconsciousness that He has come, bring a speedy close to toils. Wehave to labour on, but in how different a mood these men would bendto their oars after they had Him on board! With Him beside us toilis sweet, burdens are lighter, and the road is shortened. Even withHim on board, life is a stormy voyage; but without Him, it ends inshipwreck. With Him, it may be long, but it will look all theshorter while it lasts, and when we land the rough weather will beremembered but as a transient squall. These wearied rowers, who hadtoiled all night, stepped on shore as the morning broke on theeastern bank. So we, if we have had Him for our shipmate, shall landon the eternal shore, and dry our wet garments in the sunshine, andall the stormy years that seemed so long shall be remembered but asa 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 walkingon the waters to Matthew alone. Singularly enough there is noreference to Peter's venturesomeness and failure in the Gospel whichis generally believed to have been written under his specialinspection and suggestion. Mark passes by that part of the narrativewithout a word. That may be because Peter was somewhat ashamed ofit, or it may be from a natural disinclination to make himselfprominent in the story at all. But, whatever the reason, we may bethankful that in this first Gospel we have the story, for it is notonly interesting as illustrating the characteristics of the apostlein a very picturesque fashion, but also as carrying in it veryplainly large lessons that are of use for us all. I. Note, first, Peter's venturesomeness, half faith, and halfpresumption. There is a singular mixture of good and bad in it. Looked at oneway, it seems all right; like a bit of shot silk, in one light it isbright, 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; andthere was, further, the unconsidered, instinctive shoot of love inhis heart to the mysterious figure standing there upon the water, sothat 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_. ' Theincident was a kind of rehearsal, with a noticeable difference, andyet with nearly parallel circumstances, of the other incident when, after the Resurrection, he discovered the Lord standing on theshore, and floundered through the water anyhow; whether on it or init 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 thatwas childish and sensuous, and was perhaps quite as much the resultof mere temperament as of conscious affection, still there was goodin that eager longing to be beside his Lord, which it would be wellfor us if we in some measure shared, and in that indifference to theperils 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 perfectconfidence 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 tothe front, and wish to be singled out from his brethren by somespecial token. 'Bid _me_ come. ' Why should he be bidden any morethan John, who sits quietly and gazes, or the others, who are tuggingat the oars? Then the impetuous rashness and signal over-estimate ofhis own capacity and courage were bad. Perhaps, too, there was alittle dash of a boyish kind of wish to do a strange thing, and nowthat he sees his Master there, walking on the waters, he thinks hewould like to try it too. So the request is a rash, self-confidentpushing of himself before his brethren into circumstances of whollyunnecessary peril and trial, of which he had not estimated theseverity till he felt the water beginning to yield under his feetand the wind smiting him on the face. So that the incident is arehearsal and anticipation of the precisely similar thing that he didwhen, on the morning of Christ's trial, he shouldered himselfunnecessarily into the high priest's palace, and got himself closeup against the fire there, without a moment's reflection on thepossible danger he was running of having his loyalty melted by afiercer flame, and little dreaming that he was going to fall, and allhis courage to ooze out at his finger-ends, before the sharp tongueof a maid-servant. In like manner as he says here, 'Bid me come toThee, ' without the smallest doubt that when he was bade to come hewould be able to do it, so he said that night: 'Though all shouldforsake 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 mostgenuine faith and religious emotion need to be sobered and steadiedby reflection, and by searching into our own motives, before weventure upon the water, howsoever much we may wish to go there. Makevery sure that your zeal for the Lord has an element of soberpermanence in it, and that it is the result, not of a meretransitory feeling, but of a steady, settled purpose. And do notpush yourself voluntarily into places of peril or of difficulty, where the fighting is hard and the fire heavy, unless you havereasonable grounds for believing that you can stand the strain. Bring quiet, sober reason into the loftiest and loveliest enthusiasmof your faith, and then there will be something in it that will livethrough storm, and walk the water with unwetted and unsinking foot. An impure alloy of selfish itching for pre-eminence and distinctiondoes not seldom mingle with the fine gold of religious enthusiasmand desire to serve and be near our Lord. Therefore we have to testour motives and seek to refine our purest emotions, and the morescrupulously the purer they seem, lest we be yielding to theimpulses of self while we fancy that we are being drawn by themagnetism of Christ. II. We have here the momentary triumph and swift collapse of animpure faith. One can fancy with what hushed expectation the other apostles looked atPeter as he let himself down over the side of the ship, and his feettouched the surges and did not sink. Christ's grave, single-wordedanswer 'Come' barely sanctions the apostle's request. It is at most apermission, but scarcely a command, and it is permission to try, inorder that Peter may learn his own weakness. He did walk on the waterto go to Jesus. What kept him up? Not Christ's hand, nor any powerbestowed on the apostle, but simply the exercise of Christ's will. Butif he was held up by the operation of that will, why did he begin tosink? The vivid narrative tells us: 'When he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid. ' That was why. It had been blowing every bit as hardbefore he stepped out of the ship. The waves were not running anyhigher after than when he said, 'Bid me come to Thee. ' But he wasdown amongst them, and that makes a wonderful difference. For amoment he stood, and then the peril into which he had so heedlesslythrust himself began to tell on him. Presumption subsided swiftlyinto fright, as it usually does, and fear began to fulfil itself, as it usually does. 'He became afraid, ' and that made him heavy andhe began to sink. Not because the gale was any more violent, notbecause the uneven pavement was any more yielding, but because he wasfrightened, and his faith began to falter at the close sight of thedanger. And why did the ebbing away of faith mean the withdrawal of Christ'swill to keep him up? Why? Because it could not but be so. There isonly one door through which Christ's upholding power gets into aman, and that is the door of the man's trust in the power; and if heshuts the door, the power stops outside. So Peter went down. Thetext does not tell us how far down he went. Depend upon it, it wasfurther than over the shoes! But he went down because he began tolose his trust that Christ could hold him up; and when he lost histrust, Christ lost His power over him. All this is a parable, carrying very plain and important lessons. Weare upborne by Christ's power, and that power, working on and in ourweakness, invests us with prerogatives in some measure like His own. If He can stand quiet on the heaving wave, so can His servant. 'Theworks that I do shall ye do also'--and 'the depths of the sea"become" a way for the ransomed to pass over. ' That power isexercised on condition of our faith. As soon as faith ceases theinflux of His grace is stayed. Peter, though probably he was notthinking of this incident, has put the whole philosophy of it intoplain words in his own letter, when he says, 'You who are kept_by_ the power of God _through_ faith unto salvation. ' He was held upas long as he believed. His belief was a hand, and that which itgrasped 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, andno longer than, we set our confidence upon Him. Our faith is sure to fail when we turn away our eyes from Christ tolook at the tempest and the dangers. If we keep our gaze fixed uponHim, the consciousness and the confidence of His all-sustainingpower will hold us up. If once we turn aside to look at the waves asthey 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 weare to run the race set before us. A man walking along a narrow ledge of some Alpine height has onlyone chance of safety, and that is, not to look at his feet or at theicy rocks beside him, or at the gulf beneath, into which he will bedashed if he gazes down. He must look up and onwards, and then hewill walk along a knife-edge, and he shall not fall. So, Peter, never mind the water, never mind the wind; look at Jesus and youwill get to Him dry shod. If you turn away your eyes from Him, andtake counsel of the difficulties and trials and antagonisms, downyou will be sure to go. 'They sank to the bottom like a stone, thedepths covered them. ' Christ holds us up. He cannot hold us upunless we trust Him. Faith and fear contend for supremacy in ourhearts. If we rightly trust, we shall not be afraid. If we areafraid, terror will slay trust. To look away from Christ, and occupyour thoughts with dangers and obstacles, is sure to lead to thecollapse of faith and the strengthening of terror. To look past andabove the billows to Him that stands on them is sure to cast outfear and to hearten faith. Peter ignored the danger at the wrongtime, before he dropped over the side of the boat, and he was awareof it at the wrong time, while he was actually being held up anddelivered from it. Rashness ignores peril in the wrong way, andthereby ensures its falling on the presumptuous head. Faith ignoresit in the right way, by letting the eye travel past it, to Christwho shields from it, and thereby faith brings about the security itexpects, and annihilates the peril from which it looks away toJesus. III. We have here the cry of desperate faith and its immediateanswer. The very thing which had broken Peter's faith mended it again. Fearsunk him by making him falter in his confidence; and, as he wassinking, the very desperation of his terror drove him back to hisfaith, and he 'cried' with a shrill, loud voice, heard above theroar of the boisterous wind, 'Lord, save me. ' So difficulties anddangers, when they begin to tell upon us, often send us back to thetrust which the anticipation of them had broken; and out of the veryextremity of fear we sometimes can draw its own antidote. Just aswith flint and steel you may strike a spark, so danger, strikingagainst our heart, brings out the flash that kindles the tinder. This brief cry for help singularly blends faith and fear. There isfaith in it, else Peter would not have appealed to Christ to savehim. There is mortal terror in it, else he would not have felt thathe needed to cry. But faith is uppermost now, and the very terrorfeeds it. So, by swift transition, our fears may pass into their ownopposite and become courageous trust. Just as in a coal fire thethick 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 Hecaught him, ' because another moment would have been too late. Therewill be time to teach him the lessons of his presumption, but whenthe water is all but up to the lips that shrieked for help, there isbut one thing to do. He must be saved first and talked to afterwards. Our cries for deliverance in temporal matters are not always answeredso quickly, for it is often better for us to be left to struggle withthe waves and winds. But our appeals for Christ's helping hand insoul-peril are always answered without delay. No appreciable time isconsumed in the passage of the telegram or in flashing back theanswer. The apostle was not caught by Christ's hand before he knewhis 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 hehad come to any harm. The trial lasted long enough to wash thestiffening of self-confidence out of him, and then it had done itswork--and Christ's strong hand held him up. The manner of the answer is noteworthy. It is determined by, andadapted to, his weak faith. He could not be upheld now as he hadbeen a moment ago, before his fear had weighted him, by the exerciseof Christ's will only. Then Christ could hold him up withouttouching him, but now the palpable grasp of the hand was needed toassure the tremulous, doubting heart. So we, too, sometimes need andget material and outward signs which make it easier to feel thereality of sustaining grace. But whether we do or no, Christ's swifthelp always takes the form best suited to our faith, and He hasregard to the capacity of our clasping hands in the measure andmanner of His gifts. The time and tone of Christ's gentle remonstrance are remarkable. Deliverance comes first, and rebuke afterwards. Having first shownhim, by the fact of safety, that his doubts were irrational, Christthen, and not till then, puts His gentle question. Perhaps there wasa smile on His face, as surely there was love in His voice, thatsoftened the rebuke and went to Peter's heart. What does Christ rebuke him for? Getting out of the boat? No. Hedoes not blame him for venturing too much, but for trusting toolittle. He does not blame him for attempting something beyond hisstrength, but for not holding fast the beginning of his confidencefirm unto the end. And so the lesson for us is, that we cannotexpect too much if we expect it perseveringly. We cannot set ourconceptions of Christ's possible help to us too high if only we keepat the height to which we once have set them, and are assured thatHe will hold us up when we are down amongst the weltering waves, aswe fancied ourselves to be when we were sitting in the boat wishingto be with Him. That is the question that He will meet us with whenwe get up on the shore yonder; and we shall not have any more to sayfor 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 trialsconsolidate our characters, and out of the shifting, fluctuating, impetuous nature that was blown about like sand by every gust ofemotion there be made, by the pressure of responsibility and trial, and experience of our own unreliableness, the 'Rock' of a stablecharacter, steadfast and unmovable, with calm resolution and fixedfaith, on which the Great Architect can build some portion of Hisgreat 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 bythe hostility of those who should have been His subjects. Thedelegates of the priestly party from Jerusalem, who had come down tosee into this dangerous enthusiasm which was beginning in Galilee, have made Christ's withdrawal expedient, and He goes northward, ifnot actually into the territory of Tyre and Sidon, at any rate tothe border land. The incident of the Syro-Phoenician woman becomesmore striking if we suppose that it took place on Gentile ground. Atall events, after it, we learn from Mark that He made a considerablecircuit, first north and then east, and so came round to the easternside of the sea of Galilee, where the last paragraph of this sectionfinds Him. The key to its meaning lies in the contrast between thesingle cure of the woman's demoniac daughter, obtained after so longimploring, and the spontaneous abundance of the cures wrought whenJesus again had Jewish sufferers to do with, even though it were onthe half-Gentilised eastern shore of the lake. The contrast is anillustration of His parable of the crumbs that fell from the tableand the plentiful feast that was spread upon it for the children. The story of the Syro-Phoenician woman naturally falls into fourparts, each marked by the recurrence of 'He answered. ' I. There is the piteous cry, and the answer of silence. Mark tellsus that Jesus sought concealment in this journey; but distress hasquick eyes, and this poor woman found Him. Canaanite as she is, andthus a descendant of the ancient race of Israel's enemies, she haslearned to call Him the Son of David, owning His kingship, which Hisborn subjects disowned. She beseeches for that which He delights togive, identifying herself with her poor child's suffering, andasking as for herself His mercy. As Chrysostom says: 'It was a sightto stir pity to behold a woman calling aloud in such distress, andthat woman a mother, and pleading for a daughter, and that daughterin 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 butto spread her grief before Him, as thinking that He, of whose pityshe has heard, needs but to know in order to alleviate, and requiresno motives urged to induce Him to help. In her faith, she thinksthat His power can heal from afar. What more could He have desired?All the more startling, then, is His demeanour. All the conditionswhich He usually required, were present in her; but He, who was wontto meet these with swift and joyful over-answers, has no word to sayto this poor, needy, persevering, humble, and faithful suppliant. The fountain seems frozen, from which such streams of blessing werewont to flow. His mercy seems clean gone, and His compassion to havefailed. A Christ silent to a sufferer's cry is a paradox whichcontradicts the whole gospel story, and which, we may be very sure, no evangelist would have painted, if he had not been painting fromthe life. II. There is the disciples' intercession answered by Christ'sstatement of the limitations of His mission. Their petitionevidently meant, 'Dismiss her by granting her request'; they knew inwhat fashion He was wont to 'send away' such suppliants. They seem, then, more pitiful than He is. But their thoughts are more forthemselves than for her. That 'us' shows the cloven foot. They didnot like the noise, and they feared it might defeat His purpose ofsecrecy; and so, by their phrase, 'Send her away, ' theyunconsciously betray that what they wanted was not granting theprayer, but getting rid of the petitioner. Perhaps, too, they mean, 'Say something to her; either tell her that Thou wilt or that Thouwilt not; break Thy silence somehow. ' No doubt, it was intenselydisagreeable to have a shrieking woman coming after them; and theywere only doing as most of us would have done, and as so many of usdo, when we give help without one touch of compassion, in order tostop some imploring mouth. Their apparently compassionate but really selfish intercession wasput aside by the answer, which explains the paradox of His silence. It puts emphasis on two things: His subordination to the divine willof the Father, and the restrictions imposed thereby on the scope ofHis beneficent working. He was obeying the divine will in confiningHis ministry to the Jewish people, as we know that He did. Clearly, that restriction was necessary. It was a case of concentration inorder to diffusion. The fire must be gathered on the hearth, if itis afterward to warm the chamber. There must be geographical andnational limits to His life; and the Messiah, who comes last in thelong series of the kings and prophets, can only be authenticated asthe world's Messiah, by being first the fulfiller to the children ofthe promises made to the fathers. The same necessity, which requiredthat revelation should be made through that nation, required thatthe climax and fulfiller of all revelation should limit His earthlyministry to it. This limitation must be regarded as applying only toHis own personal ministry. It did not limit His sympathies, norinterfere with His consciousness of being the Saviour and King ofthe whole world. He had already spoken the parables which claimed itall for the area of the development of His kingdom, and in manyother ways had given utterance to His consciousness of universaldominion, and His purpose of universal mercy. But He knew that therewas an order of development in the kingdom, and that at its thenstage the surest way to attain the ultimate universality was rigidlimitation of it to the chosen people. This conviction locked Hisgracious lips against even this poor woman's piteous cry. We maywell believe that His sympathy outran His commission, and that itwould have been hard for so much love to be silent in the presenceof so much sorrow, if He had not felt the solemn pressure of thatdivine necessity which ruled all His life. He was bound by Hisinstructions, and therefore He answered her not a word. Individualsuffering is no reason for transcending the limits of God-appointedfunctions; and he is absolved from the charge of indifference whorefrains from giving help, which he can only give by overleaping thebounds of his activity, which have been set by the Father. III. We have, next, the persistent suppliant answered by a refusalwhich sounds harsh and hopeless. Christ's former words were probablynot heard by the woman, who seems to have been behind the group. Shesaw that something was being said to Him, and may have gathered, from gestures or looks, that His reply was unfavourable. Perhapsthere was a short pause in their walk, while they spoke, duringwhich she came nearer. Now she falls at His feet, and with'beautiful shamelessness, ' as Chrysostom calls it, repeats herprayer, but this time with pathetic brevity, uttering but the onecry, 'Lord, help me!' The intenser the feeling, the fewer the words. Heart-prayers are short prayers. She does not now invoke Him as theSon of David, nor tell her sorrow over again, but flings herself indesperation on His pity, with the artless and unsupported cry, wrungfrom her agony, as she sees the hope of help fading away. LikeJacob, in his mysterious struggle, 'she wept, and made supplicationunto Him. ' As it would seem, her distress touched no chord of sympathy; andfrom the lips accustomed to drop oil and wine into every wound, camewords like swords, cold, unfeeling, keen-edged, fitted and meant tolacerate. We shall not understand them, or Him, if we contentourselves with the explanation which jealousy for His honour ascompassionate and tender has led many to adopt, that He meant allthe long delay in granting her request, and the words which Hespoke, only as tests of her faith. His refusal was a real refusal, founded on the divine decree, which He was bound to obey. His wordsto her, harsh as they unquestionably sound, are but another way ofputting the limitation on which He had just insisted in His answerto the disciples. The 'bread' is the blessing which He, as the sentof God, brings; the 'children' are the 'lost sheep of the house ofIsrael'; the 'dogs' are the Gentile world. The meaning of the wholeis simply the necessary restriction of His personal activity to thechosen nation. It is not meant to wound nor to insult, though, nodoubt, it is cast in a form which might have been offensive, andwould have repelled a less determined or less sorrowful heart. Theform may be partly explained by the intention of trying herearnestness, which, though it is not the sole, or even theprincipal, is a subordinate, reason of our Lord's action. But it isalso to be considered in the light of the woman's quick-wittedretort, which drew out of it an inference which we cannot supposethat Christ did not intend. He uses a diminutive for 'dogs, ' whichshows that He is not thinking of the fierce, unclean animals, masterless and starving, that still haunt Eastern cities, anddeserve their bad character, but of domestic pets, who live with thehousehold, and are near the table. In fact, the woman seized Hisintention much better than later critics who find 'national scorn'in the words; and the fair inference from them is just that whichshe drew, and which constituted the law of the preaching of theGospel, --'To the Jew first, and also to the Gentile. ' IV. We have the woman's retort, which wrings hope out of apparentdiscouragement, answered by Christ's joyful granting of her request. Out of His very words she weaves a plea. 'Yes, Lord; I am one of thedogs; then I am not an alien, but belong to the household. ' TheRevised 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 ownmetaphor. 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 thetable, nor anything taken from those who have a prior claim to amore abundant share in His mercies. A crumb is enough for her, whichthey will never miss. In other and colder words, she acquiesces inthe divine appointment which limits His mission to Israel; but sherecognises that all nations belong to God's household, and that sheand her countrymen have a real, though for the time inferior, position in it. She pleads that her gain will not be the children'sloss, nor the answer to her prayers an infraction of the spirit ofHis mission. Perhaps, too, there may be a reference to the fact ofHis being there on Gentile soil, in her words, 'Which fall from thechildren's table. ' She does not want the bread to be thrown from thetable to her. She is not asking Him to transfer His ministry toGentiles; 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 hallowedingenuity and boldness, are equally admirable. By admitting that shewas 'a dog, ' and pleading her claim on that footing, she shows thatshe was 'a child. ' And therefore, because she has shown herself oneof the true household, in the fixedness of her faith, in themeekness of her humility, in the persistence of her prayers, Christjoyfully recognises that here is a case in which He may pass theline of ordinary limitation, and that, in doing so, He does notexceed His commission. Such faith is entitled to the fullest shareof His gift. She takes her place beside the Gentile centurion as thetwo recipients of commendation from Him for the greatness of theirfaith. It had seemed as if He would give nothing; but He ends withgiving all, putting the key of the storehouse into her hand, andbidding her take, not a crumb, but 'as thou wilt. ' Her daughter ishealed, by His power working at a distance; but that was not, we maybe very sure, the last nor the best of the blessings which she tookfrom that great treasure of which He made her mistress. Nor can wedoubt that He rejoiced at the removal of the barrier which dammedback His help, as much as she did at the abundance of the streamwhich reached her at last. V. The final verses of our lesson give us a striking contrast tothis story. Jesus is again on the shores of the lake, after a tourthrough the Tyrian and Sidonian territory, and then eastwards andsouthwards, to its eastern bank. There He, as on several formeroccasions, seeks seclusion and repose in the hills, which is brokenin upon by the crowds. The old excitement and rush of people beginagain. And large numbers of sick, 'lame, blind, dumb, maimed andmany others, ' are brought. They are cast 'down at His feet' in hothaste, with small ceremony, and, as would appear, with littlepetitioning for His healing power. But the same grace, for which theCanaanitish woman had needed to plead so hard, now seems to flowalmost unasked. She had, as it were, wrung a drop out; now it gushesabundantly. She had not got her 'crumb' without much pleading; theseget the bread almost without asking. It is this contrast of scantand full supplies which the evangelist would have us observe. And hepoints his meaning plainly enough by that expression, 'theyglorified the God of Israel, ' which seems to be Matthew's own, andnot his quotation of what the crowd said. This abundance of miraclewitnesses to the pre-eminence of Israel over the Gentile nations, and to the special revelation of Himself which God made to them inHis Son. The crowd may have found in it only fuel for narrownational pride and contempt; but it was the divine method for thefounding of the kingdom none the less; and these two scenes, setthus side by side, teach the same truth, that the King of men isfirst 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 canbut lightly touch points on which volumes might be, and indeed havebeen, written. I. The first section (vs. 13-20) gives us Peter's great confessionin the name of the disciples, and Christ's answer to it. The centreof this section is the eager avowal of the impetuous apostle, alwaysforemost for good or evil. We note the preparation for it, itscontents, and its results. As to the preparation, --our Lord isentering on a new era in His work, and desires to bring clearly intoHis followers' consciousness the sum of His past self-revelation. The excitement, which He had checked after the first miraculousfeeding, had died down. The fickle crowd had gone away from Him, andthe shadows of the cross were darkening. Amid the seclusion of thewoods, fountains, and rocks of Caesarea, far away from distractinginfluences, He puts these two momentous questions. Following theRevised Version reading, we have a double contrast between the firstand second. 'Men' answers to 'ye, ' and 'the Son of Man' to 'I. ' Thefirst question is as to the partial and conflicting opinions amongthe 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 ofthe depths of His gracious personality, which the disciples hadexperienced, and implies, 'Surely you, who have been beside Me, andknown Me so closely, have reached a deeper understanding. ' It has atone of the same wistfulness and wonder as that other question ofHis, 'Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not knownMe?' For their sakes, He seeks to draw out their partly unconsciousfaith, that had been smouldering, fed by their daily experience ofHis beauty and tenderness. Half-recognised convictions float in manya heart, which need but a pointed question to crystallise intomaster-truths, to which, henceforward, the whole being is subject. Great are the dangers of articulate creeds; but great is the powerof putting our shadowy beliefs into plain words. 'With the mouthconfession is made unto salvation. ' Why should this great question have been preceded by the other?Probably to make the disciples feel more distinctly the chaoticcontradictions of the popular judgment, and their own isolation bytheir possession of the clearer light. He wishes them to see thegulf opening between them and their fellows, and so to bind themmore closely to Himself. This is the question the answer to whichsettles everything for a man. It has an intensely sharp point. Wecannot take refuge from it in the general opinion. Nor does anyother man's judgment about Him matter one whit to us. This Christhas a strange power, after nineteen hundred years, of coming to eachof us, with the same persistent interrogation on His lips. And to-day, as then, all depends on the answer which we give. Many answer byexalted estimates of Him, like these varying replies which ascribedto Him prophetic authority, but they have not understood His own namefor Himself, nor drunk in the meaning of His self-revelation, unlessthey can reply with the full-toned confession of the apostle, whichsets Him far above and apart from the highest and holiest. As to the contents of the confession, it includes both the human andthe divine sides of Christ's nature. He is the Messiah, but He ismore than what a Jew meant by that name; He is 'the Son of theliving God, ' by which we cannot indeed suppose that Peter meant allthat he afterwards learned it contained, or all that the Church hasnow been taught of its meaning, but which, nevertheless, is not tobe watered down as if it did not declare His unique filial relationto the Father, and so His divine nature. Nathanael had burst intorapturous adoration of Jesus as 'the Son of God' at the verybeginning; and the disciples' glad confidence, which cast out thefear of the dim form striding across the sea, had echoed theconfession; all had heard His words, 'No man knoweth the Father butthe Son. ' So we need not hesitate to interpret this confession as inessence and germ containing the whole future doctrine of our Lord'sdivinity. 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 Christianprogress in doctrine, which consists not in the winning of newtruths, but in the penetrating further into the meaning of old andinitial truths? The conviction which made and makes a Christian, isthis 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, whichbreathes of delight, and we may almost say gratitude. His manhoodknew the thrill of satisfaction at having some hearts whichunderstood though partially, and loved even better than they knew. The solemn address to the apostle by his ancestral name, givesemphasis to the contrast between his natural weakness and his divineillumination and consequent privilege. The name of Peter is not herebestowed, 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 isbuilt. The efforts to avoid that conclusion would never have beenheard of, but for the Roman Catholic controversy; but they are asunnecessary as unsuccessful. Is it credible that in the course of anaddress which is wholly occupied with conferring prerogatives on theapostle, a clause should come in, which is concerned about analtogether different subject from the 'thou' of the preceding andthe 'thee' of the following clauses, and which yet should take thevery 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 faithfulutterer of the divine inspiration in his confession, who receivedthese privileges. Therefore they are not his exclusive property, butbelong to his faith, which grasped and confessed the divine-humanLord; and wherever that faith is, there are these gifts, which areits results. They are the 'natural' consequences of the true faithin Christ, in that higher region where the supernatural is thenatural. Peter's grasp of Christ's nature wrought upon hischaracter, as pressure does upon sand, and solidified his shiftingimpetuosity into rock-like firmness. So the same faith will tend todo in any man. It made him the chief instrument in the establishmentof the early Church. On souls steadied and made solid by like faith, and only on such, can Christ build His Church. Of course, themetaphor here regards Jesus, not as the foundation, as the Scripturegenerally does, but as the founder. The names of the twelve apostlesof the Lamb are on the foundations of the heavenly city; and, inhistorical fact, the name of this apostle is graven on the deepestand first laid. In like subordinate sense, all who share that heroicfaith and proclaim it are used by the Master-builder in thefoundations of His Church; and Peter himself is eager to share hisname 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 theunseen world shall not be able to destroy it. Peter, as confessor ofhis Lord's human-divine nature, wields the keys of the kingdom ofheaven, like a steward of a great house; and that too was fulfilledin his apostolic activity in his admitting Jews at Pentecost, andGentiles in the house of Cornelius. But the same power attends allwho share his faith and avowal, for the preaching of that faith isthe opening of heaven's door to men. He receives the power ofbinding and loosing, by which is not meant that of forgiving orretaining sins, but that of prohibiting or allowing actions, or, inother words, of laying down the law of Christian conduct. Thismeaning of the metaphors is made certain by the common Jewish use ofthem. Despotic legislative power is not here committed to theapostle, but the great principle is taught that the morality ofChristianity flows directly from its theology, and that whosoever, like Peter, grasps firmly the cardinal truth of Christ's nature, andall which flows therefrom, will have his insight so cleared that hisjudgments on what is permitted or forbidden to a Christian man willcorrespond with the decisions of heaven, in the measure of his holdupon the truth which underlies all religion and all morality, namely, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. ' These aregifts to Peter indeed, but only as possessor of that faith, and aremuch more truly understood as belonging to all who 'possess likeprecious faith' (as Peter says), than as the prerogative of anyindividual or class. II. The second section (vs. 21-23) contains the startling newrevelation of the suffering Messiah, and the disciples' repugnanceto it. The Gospel has two parts: Jesus is the Christ, and the Christmust suffer and enter into His glory. Our Lord has made sure thatthe disciples have learned the first before He leads to the second. The very conviction of His dignity and divine nature made thatsecond truth the more bewildering, but still the only road to it wasthrough the first. Verse 21 covers an indefinite time, during whichJesus gradually taught His sufferings. Ordinarily we exaggerate thesuddenness, and therefore the depth, of Peter's fall, by supposingthat it took place immediately after his confession; but thenarrative discountenances the idea, and merely says that Jesus then'began' His new teaching. There had been veiled hints of it (such asJohn ii. 19, and Matt. Ix. 15, xii. 40), but henceforward it assumedprominence, and was taught without veil. It was no new thought toHimself, forced on Him by the growing enmity of the nation. Thecross always cast its shadow on His path. He was no enthusiast, beginning with the dream of winning a world to His side, and slowlyand heroically making up His mind to die a martyr, but His purposein being born was to minister and to die, a ransom for the many. Wehave not here to do with a growing consciousness, but simply with anincreasing clearness of utterance. Note the detailed accuracy of Hisprevision, which points to Jerusalem as the scene, and to the rulersof the nation as the instruments, and to death as the climax, and toresurrection as the issue, of His sufferings; the clear settingforth of the divine necessity which, as it ruled all His life, ruledhere also, and is expressed in that solemn 'must'; and the perfectlywilling acceptance by Him of that necessity, implied in that 'go, 'and certified by many another word of His. The necessity was noexternal compulsion, driving Him to an unwelcome sacrifice, but oneimposed 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 isdescribed! The apostle, full of eager love, still, as of old, swiftto speak, and driven by unexamined impulse, lays his hand on Christ, and draws Him a little apart, while he 'begins' to pour out wordswhich show that he has forgotten his confession. 'Rebuke' must notbe softened down into anything less vehement or more respectful. Heknows better than Jesus what will happen. Perhaps his assurance'that this shall never be' means 'We will fight first. ' But he isnot allowed to finish what he began; for the Master, whom he lovedunwisely but well, turns His back on him, as in horror, and shows bythe terrible severity of His rebuke how deeply moved He is. Herepels the hint in almost the same words as He had used to thetempter in the wilderness, of whom that Peter, who had so latelybeen the recipient and proclaimer of a divine illumination, hasbecome the mouthpiece. So possible is it to fall from sunny heightsto doleful depths! So little can any divine inspiration bepermanent, if the man turn away from it to think man's thoughts, andset his affections on the things which men desire! So certainly doesminding these degrade to becoming an organ of Satan! The words arefull of restrained emotion, which reveal how real a temptation Peterhad flung in Christ's path. The rock has become a stone ofstumbling; the man Jesus shrank from the cross with a natural andinnocent shrinking, which never made His will tremulous, but wasnone the less real; and such words from loving lips did affect him. Let us note, on the whole, that the complete truth about JesusChrist must include these two parts, --His divine nature andMessiahship, and His death on the cross; and that neither alone isthe gospel, nor is he a disciple, such as Christ desires, who doesnot cleave to both with mind and heart. III. In verses 24-28, the law, which ruled the Master's life, isextended to the servants. They recoiled from the thought of Hishaving to suffer. They had to learn that they must suffer too ifthey would be His. First, the condition of discipleship is setbefore them as being the fellowship of His suffering. 'If any manwill' 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. Hewill have no unwilling soldiers, nor any who have been beguiled intothe ranks. No doubt, some went away, and walked no more with Him. The terms of service are clear. Discipleship means imitation, andimitation means self-crucifixion. At that time they would onlypartially understand what taking up their cross was, but they wouldapprehend that a martyred master must needs have for followers menready to be martyrs too. But the requirement goes much deeper thanthis. There is no discipleship without self-denial, both in theeasier form of starving passions and desires, and in the harder ofyielding up the will, and letting His will supplant ours. Only socan we ever come after Him, and of such sacrifice of self the crossis the eminent example. We cannot think too much of it as theinstrument of our reconciliation and forgiveness, but we may, andtoo often do, think too little of it as the pattern of our lives. When Jesus began to teach His death, He immediately presented it asHis servants' example. Let us not forget that fact. The ground of the law is next stated in verse 25. The desire to savelife is the loss of life in the highest sense. If that desire guideus, then farewell to enthusiasm, courage, the martyr spirit, and allwhich makes man's life nobler than a beast's. He who is ruled mainlyby the wish to keep a whole skin, loses the best part of what he isso anxious to keep. In a wider application, regard for self as aruling motive is destruction, and selfishness is suicide. On theother hand, lives hazarded for Christ are therein truly saved, andif 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 apparentfolly, and enforces the requirement by the plain consideration that'life' is worth more than anything beside, and that on the twogrounds, that the world itself would be of no use to a dead man, andthat, once lost, 'life' cannot be bought back. Therefore the dictateof the wisest prudence is that seemingly prodigal flinging away ofthe lower 'life' which puts us in possession of the higher. Notethat the appeal is here made to a reasonable regard to personaladvantage, and _that_ in the very act of urging to crucifyself. So little did Christ think, as some people do, that the desireto save one's soul is selfishness. Verse 27 confirms all the preceding by the solemn announcement ofthe coming of the Son of Man as Judge. Mark the dignity of thewords. He is to come 'in the glory of the Father. ' That ineffableand inaccessible light which rays forth from the Father enwraps theSon. Their glory is one. The waiting angels are 'His. ' He renders toevery man according to his doing (his actions considered as onewhole). Thus He claims for Himself universal sway, and the power ofaccurately determining the whole moral character of every life, aswell as that of awarding precisely graduated retribution. Theysurely shall then find their lives who have followed Him here. Verse 28 adds, with His solemn 'verily, ' a confirmation of thisannouncement of His coming to judge. The question of what event isreferred to may best be answered by noting that it must be onesufficiently far off from the moment of speaking to allow of thedeath of the greater number of His hearers, and sufficiently near toallow of the survival of some; that it must also be an event, afterwhich these survivors would go the common road into the grave; thatit is apparently distinguished from His coming 'in the glory of theFather, ' and yet is of such a nature as to afford convincing proofof the establishment of His kingdom on earth, and to be, in somesort, a sign of that final act of judgment. All these requirements(and they are all the fair inferences from the words) meet only inthe destruction of Jerusalem, and of the national life of the chosenpeople. That was a crash of which we faintly realise the tremendoussignificance. It swept away the last remnant of the hope that Israelwas to be the kingdom of the Messiah; and from out of the dust andchaos of that fall the Christian Church emerged, manifestly destinedfor world-wide extension. It was a 'great and terrible day of theLord, ' and, as such, was a precursor and a prophecy of the day ofthe 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 thansix months before the Crucifixion, when Jesus was just on the pointof finally leaving Galilee, and travelling towards Jerusalem. It wasan epoch in His ministry. The hostility of the priestly party in thecapital had become more pronounced, and simultaneously the fickleenthusiasm of the Galilean crowds, which had been cooled by Hisdiscouragement, had died down into apathy. He and His followers areabout to leave familiar scenes and faces, and to plunge intoperilous and intrude paths. He is resolved that, if they will'come after Him, ' as He bids them in a subsequent verse, it shall bewith their eyes open, and as knowing that to come after Him nowmeans to cut themselves loose from old moorings, and to put out intothe storm. They shall be abundantly certified that their journeyingto Jerusalem is not a triumphal procession to a crown, but a marchto a cross. So, this new epoch in His life is attended with a new development ofHis teaching. My text sums up the result of many interviews inwhich, by slow degrees, He sought to put the disciples in possessionof this unwelcome truth. It was prepared for, by the previousconversation in which His question elicited from Peter, as themouthpiece of the apostles, the great confession of His Messiahshipand Divinity. Settled in their belief of these truths, howeverimperfect their intellectual grasp of them, they might perhaps beable to receive the mournful mystery of His passion. I. We have here set forth in the first place our Lord's anticipationof the Cross. Mark the tone of the language, the minuteness of the detail, theabsolute certainty of the prevision. That is not the language of aman who simply is calculating that the course which he is pursuingis likely to end in his martyrdom; but the thing lies there beforeHim, a definite, fixed certainty; every detail known, the scene, theinstruments, the non-participation of these in the final act of Hisdeath, His resurrection, and its date, --all manifested and mappedout in His sight, and all absolutely certain. Now this was by no means the first time that the certainty of theCross was plain to Christ. It was not even the first time that ithad been announced in His teaching. Veiled hints; allusions, briefbut 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 asthe profound word to the rabbi that sought Him by night, 'As Moseslifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man belifted up'; or as the passing hint, dropped to the people, insymbolical language, about the 'sign of the prophet Jonas'; or asthe grief foreshadowed dimly to the apostles, of the withdrawal ofthe Bridegroom, and their 'fasting in those days. ' These hints, andno doubt others unrecorded, had cropped to the surface before; andwhat we have to do with here, is neither the dawning of anexpectation in Christ, nor the first utterance of the certainty ofthe Cross, but simply the beginning of a continuous andunenigmatical teaching of it, as an element in His instructions toHis disciples. So then, we have to recognise the fact that our Lord's prevision ofthe end--shone, I was going to say, perhaps it might be truer tosay, darkened, --all the path along which He had to travel. I think that people dogmatise a great deal too glibly as to whatthey know very little about, the interaction of the divine and thehuman elements in Christ, and on the one side are far too certain intheir affirmation that His humanity possessed in some reflectedfashion the divine gift of omniscience; and on the other hand, thatHis manhood, passing through the process of human development, andincreasing in wisdom, was necessarily in its earlier stages void ofthe consciousness of His Messianic mission. I dare not affirm either'yes' or 'no' about that matter; but this I am sure of, that if everthere was a time in the development of the Manhood of Jesus Christwhen He began to know Himself as the Messias, at that same time Hebegan to be certain of the Cross. For His Messianic work requiredthe Cross, and the divine thing that was in Him was born into theworld for a double purpose, to minister and to die. So, dear friends, putting aside mere metaphysics, which aresuperficial after all, we have to recognise this as the fact, thatall through His career there arose before our Lord the certainty ofthat death, and that it did not assume to Him the aspect which sucha prospect might have assumed to others as a possible result of amission that failed, but it assumed to Him the aspect of the certainresult of a work that was accomplished. He began His career with noillusions, such as other teachers, reformers, philanthropists, menthat have moved society, have always begun with. Moses might'suppose his brethren would have understood how that God by His handwould deliver them, ' but Christ had no such illusion. He knew fromthe beginning that He came to be rejected and to die. And so He'trod life's common way, ' with that grim certainty rising everbefore Him. I suppose that He did not, as you and I do, forget thedeath that awaits us, and find the non-remembrance of it thecondition of much of our energy, but that it was perpetually in Hissight. Now I do not think that we sufficiently dwell upon that fact as anelement in the human experience of our Lord. What beauty it gives toHis gentleness, to the leisureliness of heart with which He was readyto make everybody's sorrow His own, and to lay a healing and a lovingfinger upon every wound! With this certainty before Him, there wasyet no strain manifest upon His spirit, no self-absorption, noshutting Himself out from other people's burdens because He had soheavy ones of His own to carry; but He was ready for every joy, readyfor 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 thatwith solemn joy and untroubled readiness, He journeyed towards thatCross. This Isaac was under no illusions as to who the Lamb for theoffering was, but knowing it, He patiently carried the wood andclimbed the hill, ready for the Father's will. II. That brings me to notice the second point here, our Lord'srecognition of the necessity of His suffering. Mark that He does not say that He _shall_ suffer. Certainty isnot all that He proclaims here, however absolute that certaintymight be, but it is '_He must_. ' He is speaking not only of thehistorical fact, but of the need, deep in the nature of things, forHis sufferings that were to follow. And though these were wrought out by His own willing submission onthe one hand, and by the unfettered play of the evil passions of theworst of men on the other, yet over all that apparent chaos ofunbridled devildom there ruled the unalterable purpose of God; andthe 'must' was wrought out through the passions of evil-doers andthe voluntary submission of the innocent sufferer; thus settingbefore us, in the central fact of the history of humanity, viz. TheCross and passion of Jesus Christ, the eminent example of that greatmystery how the absolute freedom of the human will, and theresponsibility of the guilt of human wrong-doers, are congruous withthe fixed purpose of an all-determining and all-ruling Providence. But that is apart from my purpose. Mark then, that our Lord'srecognition of this necessity for His suffering is, on the first andplainest aspect of it, His recognition that His suffering wasnecessary on the ground of filial obedience. All through His life wehear that 'must' echoing, and His whole spirit bowed to it. As Hesays Himself, 'The Son can do nothing of Himself. ' As was said forHim of old: 'Lo, I come. In the volume of the book it is written ofMe, I delight to do Thy will, and Thy law is within My heart. ' Sothe Father's will is the Son's law; and the Father's 'Thou shalt' isanswered by the Son's 'I must. ' But yet that necessity grounded on filial obedience was no mereexternal necessity determined solely by the divine will. God sowilled it, because it must be so; that it must be so was not becauseGod so willed it. That is to say, the work to which Christ had setHis hand was a work that demanded the Cross, nor could it beaccomplished without it. For it was the work of redeeming the world, and required more than a beautiful life, more than a divinegentleness of heart, more than the homely and yet deep wisdom of Histeachings, it required the sacrifice that He offered on the Cross. So, dear friends, Christ's 'must' is but this: 'My work is notaccomplished except I die. ' And remember that the connection betweenour Lord's work and our Lord's death is not that which subsistsbetween the works and the deaths of great teachers, or heroicmartyrs, or philanthropists and benefactors, who will gladly pay theprice of life in order to carry out their loving or their wisedesigns. It is no mere appendage to His work, nor the price that Hepaid for having done it, but it is His very work in its vitalcentre. I pray you to consider if there is any theory of the meaning and powerof the death of Jesus Christ which adequately explains this 'must, 'except the one that He died a sacrifice for the sins of the world. Onany other hypothesis, as it seems to me, of what His death meant, itis surplusage, over and above His work: not adding much, either to Histeaching or to the beauty of His example, and having no absolutestringent necessity impressed upon it. There is one doctrine--thatwhen He died He bare the sins of the whole world--which makes Hisdeath a necessity; and I ask you, Is there any other doctrine whichdoes? Take care of a Christianity which would not be much impoverishedif the Cross were struck out of it altogether. There is a deeper question, on which, as I believe, it does notbecome us to enter, and that is, What is the necessity for thenecessity? 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 enoughabout the depths of the divine nature and the divine government tospeak very wisely or reverently upon that subject, and I, for one, abjure the attempt, which seems to me to be presumptuous--theattempt to explain why there was needed a sacrifice for sin in orderto the forgiveness of sin. If I knew all about God, I could tellyou; and nobody, that does not, can. But we can see, as far asconcerns us, that, as the history of all religions tells us, for theforgiveness and acceptance of sinful men a pure sacrifice is needed;and that for teaching us the love of God, the hideousness and wagesof sin, for our emancipation from evil, for the quieting of ourconsciences, for a foothold for faith, for an adequate motive ofself-surrender and obedience, his sacrificial death is needful. Thelife and death of Jesus Christ, regarded as God's sacrifice for theworld's sin, _does_ all this. The life and death of JesusChrist, regarded in any other aspect, does not do this. Historicallyspeaking, mutilated forms of Christianity, which have not known whatto do with the Cross of Christ, have lost their constraining, purifying, and aggressive power. For us sinful men, if we are to bedelivered from evil and become sons of God, He _must_ suffermany things, and be killed, and rise again the third day. III. Now note further, how we have here also our Lord's willingacceptance 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. Nodoubt there was in Him the innocent instinctive physical shrinkingfrom death. No doubt the Cross, in so far, was pain and suffering. Nodoubt we are to trace the reality of a temptation in Peter's rash wordswhich follow, as indicated to us by the severity and almost vehemenceof the action with which Christ puts it away. No doubt there is aprofound meaning in that answer of His, 'Thou art a _stumbling-block_to Me. ' The 'Rock' is turned into a stone of stumbling, and Peter'ssuggestion appeals to something in Him which responded to it. That shrinking might be a shrinking of nature, but it was not arecoil of will. The ship may toss in dreadful billows, but theneedle points to the pole. The train may rock upon the line, but itnever leaves the rails. Christ felt that the Cross was an evil, butthat feeling never made Him falter in His determination to bear it. His willing acceptance of the necessity was owing to His fullresolve to save the world. He must die because He would redeem, andHe would redeem because He could not but love. 'He saved others, 'and therefore 'Himself He cannot save. ' So the 'must' was not aniron chain that fastened Him to His Cross. Like some of the heroicmartyrs of old, who refused to be bound to the funeral pile, Hestood there chained to it by nothing but His own will and lovingpurpose to save the world. And, brethren, in that loving purpose, each of us may be sure thatwe had an individual and a personal share. Whatever the interactionbetween the divinity and the humanity, this at all events iscertain, that every soul of man has his distinct and definite placein Christ's knowledge and in Christ's love. Each of us all may besure that one strand of the cords of love which fastened Him to theCross 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 Hisdeath. This announcement was preceded, as I remarked, by that conversationwhich led to the crystallising of the half-formed convictions of theapostles in a definite creed, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of theliving God. ' But that was not all that they needed to know andbelieve and trust to. That was the first volume of their lesson-book. The second volume was this, that 'Christ must suffer. ' And so let uslearn the central place which the Cross holds in Christ's teaching. They tell us that the doctrine of Christ as the Sacrifice for theworld is not in the Gospels. Where are the eyes that read the Gospelsand do not see it? The theory of it is not there; the announcementsof it are. And in this latest section of our Lord's ministry, theyare fuller and more frequent than in the earlier, for the plainreason which is implied by the preparation through which He passedthese disciples, ere He ventured to communicate the mournful and thebewildering fact. There must be, first, the grasp of His Messiahship, and some recognition that He is the Son of God, ere it is possibleto go on to speak of the Cross, the full message concerning whichcould not be spoken until after the Resurrection and the Ascension. But note, you do not understand Christ's Cross unless you bring toit the faith in Christ's Messiahship and the belief in some measurethat He is the Son of God. Neither the pathos nor the power of Hisdeath is intelligible if it be simply like other deaths--the dyingof a man who is born subject to the law of mortality, and who yieldsto it by natural process. Unless you and I take upon our lips, though with far deeper meaning, the words with which the heathencenturion gazed upon the dying Christ, and say, 'Truly this was theSon of God!' His Cross is common and trivial and insignificant; butif we can thus speak, then it stands before us as the crown of allGod's manifestations in the world, ' the wisdom of God and the powerof God. ' And then note, still further, how, without the Cross, these othertruths are not the whole gospel. There were disciples then, as therehave been disciples since, and as there are to-day, who were willingto 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 ofMan must suffer. ' Brethren, I venture to urge that the gospel of theIncarnation, precious as it is, is not the whole gospel, and thatthe 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, ourPriest and King. We need a whole Christ. For our soul's salvation, for the quietingof our consciences, the forgiveness of our sins, for new life, forpeace, purity, obedience, love, joy, hope, our faith must grasp'Christ, and Him crucified. ' A half Christ is no Christ, and unlesswe have as sinful men laid hold of the one Sacrifice for sins forever, which He offered, we do not understand even the preciousnessof the half Christ whom we perceive, nor know the full beauty of Hisexample, the depth of His teaching, nor the tenderness of His heart. I beseech you, ask yourselves, _What_ Christ can do for me thethings 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 begiven up as untenable. Some one of the many peaks of Hermon risingright over Caesarea is a far more likely place. But the silence ofall the accounts as to the locality surely teaches us theunimportance of knowledge on the point. The dangers of knowing wouldmore than outweigh the advantages. A similar indefiniteness attachesto the _when_. Are we to think of it as occurring by night, orby day? Perhaps the former is slightly the more probable, from thefact of the descent being made 'the next day' (Luke). Our conceptionof the scene will be very different, as we think of that lustre fromHis face, and that bright cloud, as outshining the blaze of a Syriansun, or as filling the night with glory. But we cannot settle whichview is correct. There are three distinct parts in the whole incident: theTransfiguration proper; the appearance of Moses and Elijah; and thecloud with the voice from it. I. The Transfiguration proper. The general statement that Jesus 'was transfigured before them' isimmediately followed out into explanatory details. These aretwofold--the radiance of His face, and the gleaming whiteness of Hisraiment, which shone like the snow on Hermon when it is smitten bythe sunshine. Probably we are to think of the whole body as givingforth the same mysterious light, which made itself visible eventhrough the white robe He wore. This would give beautiful accuracy andappropriateness to the distinction drawn in the two metaphors, --thatHis face was 'as the sun, ' in which the undiluted glory was seen; andHis garments 'as the light, ' which is sunshine diffused and weakened. There is no hint of any external source of the brightness. It does notseem to have been a reflection from the visible symbol of the divinepresence, as was the fading radiance on the face of Moses. That symboldoes not come into view till the last stage of the incident. We arethen to think of the brightness as rising from within, not cast fromwithout. We cannot tell whether it was voluntary or involuntary. Lukegives a pregnant hint, in connecting it with Christ's praying, as ifthe calm ecstasy of communion with the Father brought to the surfacethe hidden glory of the Son. Can it be that such glory alwaysaccompanied His prayers, and that its presence may have been onereason for the sedulous privacy of these, except on this one occasion, when He desired that His faithful three should be 'eye-witnesses ofHis majesty'? However that may be, we have probably to regard theTransfiguration as the transient making visible, in the natural, symbolic form of light, of the indwelling divine glory, which dweltin 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 hesays, 'We beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from theFather. ' What was the purpose of the Transfiguration? Matthew seems to tellus in that 'before them. ' It was for their sakes, not for His, asindeed follows from the belief that it was the irradiation fromwithin of the indwelling light. The new epoch of His life, in whichthey were to have a share of trial and cross-bearing, needed somegreat encouragement poured into their tremulous hearts; and so, foronce, 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 astep farther, and see here some prophecy of that body of His gloryin which He now reigns. Speculations as to the difference betweenthe earthly body of our Lord and ours are fascinating butunsubstantial. It was a true human body, susceptible of hunger, pain, weariness; but we are not taught that it carried in it thenecessity of death. It may have been more pliable to the spirit'sbehests, and more transparent to its light, than ours. There mayhave been in that hour of radiance some approximation to the perfectharmony between the perfect spirit and the body, which is its fitorgan, which we know is His now, and to which we also know that Hewill conform the body of our humiliation. Then His face 'shone asthe sun'; when one of these three saw Him in His glory, 'Hiscountenance was as the sun shineth in his strength'; and His ownpromise to us is that we too 'shall shine forth as the sun. ' ThenHis garments were white as the light; His promise is that they whoare worthy shall 'walk with Him in white. ' The Transfiguration was arevelation and a prophecy. II. The appearance of Moses and Elijah. While the three are gazing with dazzled eyes, suddenly, as if shapedout 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 ofawe and wonder must have touched the gazers as the conviction whothese were filled their minds, and they recognised, we know not how, the mighty lineaments of the lawgiver and the prophet! Did the threemortals understand the meaning of the words of the heavenly three?We cannot tell. Nor does Matthew tell us what was the theme of thatwondrous colloquy. These two might have asked, 'Why hast Thoudisquieted us to bring us up?' What is the answer? Wherefore werethey there? To tell Jesus that He was to die? No, for that lay plainbefore Him. To learn from Him the mystery of His passion, that theymight be His heralds, the one in Paradise, the other in the palekingdoms of Hades? Perhaps, but, more probably, they came tominister to Him strength for His conflict, even as women did oftheir substance, and an angel did in Gethsemane. Perhaps thestrength came to Jesus from seeing how they yearned for thefulfilment of the typified redemption; perhaps it came from Hisbeing able to speak to them as He could not to any on earth. At allevents, surely Moses and Elijah were not brought there for their ownsakes alone, nor for the sake of the witnesses, but also for Hissake who was prepared by that converse for His cross. Further, their appearance set forth Christ's death, which was theirtheme, as the climax of revelation. The Law with its requirement andits sacrifices, and Prophecy with its forward-looking gaze, standthere, in their representatives, and bear witness that theirconverging lines meet in Jesus. The finger that wrote the law, andthe finger that smote and parted Jordan, are each lifted to point toHim. The stern voices that spoke the commandments and that hurledthreatenings at the unworthy occupants of David's throne, bothproclaim, 'Behold the Lamb of God, the perfect Fulfiller of law, thetrue King of Israel. ' Their presence and their speech were theacknowledgment that this was He whom they had seen from afar; theirdisappearance proclaims that their work is done when they havepointed to Him. Their presence also teaches us that Jesus is the life of all theliving dead. Of course, care must be exercised in drawing dogmaticconclusions from a manifestly abnormal incident, but some plaintruths do result from it. Of these two, one had died, though mysteryhung round his death and burial; the other had passed into theheavens by another gate than that of death; and here they both standwith lives undiminished by their mysterious changes, in fulness ofpower and of consciousness, bathed in glory, which was as theirnative air now. They are witnesses of an immortal life, and proofsthat His yet unpierced hands held the keys of life and death. Heopened the gate which moves backwards to no hand but His, andsummoned them; and they come, with no napkins about their heads, andno trailing grave-clothes entangling their feet, and own Him as theKing of life. They speak too of the eager onward gaze which the Old Testamentbelievers 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 livedexpectant and crying, like the souls under the altar, 'How long, OLord, how long?' Now these two are brought from their hopefulrepose, perchance to learn how near their deliverance was; andbehind them we seem to discern a dim crowd of holy men and women, who had died in faith, not having received the promises, and whothrong the portals of the unseen world, waiting for the near adventof 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, andthat to do something will relieve the tension of his spirit. Hisproposal, so ridiculous as it is, shows that he had not reallyunderstood what he saw. It also expresses his feeling that it ismuch better to be there than to be travelling to a cross--and so maystand as an instance of a very real temptation for us all, that ofavoiding unwelcome duties and shrinking from rough work, on the pleaof holding sweet communion with Jesus on the mountain. It was_not_ 'good' to stay there, and leave demoniacs uncured in theplain. III. The cloud and the witnessing voice. Peter's words receive no answer, for, while he is speaking, anothersolemn and silencing wonder has place. Suddenly a strange cloudforms in the cloudless sky. It is 'bright' with no reflection caughtfrom the sun; it is borne along by no wind; slowly it settles downupon them, like a roof, and, bright though it is, casts a strangeshadow. According to one reading of Luke's account, Christ and thetwo heavenly witnesses pass within its folds, leaving the discipleswithout, and that separation seems confirmed by Matthew's sayingthat the voice 'came out of the cloud. ' Our evangelist points to itsbrightness as singular. It was not merely bright, as if smitten bythe sunlight, but its whole substance was luminous. It is almost acontradiction to speak of a cloud of light, and the anomalousexpression points to something beyond nature. We cannot but rememberthe pillar which had a heart of fire, and glowed in the darknessover the sleeping camp, and the cloud which filled the house, anddrove the priests from the sanctuary by its brightness. Nor shouldwe forget that at His Ascension Jesus was not lost to sight in theblue; but while He was yet visible in the act of blessing, 'a cloudreceived Him out of their sight. ' It is, in fact, the familiarsymbol of the divine presence, which had long been absent from thetemple, and now reappears. We may note the beauty and felicity ofthe emblem. It blends light and darkness, so suggesting how the verysame 'attributes' of God are both; and how His revelation of Himselfreveals Him as unrevealable. The manifestation of His power is alsothe 'hiding of His power. ' The inaccessible light is also thickdarkness. The same characteristics of His nature are light and joyto 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 behid in its fiery heart, unshrinking and unconsumed. 'Who among usshall dwell with everlasting burnings? His entrance into it is butthe witness to the purity of His nature, and the absence in Him ofall fuel for fire. That bright cloud was 'His own calm home, Hishabitation from eternity, ' and where no man, compassed with fleshand sin, could live, He enters as the Son into the bosom of theFather. Then comes the articulate witness to the Son. The solemnity andforce of the attestation are increased, if we conceive of thedisciples as outside the cloud, and parted from Jesus. This word ismeant for them only, and so is distinguished from the similar voiceat the baptism, and has added the imperative 'Hear him. ' The voicebears witness to the mystery of our Lord's person. It points to thecontrast 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 tothe unbroken union of love between the Father and Him, and thereinto the absolute perfection of our Lord's character. He is theadequate object of the eternal, divine love. As He has been from thetimeless depths of old, He is, in His human life, the object of theever-unruffled divine complacency, in whom the Father can glassHimself as in a pure mirror. It enjoins obedient listening. God'svoice bids us hear Christ's voice. If He is the beloved Son, listening to Him is listening to God. This is the purpose of thewhole, so far as we are concerned. We are to hear Him, when Hedeclares God; when He witnesses of Himself, of His love, His work, His death, His judgeship; when He invites us to come to Him, andfind rest; when He commands and when He promises. Amid the Babel ofthis day, let us listen to that voice, low and gentle, pleading andsoft, authoritative, majestic, and sovereign. It will one day shake'not the earth only, but also the heaven. ' But, as yet, it calls uswith strange sweetness, and the music of love in every tone. Wellfor us if our hearts answer, 'Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth. ' Matthew tells us that this voice from the cloud completely unmannedthe disciples, who fell on their faces, and lay there, we know nothow long, till Jesus came and laid a loving hand on them, biddingthem arise, and not fear. So when they staggered to their feet, andlooked around, they saw nothing but the grey stones of the hillsideand the blue sky. 'That dread voice was past, ' and the silence wasbroken only by the hum of insects or the twitter of a far-off bird. The strange guests have gone; the radiance has faded from theMaster's face, and all is as it used to be. 'They saw no one, saveJesus only. ' It is the summing up of revelation; all others vanish, He abides. It is the summing up of the world's history. Thickeningfolds of oblivion wrap the past, and all its mighty names becomeforgotten; but His figure stands out, solitary against thebackground of the past, as some great mountain, which travellers seelong after the lower summits are sunk beneath the horizon. Let usmake this the summing up of our lives. We can venture to take Himfor our sole helper, pattern, love, and aim, because He, in Hissingleness, is enough for our hearts. There are many fragmentaryprecious things, but there is only one pearl of great price. Andthen this will be a prophecy of our deaths--a brief darkness, apassing dread, and then His touch and His voice saying, 'Arise, benot afraid. ' So we shall lift up our eyes, and find earth faded, andits 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 thempower against unclean spirits to cast them out. ' That same power wasbestowed, too, on the wider circle of the seventy who returned againwith joy, saying, 'Lord, even the devils are subject unto us throughThy name. ' The ground of it was laid in the solemn words with whichChrist met their wonder at their own strength, and told how He'beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. ' Therefore had theytriumphed, showing the fruits of their Master's victory; andtherefore had He a right to renew the gift, in the still morecomprehensive promise, 'I give unto you power--over all the power ofthe enemy. ' What a commentary on such words this story affords! What has becomeof the disciples' supernatural might? Has it ebbed away as suddenlyas it flowed? Is their Lord's endowment a shadow or His assurancesdelusion? Has He taken back what He gave? Not so. And yet Hisservants are ignominiously beaten. One poor devil-ridden boy bringsall their resources to nothing. He stands before them writhing inthe gripe of his tormentor, but they cannot set him free. Theimportunity of the father's prayers is vain, and the tension ofexpectancy in his eager face relaxes into the old hopeless languoras he slowly droops to the conviction that 'they could not cast himout. ' The malicious scorn in the eyes of the Scribes, those hostilecritics who 'knew that it would be so, ' helps to produce the failurewhich they anticipated. The curious crowd buzz about them, and inthe midst of it all stand the little knot of baffled disciples, possessors of power which seems to leave them when they need itmost, with the unavailing spells dying half spoken on their lips, and their faint hearts longing that their Master would come downfrom the mount, and cover their weakness with His own greatstrength. No wonder that, as soon as Christ and they are alone, they wish toknow how their mortifying defeat has come about. And they get ananswer which they little expected, for the last place where men lookfor the explanation of their failures is within; but they willascend into the heavens, and descend into the deeps for remote andrecondite reasons, before they listen to the voice which says, 'Thefault is nigh thee, in thy heart. ' Christ's reply distinctly impliesthat the cause of their impotence lay wholly in themselves, not inany defect or withdrawal of power, but solely in that in them whichgrasped the power. They little expected, too, to be told that theyhad failed because they had not been sure they would succeed. Theyhad thought that they believed in their ability to cast out thedemon. They had tried to do so, with some kind of anticipation thatthey could. They had been surprised when they found that they couldnot. They had wonderingly asked why. And now Christ tells them thatall along they had had no real faith in Him and in the reality ofHis gift. So subtly may unbelief steal into the heart, even while wefancy that we are working in faith. And a further portion of ourLord's reply points them to the great means by which this conqueringfaith can be maintained--namely, prayer and fasting. If, then, weput all these things together, we get a series of considerations, very simple and commonplace indeed, but all the better and truertherefor, which I venture to submit to you, as having a veryimportant bearing on all our Christian work, and especially on themissionary work of the Church. The principles which the textsuggests 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 askyour attention to a few considerations on these points in theirorder. But first, let me say very briefly, that I would not be understoodas, by the selection of such a text, desiring to suggest that wehave failed in our work. Thank God! we can point to results far, fargreater than we have deserved, far greater than we have expected, however they may be beneath our desires, and still further belowwhat the gospel was meant to accomplish. It may suit observers whohave never done anything themselves, and have not particularly cleareyes for appreciating spiritual work, to talk of Christian missionsas failures; but it would ill become us to assent to the lie. Failures indeed! with half a million of converts, with new forms ofChristian life budding in all the wilderness of the peoples, withthe consciousness of coming doom creeping about the heart of everysystem of idolatry! Is the green life in the hedges and in the sweetpastures starred with rathe primroses, and in the hidden copses bluewith hyacinths, a failure, because the east wind bites shrewdly, and'the tender ash delays to clothe herself with green'? No! no, wehave not failed. Enough has been done to vindicate the enterprise, more than enough to fill our lips with thanksgiving, enough toentitle us to say to all would-be critics--Do you the same with yourenchantments. But, on the other hand, we have to confess that thesuccess has been slow and small, chequered and interrupted, thatoften we have been foiled, that we have confronted many a demon whomwe could not cast out, and that at home and abroad the masses ofevil seem to close in around us, and we make but little impressionon their serried ranks. We have had success enough to assure us thatwe possess the treasure, and failures enough to make us feel howweak 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 suggesteditself to these disciples would be that somehow or other--perhapsbecause of Christ's absence--they had lost the gift which they knewthat they once had. And the same way of accounting for later want ofsuccess lingers among Christian people still. You will sometimes hearit said: 'God sends forth His Spirit in special fulness at specialtimes, according to His own sovereign will; and till then we can onlywait and pray. ' Or, 'The miraculous powers which dwelt in the earlyChurch have been withdrawn, and therefore the progress is slow. ' Thestrong imaginative tendency to make an ideal perfect in the pastleads us to think of the primitive age of the Church as golden, inopposition to the plain facts of the case. We fancy that becauseapostles were its teachers, and the Cross within its memory, theinfant society was stronger, wiser, better than any age since, and hadgifts which we have lost. What had it which we do not possess? Thepower of working miracles. What have we which it did not possess? Acompleted Bible, and the experience of nineteen centuries to teach usto understand it, and to confirm by facts our confidence that Christ'sgospel 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, thesame gospel, the same spirit, the same immortal Lord. All that any agehas possessed to fit it for the task of witnessing for Christ we toopossess. The Church has in it a power which is ever adequate to theconquest of the world; and that power is constant through all time, whether we consider it as recorded in an unvarying gospel, or asenergised by an abiding spirit, or as flowing from and centred in anunchangeable Lord. We have a gospel which never can grow old. Its adaptation to thedeepest needs of men's souls remains constant with these needs. These vary not from age to age. No matter what may be the superficialdifferences of dress, the same human heart beats beneath every robe. The great primal wants of men's spirits abide, as the great primalwants of their bodily life abide. Food and shelter for the one, --aloving, pardoning God, to know and love, for the other--else theyperish. Wherever men go they carry with them a conscience which needscleansing, a sense of separation from God joined with a dim knowledgethat union with Him is life, a will which is burdened with its ownselfhood, an imagination which paints the misty walls of this earthlyprison with awful shapes that terrify and faint hopes that mock, aheart that hungers for love, and a reason which pines in atrophywithout light. And all these the gospel which is lodged in our handsmeets. 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 universalwants. People tell us it has done its work, and much confident dogmatismproclaims that the world has outgrown it. We have a right to beconfident also, with a confidence born of our knowledge, that it hasmet and satisfied for us the wants which are ours and every man's, andto believe that as long as men live by bread, so long will this wordwhich proceedeth out of the mouth of God be the food of their souls. Areopagus and Piccadilly, Benares and Oxford, need the same messageand will find the same response to all their wants in the same word. Many of the institutions in which Christendom has embodied itsconceptions of God's truth will crumble away. Many of theconceptions will have to be modified, neglected truths will grow, tothe dislocation of much systematic theology, and the Word betterunderstood will clear away many a portentous error with which theChurch has darkened the Word. Be it so. Let us be glad when 'thethings which can be shaken are removed, ' like mean huts builtagainst the wall of some cathedral, masking and marring thecompleteness of its beauty; 'that the things which cannot be shakenmay remain, ' and all the clustered shafts, and deep-arched recesses, and sweet tracery may stand forth freed from the excrescences whichhid them. 'The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away. But theword of the Lord endureth for ever. ' We have an abiding Spirit, the Giver to us of a power withoutvariableness or the shadow of turning, 'I will pray the Father, andHe shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you forever. ' The manner of His operations may vary, but the reality of Hisenergy abides. The 'works' of wonder which Jesus did on earth may nomore 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 giftsare poured out now as richly as ever. We are apt to look back toPentecost and think that that marked a height to which the tide hasnever reached since, and therefore we are stranded amidst the oozeand mud. But the river which proceeds from the throne of God and ofthe Lamb is not like one of our streams on earth, that leaps to thelight and dashes rejoicingly down the hillside, but creeps alongsluggish in its level course, and dies away at last in the sands. Itpours along the ages the same full volume with which it gushed forthat first. Rather, the source goes with the Church in all ages, andwe drink not of water that came forth long ago in the history of theworld, and has reached us through the centuries, but of that whichwells out fresh every moment from the Rock that follows us. TheGiver of all power is with us. We have a Lord, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. 'Lo, Iam with you alway, even to the end of the world. ' We have not merelyto look back to the life and death of Christ in history, andrecognise there the work, the efficacy of which shall endure forever. 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 alsomaketh intercession for us. ' And the one thought, as the other, should strengthen our confidence in our possession of all the mightthat we need for bringing the world back to our Lord. A work in the past which can never be exhausted or lose its power isthe theme of our message. The mists of gathering ages wrap in slowlythickening folds of forgetfulness all other men and events inhistory, and make them ghostlike and shadowy; but no distance hasyet dimmed or will ever dim that human form divine. Other names arelike those stars that blaze out for a while, and then smoulder downinto almost complete invisibility; but He is the very Light itself, that burns and is not consumed. Other landmarks sink below thehorizon as the tribes of men pursue their solemn march through thecenturies, but the Cross on Calvary 'shall stand for an ensign ofthe people, and to it shall the Gentiles seek. ' To proclaim thataccomplished salvation, once for all lodged in the heart of theworld's history, and henceforth for ever valid, is our unalterableduty. The message carries in itself its own immortal strength. A living Saviour in the present, who works with us, confirming theword with signs following, is the source of our power. Not till He isimpotent shall we be weak. The unmeasurable measure of the gift ofChrist defines the degree, and the unending duration of His life whocontinueth for ever sets the period, of our possession of the gracewhich is given to every one of us. He is ever bestowing. He neverwithdraws what He once gives. The fountain sinks not a hairs-breadth, though nineteen centuries have drawn from it. Modern astronomy beginsto believe that the sun itself by long expense of light will be shornof its beams and wander darkling in space, circled no more by itsdaughter planets. But this Sun of our souls rays out for ever theenergies of life and light and love, and after all communicationpossesses the infinite fulness of them all. 'His name shall becontinued as long as the sun; all nations shall call Him blessed. ' Here then, brethren, are the perpetual elements of our constantpower, 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 themountains and break the rocks--how come we ever to fail? So thedisciples asked, and Christ's answer cuts to the very heart of thematter. Why could you not cast him out? For one reason only, becauseyou had lost your hold of My strength, and therefore had lost yourconfidence in your own derived power, or had forgotten that it wasderived, and essayed to wield it as if it were your own. You did nottrust Me, so you did not believe that you could cast him out; or youbelieved that you could by your own might, therefore you failed. Hethrows them back decisively on themselves as solely responsible. Nowhere else, in heaven or in earth or hell, but only in us, doesthe reason lie for our breakdown, if we have broken down. Not inGod, 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 knowledgeof the truth; not in the gospel which we preach, for 'it is thepower of God unto salvation'; not in the demon might which hasovercome us, for 'greater is He that is in us than he that is in theworld. ' We are driven from all other explanations to the bitterestand 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 ofworking; they have not been free enough, or not orderly enough, orin some way or other not wisely adapted to our ends. Some willanswer--Our forms of presenting the truth; they have not beenflexible enough, or not fixed enough; they have been too much areproduction of the old; they have been too licentious a departurefrom the old. Some will answer--Our ecclesiastical arrangements;they have been too democratic; they have been too priestly. Somewill 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 orderedsystems of idolatry which rest upon a philosophical basis, and canonly be overturned by undermining that. It is no part of my presentduty to discuss these varying answers. No doubt there is room forimprovement in all the fields which they indicate. But does not thespirit of our Lord's words here beckon us away from these purelysecondary subjects to fix our self-examination on the depth andstrength of our faith, as incomparably the most important element inthe conditions which determine our success or our failure? I do notundervalue the worth of wise methods of action, but the history ofthe Church tells us that pretty nearly any methods of action arefruitful in the right hands, and that without living faith the bestof them become like the heavy armour which half-smothered a feebleman. I do not pretend to that sublime indifference to dogma which isthe modern form of supreme devotion to truth, but experience hastaught us that wherever the name of Christ, as the Saviour of theworld, has been lovingly proclaimed, there devils have been castout, whatever private and sectional doctrines the exerciser hasadded to it. I do not disparage organisation, but courage is morethan drill; and there is such a thing as the very perfection ofarrangement without life, like cabinets in a museum, where all thespecimens are duly classified, and dead. I believe, with the oldpreacher, that if God does not need our learning, He needs ourignorance still less, but it is of comparatively little importancewhether the draught of living water be brought to thirsty lips in anearthen 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 inthese subordinate conditions, let me urge upon you that the mainthing which makes us strong for our Christian work is the grasp ofliving faith, which holds fast the strength of God. There is no needto plunge into the jungle of metaphysical theology here. Is it not afact that the might with which the power of God has wrought formen's salvation has corresponded with the strength of the Church'sdesire and the purity of its trust in His power? Is it not a truthplainly spoken in Scripture and confirmed by experience, that wehave the awful prerogative of limiting the Holy One of Israel, andquenching the Spirit? Was there not a time in Christ's life on earthwhen He could do no mighty works because of their unbelief? Wereceive all spiritual gifts in proportion to our capacity, and thechief 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 andcalm, in all its movement never troubled, in all its repose neverstagnating; and on the other side is the empty aridity of our poorweak 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 nolimit 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 eachmoment it is the measure of our possession, and our faith is themeasure of our capacity. Our power is God's power in us, and ourfaith 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 beingstrengthened with might by His Spirit. Consider, too, how the same faith has a natural operation on ourselveswhich tends to fit us for casting out the evil spirits. Given a manfull of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed inone grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has beendriven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred intounwearied energy. Such a man will be made wise to devise, gentle toattract, bold to rebuke, fertile in expedients, and ready to beanything 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 cutinto the quivering flesh, and the spirit be scarce conscious of a pang. Love, ambition, and all the swarm of distracting desires will bedriven from the soul in which the lamp of faith burns bright. Ordinaryhuman motives will appeal in vain to the ears which have heard thetones of the heavenly music, and all the pomps of life will show poorand tawdry to the sight that has gazed on the vision of the greatwhite throne and the crystal sea. The most ignorant and erroneous'religious sentiment'--to use a modern phrase--is mightier than allother forces in the world's history. It is like some of those terriblecompounds of modern chemistry, an inert, innocuous-looking drop ofliquid. Shake it, and it flames heaven high, shattering the rocks andploughing up the soil. Put even an adulterated and carnalised faithinto the hearts of a mob of wild Arabs, and in a century they willstream from their deserts, and blaze from the mountains of Spain tothe plains of Bengal. Put a living faith in Christ and a heroicconfidence in the power of His Gospel to reclaim the worst sinnersinto a man's heart, and he will out of weakness be made strong, andplough his way through obstacles with the compact force and crashingdirectness of lightning. There have been men of all sorts who havebeen honoured to do much in this world for Christ. Wise and foolish, learned and ignorant, differing in tone, temper, creed, forms ofthought, and manner of working, in every conceivable degree; but onething, and perhaps one thing only, they have all had--a passion ofenthusiastic personal devotion to their Lord, a profound and livingfaith in Him and in His salvation. All in which they differed is butthe gay gilding on the soldier's coat. That in which they were alikeis as the strong arm which grasps the sword, and has its musclesbraced by the very clutch. Faith is itself a source of strength, aswell as the condition of drawing might from heaven. Consider, too, how faith has power over men who see it. Theexhibition of our own personal convictions has more to do inspreading them than all the arguments which we use. There is amagnetism and a contagious energy in the sight of a brother's faithwhich few men can wholly resist. If you wish me to weep, your owntears must flow; and if you would have me believe, let me see yoursoul heaving under the emotion which you desire me to feel. Thearrow may be keen and true, the shaft rounded and straight, the bowstrong, and the arm sinewy; but unless the steel be winged it willfall to the ground long before it strikes the butt. Your arrows mustbe winged with faith, else orthodoxy, and wise arrangements, andforce and zeal, will avail nothing. No man will believe in, and nodemon will obey, spells which the would-be exorcist only halfbelieves himself. Even if he speak the name of Christ, unless hespeak it with unfaltering confidence, all the answer he will getwill only be the fierce and taunting question, 'Jesus I know, andPaul I know, but who are ye?' Brethren, let us give heed to thesolemn rebuke which our Master lovingly reads to us in these words, and while we aim at the utmost possible perfection in allsubordinate matters, let us remember that they all without faith areweak, 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 Lordis our faith. III. Our faith is ever threatened by subtle unbelief. It would appear that the disciples were ignorant of the unbeliefthat had made them weak. They fancied that they had confidence intheir Christ-given power, and they certainly had in some dull kindof fashion expected to succeed in their attempt. But He who sees theheart 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 isfor us to have our faith all honeycombed by gnawing doubt while wesuspect it not, like some piece of wood apparently sound, the wholesubstance of which has been eaten away by hidden worms. We may begoing on with Christian work, and may even be looking for spiritualresults. We may fancy ourselves faithful stewards of the gospel, andall the while there may be an utter absence of the one thing whichmakes our words more than so much wind whistling through an archway. The shorn Samson went out 'to shake himself as at other times, ' andknew not that the Spirit of the Lord had departed from him. Whoamong us is not exposed to the assaults of that pestilence thatwalketh in darkness? and, alas! who among us can say that he hasrepelled the contagion? Subtly it creeps over us all, the stealthyintangible vapour, unfelt till it has quenched the lamp which alonelights the darkness of the mine, and clogged to suffocation thelabouring 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 asfriction, as certain as the gravitation which pulls the pendulum torest at its lowest point. But I may very briefly particularise twoof the enemies of that faith, which have a special bearing on ourmissionary work, and may be illustrated from the narrative beforeus. First, all our activity in spreading the Gospel, whether by personaleffort or by our gifts, like every form of outward action, tends tobecome mechanical, and to lose its connection with the motive whichoriginated it. Of course it is also true, on the other side, thatall outward action also tends to strengthen the motive from which itflows. But our Christian work will not do so, unless it be carefullywatched, and pains be taken to keep it from slipping off itsoriginal foundation, and so altering its whole character. We mayvery easily become so occupied with the mere external occupation asto be quite unconscious that it has ceased to be faithful work, andhas become routine, dull mechanism, or the result of confidence, notin Christ, whose power once flowed through us, but in ourselves thedoers. So these disciples may have thought, 'We can cast out thisdevil, for we have done the like already, ' and have forgotten thatit was not they, but Christ in them, who had done it. How widely this foe to our faith operates amid the multipliedactivities of this busy age, one trembles to think. We see allaround us a Church toiling with unexampled expenditure of wealth, and effort, and time. It is difficult to repress the suspicion thatthe work is out of proportion to the life. Ah, brethren, how much ofall this energy of effort, so admirable in many respects, will Hewhose fan is in His hand accept as true service--how much of it willbe wheat for the garner, how much chaff for the fire? It is not forus to divide between the two, but it is for us to remember that itis not impossible to make of our labours the most dangerous enemy tothe depth of our still life hidden with Christ in God, and thatevery deed of apparent service which is not the real issue of livingfaith is powerless for good to others, and heavy with hurt toourselves. Brethren and fathers in the ministry! how many of us knowwhat it is to talk and toil away our early devotion; and all at onceto discover that for years perhaps we have been preaching andlabouring from mere habit and routine, like corpses galvanised intosome ghastly and transient caricature of life. Christian men andwomen, beware lest this great enterprise of missions, which ourfathers began from the holiest motives and in the simplest faith, should in our hand be wrenched away from its only true basis, and bedone with languid expectation and more languid desires of success, from no higher motive than that we found it in existence, and havebecome accustomed to carry it on. If that be our reason, then weharm ourselves, and mask from our own sight our own unbelief. Ifthat be the case the work may go on for a while, like a clockticking with fainter and fainter beats for a minute after it has rundown; but it will soon cease, and neither heaven nor earth will bemuch the poorer for its ending. Again, the atmosphere of scornful disbelief which surrounded thedisciples made their faith falter. It was too weak to sustain itselfin the face of the consciousness that not a man in all that crowdbelieved in their power; and it melted away before the contempt ofthe scribes and the incredulous curiosity of the bystanders, withoutany reason except the subtle influence which the opinions andcharacters of those around us have on us all. And, brethren, are not we in danger to-day of losing the firmness ofour grasp on Christ, as our Saviour and the world's, from aprecisely similar cause? We live in an atmosphere of hesitancy anddoubt, of scornful rejection of His claims, of contemptuousdisbelief in anything which a scalpel cannot cut. We cannot but beconscious that to hold by Jesus Christ as the Incarnate God, thesupernatural Beginning of a new life, the sole Hope of the world, isto expose ourselves to the contempt of so-called advanced andliberal thinkers, and to be out of harmony with the prevailing setof opinions. The current of educated thought runs strongly againstsuch beliefs, and I suppose that every thoughtful man among us feelsthat a great danger to our faith to-day comes from the force withwhich that current swings us round, and threatens to make some of usdrag our anchors, and drift, and strike and go to pieces on thesands. For one man who is led by the sheer force of reason to yieldto the intellectual grounds on which modern unbelief reposes, thereare twenty who simply catch the infection in the atmosphere. Theyfind that their early convictions have evaporated, they know nothow; 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 ofits grounds, as the iceberg chills the summer air for leagues, andmakes the sailors shiver long before they see its barren peaks. Therefore, brethren, let us all take heed to ourselves, lest wesuffer our grasp of our dear Lord's hand to relax for no betterreason than because so many have left His side. To us all Hispleading love, which knows how much we are moulded by the example ofothers, is saying, in view of the fashion of unbelief, 'Will ye alsogo away?' Let us answer, with a clasp that clings the tighter forour danger of being sucked in by the strong current, 'Lord, to whomshall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. ' We cannot helpseeing that the creeping paralysis of hesitancy and doubt about eventhe power of Christ's name is stealing over portions of the Church, and stiffening the arm of its activity. Lips that once spoke withfull confidence the words that cast out devils, mutter them nowlanguidly with half-belief. Hearts that were once full of sympathywith the great purpose for which Christ died are growing cold to thework of preaching the Gospel to the heathen, because they aregrowing to doubt whether, after all, there is any Gospel at all. This icy breath, dear brethren, is blowing over our Churches andover our hearts. And wherever it reaches, there labour for Jesus andfor men languishes, and we recoil baffled with unavailing exorcismsdying 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 rigidself-denial. I can touch but very lightly on that solemn thought in which our Lordsets forth the condition of our faith, and therefore of our power. This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting. The disciplinethen which nurtures faith is mainly moral and spiritual--not as asubstitute 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 constantdevotion. The attrition of the world wears it thin, the distractionsof life draw it from its clinging hold on Christ, the very toil forHim is apt to entice our thoughts from out of the secret place ofthe most High into the busy arena of our strife. Therefore we haveever need to refresh the drooping flowers of the chaplet by bathingthem in the Fountain of Life, to rise above all the fevered toil ofearth to the calm heights where God dwells, and in still communionwith Him to replenish our emptied vessels and fill our dimly burninglamps with His golden oil. The sister of the cumbered Martha is thecontemplative Mary, who sits in silence at the Master's feet andlets His words sink into her soul; the closest friend of Peter theapostle of action is John the apostle of love. If our work is to beworthy, it must ever be freshened anew by our gaze into His face; ifour communion with Him is to be deep, it must never be parted fromoutward service. Our Master has left us the example, in that, whenthe night fell and every man went to his own home, Jesus went to theMount of Olives; and thence, after His night of prayer, came veryearly in the morning to the temple, and taught. The stream that isto flow broad and life-giving through many lands must have itshidden 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 theheight of transfiguration that _He_ came, before whom the demonthat baffled the disciples quailed and slunk away like a whippedhound. This kind goeth not out but by prayer. The second condition is rigid self-denial. Fasting is the expressionof the purpose to control the lower life, and to abstain from itsdelights 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 andstrengthens that purpose. And such vigorous subordination of allthe lower powers, and abstinence from many an inferior good, bothmaterial and immaterial, is absolutely necessary if we are to haveany wholesome strength of faith in our souls. In the recoil fromthe false asceticism of Roman Catholicism and Puritanism, has notthis generation of the Church gone too far in the oppositedirection? and in the true belief that Christianity can sanctifyall joys, and ensure the harmonious development of all our powers, have we not been forgetting that hand and foot may cause us tostumble, and that we had better live maimed than die with all ourlimbs? There is a true asceticism, a discipline--a 'gymnastic untogodliness, ' as Paul calls it. And if our faith is to grow high andbear rich clusters on the topmost boughs that look up to the sky, we must keep the wild lower shoots close nipped. Without rigidself-control and self-limitation, no vigorous faith. And without them no effectual work! It is no holiday task to castout devils. Self-indulgent men will never do it. Loose-braced, easysouls, that lie open to all the pleasurable influences of ordinarylife, are no more fit for God's weapons than a reed for a lance, ora bit of flexible lead for a spear-point. The wood must be tough andcompact, the metal hard and close-grained, out of which God makesHis shafts. The brand that is to guide men through the darkness totheir Father's home must glow with a pallor of consuming flame thatpurges its whole substance into light. This kind goeth not out butby prayer and fasting. Dear brethren, what solemn rebuke these words have for us all! Howthey winnow our works of Christian activity! How they show us thehollowness of our services, the self-indulgence of our lives, thecoldness of our devotion, the cowardice of our faith! How marvellousthey make the fruits which God's great goodness has permitted us tosee even from our doubting service! Let us turn to Him with freshthankfulness that unto us, who are 'less than the least of allsaints, is this grace given, that we should preach among the nationsthe unsearchable riches of Christ. ' Let us not be driven from ourconfidence that we have a gospel to preach for all the world; butstrong in the faith which rests on impregnable historical grounds, on our own experience of what Christ has done for us, and onnineteen centuries of growing power and unfolding wisdom, let usthankfully welcome all that modern thought may supply for thecorrection of errors in belief, in organisation, and in life, thatmay have gathered round His perfect and eternal gospel--beingassured, as we have a right to be, that all will but lift higher theName which is above every name, and set forth more plainly thatCross which is the true tree of life to all the families of men. Letus cast ourselves before Him with penitent confession, and say, --OLord, our strength! we have not wrought any deliverance on earth; wehave been weak when all Thy power was at our command; we have spokenThy word as if it were an experiment and a peradventure whether ithad might; we have let go Thy hand and lost Thy garment's hem fromour slack grasp; we have been prayerless and self-indulgent. Therefore Thou hast put us to shame before our foes, and 'ourenemies laugh among themselves. Thou that dwellest between thecherubim, shine forth; stir up Thy strength and come and save us!'Then will the last words that He spoke on earth ring out again fromthe throne: 'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Goye 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 havea meaning. They not only authenticate His teaching, but they arethemselves no inconsiderable portion of the teaching. They are notonly 'the great bell before His sermon, ' but they are also a portionof the sermon. That doctrinal or dogmatic purpose characterises all the miracles invarying degrees. It is the only purpose of the one before us. Thissingular miracle of finding the coin in the fish's mouth and givingit for the tribute-money is unlike our Lord's other works in severalparticulars. It is the only miracle--with the exception of thecursing of the barren fig-tree, and the episode of the uncleanspirits entering into the swine--in which there is no message oflove or blessing for man's sorrow and pain. It is the only miraclein which our Lord uses His power for His own service or help, and itis like the whole brood of legendary miracles, and unlike all therest of Christ's in that, at first sight, it seems done for a verytrivial end--the providing of some three shillings of our money. Now, if we put all these things together, the absence of anyalleviation of man's sorrow, the presence of a personal end, and theapparent triviality of the result secured, I think we shall see thatthe only explanation of the miracle is given by regarding it asbeing what I may call a teaching one, full of instruction withregard to our Lord's character, person, and work. It is a parable aswell as a miracle, and it is in that aspect that I wish to look atit 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 thistribute-money was not a civil, but an ecclesiastical impost. It hadoriginally been levied in the Wilderness, at the time of thenumbering of the people, and was enjoined to be repeated at eachcensus, when every male Israelite was to pay half a shekel for 'aransom for his soul, ' an acknowledgment that his life was forfeitedby sin. In later years it came to be levied as an annual payment forthe support of the temple and its ceremonial. It was nevercompulsory, there was no power to exact it. The question of thecollectors, 'Doth not your Master pay tribute?' does not sound likethe imperative demand which a 'publican' would have made for paymentof an impost due to the Roman Government. It was an 'optionalchurch-rate, ' and the very fact that it was so, would make Jews whowere, or wished to be considered, patriotic or religious, the morepunctilious in paying it. The question put to Peter possibly implies a doubt whether thisRabbi, who held lax views on so many points of Pharisaicalrighteousness, would be likely to recognise the obligation of thetax. Peter's quick answer seems to be prompted by zeal for hisMaster's honour, on which the question appears to him to cast aslur. It was perhaps too quick, but the apostle has been too muchblamed for his answer, which was in fact correct, and for which ourLord does not blame him. When he comes to Christ to tell what hashappened, before he can speak, Christ puts to him this littleparable which I have taken as part of my text: 'How thinkest thou?Do kings of this world take custom?'--meaning thereby not imports orexports, but taxes of all kinds of things, --'or tribute, '--meaningthereby taxes on persons--'from their own children, or from subjectswho are not their children?' The answer, of course, is, 'From thelatter. ' So the answer comes, 'Then are the children free. ' Christ then here claims in some sense, Sonship to Him to whom thetribute is paid, that is, to God, and therefore freedom from theobligation to pay the tribute. But notice, for this is an importantpoint in the explanation of the words, that the plural in our Lord'swords, 'Then are the children free, ' is not intended to includePeter and the others in the same category as Himself. The onlyquestion in hand is as to His obligation to pay a certain tax; andto include any one else would have been irrelevant, as well aserroneous. The plural belongs to the illustration, not to itsapplication, and corresponds with the plural in the question, 'Ofwhom do the _kings_ of the earth take custom?' The kings of theearth are contrasted with the one King of the heavens, the supremeand sole Sovereign; and the children of the kings of the earth arecontrasted with the only begotten Son of the only King of kings andLord of lords. So that here there is no mixing up of Himself with others, or ofothers with Himself, but the claiming of an unique position, singular and sole, belonging to Him only, in which He stands as theSon of the mighty Monarch to whom the tribute is paid. He claims tohave the divine nature, the divine prerogatives, to bear a specificrelationship to God Himself, and to be, as other words in Scriptureput it, 'the brightness of the Father's glory and the express imageof His person. ' If there is anything certain about Jesus Christ's teaching, this iscertain 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 asvindicated 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, andfrom the meekness of His Spirit, if that claim was an illusion! Whatshall we say of the sanity of a man who poses himself before thewhole race, claiming to be the Son of God, and whose continualteaching 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 hereclaims? 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 devotedto the temple and its worship. And now, mark, that in both theseaspects our Lord alleges His true sonship as the reason why He isexempt from it. That is to say, first, Jesus Christ claims to have no need of aransom for His soul. Never one word dropped from His lips whichindicated the smallest consciousness of flaw or failure, of defector imperfection, still less of actual transgression. He takes Hisposition outside the circle of sinful men which includes all others. It is a strange characteristic in a religious teacher, very unlikethe usual tone of devout men. And stranger still is the fact thatthe absence of this consciousness of evil has never been felt to beitself evil and a blot. Think of a David's agony of penitence. Thinkof a Paul's, 'Of whom I am chief!' Think of the long wail of anAugustine's confessions. Think of the stormy self-accusations of aLuther; and then think that He who inspired them all, never, by wordor deed, betrayed the slightest consciousness that in Himself therewas the smallest deflection from the perfect line of right, theleast speck or stain on the perfect gold of His purity. Andremember, too, that when He challenges the world with, 'Which of youconvinceth Me of sin?' with the exception of half a dozen men, ofwhom we can scarcely say whether their want of spiritual insight ortheir arrogance of self-importance is the most flagrant, who, in thecourse of nineteen centuries, have ventured to fling their littlehandfuls of mud at Him, the whole world has answered, 'Thou artfairer than the children of men; grace is poured into Thy lips. ' The Son needs no 'ransom for His soul, ' which, being translated, isbut this: the purity and the innocence of Jesus Christ, which is amanifest fact in His biography, is only explicable when we believethat we have before us the Incarnate God, and therefore the PerfectMan. And the Son needs no temple for His worship. His whole life, ashuman, 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 Himritual and temple were nought. Sense-bound men needed them; Heneeded them not. 'In this place, ' said He, 'is one greater than thetemple. ' He was all which the temple symbolised. Was it thedwelling-place of God, the place of sacrifice, the meeting-place ofman with God, the place of divine manifestation? 'The temple of Hisbody' was in deepest reality all these. In it dwelt the wholefulness of the Godhead. It was at once sacrifice and place ofsacrifice, even as He is the true everlasting Priest. In Him men seeGod, and meet with God. He is greater than the temple because He isthe 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 dependenceupon, and connection with, the outward worship of ceremony andsacrifice and priest and ritual. Now, dear brethren, let me pause for one moment to press upon youand upon myself this question: Do I welcome that Christ with thefull conviction that He is the Son of God? It seems to me that, inthis generation, the question of questions, as far as religion isconcerned, is the old one which Christ asked of His disciples by thefountains and woods of Caesarea Philippi: 'Whom say ye that I, theSon of Man, am?' Can you lift up your face to meet His clear andall-searching eye, and say: 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of theliving God'? If you can, you are on the way to understanding Him andHis work; if you cannot, His life and work are all wrapped indarkness for you, His death robbed of its truest power, and yourlife deprived of its surest anchor. II. Now, there is a second lesson that I would gather from thismiracle--the voluntary submission of the Son to the bonds from whichHe 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 ofpractical wisdom, to prevent any narrow or purblind souls fromstumbling at His teaching, by reason of His neglect of this trivialmatter. The question of how far religious teachers or any others areat liberty, when they are not actuated by personal motives, torender compliance with ceremonies which are of no value to them, isa wide one, which I have no need to dwell upon here. But, turningfrom that specific aspect of the incident, I think we may look uponit as being an illustration, in regard to a very small matter, ofwhat is really the essence of our Lord's relation to the whole worldand ourselves--His voluntary taking upon Himself of bonds from whichHe is free. Is it not a symbol of the very heart of the meaning of HisIncarnation? 'For as much as the children are partakers of flesh andblood He also Himself likewise takes part of the same. ' 'He is foundin fashion as a man. ' He chooses to enter within the limits and theobligations of humanity. Round the radiant glories of the divinity, He gathers the folds of the veil of human flesh. He immerses thepillar of fire in a cloud of smoke. He comes amongst us, taking onHis own wrists the fetters that bind us, suffering Himself to be'cribbed, cabined, and confined' within the narrow limits of ourmanhood, in order that by His voluntary acceptance of it we may beredeemed from our corruption. Is it not a parable of His life and lowly obedience? He proclaimedthe same principle as the guide for all His conduct, when, sinless, He presented Himself to John for the 'baptism of repentance, ' andovercame the baptiser's scruples with the words, 'Thus it becomethus to fulfil all righteousness. ' He comes under the law. Bound to nosuch service, He binds Himself to all human duties that He mayhallow the bonds which He has worn, may set us the pattern ofperfect obedience, and may know a servant's heart. The Prince is free, but King's Son though He be, He goes among HisFather's poor subjects, lives their squalid lives, makes experienceof 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 fromthe bonds of mortality, and He took upon Him our human flesh. He wasfree from the necessity of death, even after He had taken our fleshupon Him. But, being free from the necessity, He submitted to theactuality, and laid down His life of Himself, because of His lovingwill, to save and help each of us. Oh, dear friends! we never canunderstand the meaning and the beauty, either of the life or of thedeath 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 ownloving will brought Him here; His own loving will kept Him here; Hisown loving will impelled Him along the path of life, though at everystep of it He trod as with naked feet upon burning iron; His ownloving Will brought Him to the Cross; His own loving will, and notthe Roman soldiers' nails, fastened Him to it. Let us look, then, toHim with thankfulness, and recognise in that death His thoroughidentification with all the bonds and miseries of our condition. He'took part of the same that through death He might deliver them thatby fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. ' III. Then there is another lesson which I think we may fairly gatherfrom this miracle, viz. That we have here the supernatural glorywhich 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. Butthe miracle is vindicated, peculiar as it is, by a deep divinecongruity and decorum. He will submit, Son though He be, to thiscomplete identification of Himself with us. But He will so submitas, even in submitting, to assert His divine dignity. As has beenwell said, 'In the midst of the act of submission majesty flashesforth. ' A multiform miracle--containing many miracles in one--amiracle of omniscience, and a miracle of influence over the lowercreatures is wrought. The first fish that rises carries in its mouththe exact sum needed. Here, therefore, we have another illustration of that remarkableblending of humiliation and glory, which is a characteristic of ourLord's life. These two strands are always twined together, like atwisted line of gold and black. At each moment of special abasementthere 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 thedeepest darkness there flashes some light. So at His cradle, whichseems to be the identifying of Him with humanity in its mosthelpless and lowest condition, there shall be angels, and the starsin their courses shall bow and move to guide wise men from afar withofferings to His feet. And at His Cross, where He sounds the verybass 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 menwho need a ransom, and with sense-bound men who need a sacrifice anda temple, but He will so identify Himself with them as that He shallsend His power into the recesses of the lake, where His knowledgesees, as clearly as our eyes see the men that stand beside us, andobedient to an unconscious impulse from Him, the dumb creature thathad swallowed, as it sunk, the shining _stater_ that haddropped out of the girdle of some fisherman, shall rise first to thehook; in token that not only in His Father's house does He rule as aSon over His own house, but that He 'doeth as He hath pleased, inall deep places, ' and that in Him the ancient hope is fulfilled of aSon of Man who 'hath dominion over the fish of the sea, andwhatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea. ' The miracle wasfor a trivial end in appearance, but it was a demonstration, thoughto one man only at first, yet through him to all the world, thatthis Christ, in His lowliness, is the Everlasting Son of the Father. IV. And so, lastly, we have here also the lesson of the sufficiencyfor 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 haschosen to submit Himself to the obligations, Peter was necessarilyunder them. That which is found by miracle in the fish's mouth isprecisely the amount required for both the one and the other. It isrendered, as the original has it, _'Instead of_ thee and Me, 'putting emphasis upon the characteristic of the tribute as beingransom, or payment, for a man's soul. And so, although this thought is not part of the original purpose ofthe miracle, and, therefore, is different from those which I havealready been dwelling on, which are part of that purpose, I think wemay fairly see here this great truth, --that that which Christ bringsto us by supernatural act, far greater than the miracle here, isenough for all the claims and obligations that God, or man, or law, or conscience have upon any of us. His perfect obedience andstainless life discharged for Himself all the obligations to law andrighteousness under which He came as a Man; His perfect life and Hismighty death are for us the full discharge of all that can bebrought against us. There are many and solemn claims and claimants upon each of us. Lawand duty, that awful 'ought' which should rule our lives and whichwe have broken thousands of times, come to each of us in many anhour of clear vision, and take us by the throat, and say, 'Pay uswhat 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 ofexperience in our case. Friend! how are you going to meet yourobligations? You owe God all your love, all your heart, will, strength, service. What an awful score of unpaid debts, withaccumulated interest, there stands against each of our names! Thinkof some bankrupt sitting in his counting-house with a balance-sheetbefore 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. Hetears it open, and there flutters out a cheque that more than paysit all. The illustration is a very low one; it does not cover thewhole ground of Christ's work for you. It puts a possibly commercialaspect into it, which we have to take care of lest it become theexclusive one; but it is true for all that. You are the bankrupt. What have you to pay? Oh, behold that precious treasure of goldtried in the fire, which is Christ's righteousness and Christ'sdeath; and by faith in Him, '_that_ take and give' and all thedebt will be discharged, and you will be set free and made a son bythat Son who has taken upon Himself all our bonds, and so has brokenthem; who has taken upon Himself all our debts, and so has cancelledthem 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) THB 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 beensquabbling about pre-eminence in the kingdom, and that thisconversation was brought on by our Lord's question as to the subjectof their dispute. It seems at first sight to argue singularinsensibility that the first effect of His reiterated announcementof His sufferings should have been their quarrelling for the lead;but their behaviour is intelligible if we suppose that they regardedthe half-understood prophecies of His passion as indicating thecommencement of the short conflict which was to end in His Messianicreign. So it was time for them to be getting ready and settlingprecedence. The form of their question, in Matthew, connects it withthe miracle of the coin in the fish's mouth, in which there was avery plain assertion of Christ's royal dignity, and a distinguishinghonour 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 andentirely earthly. There are to be graded dignities, and these are todepend on His mere will. Our Lord not only answers the letter oftheir question, but cuts at the root of the temper which inspiredit. I. He shows the conditions of entrance into and eminence in Hiskingdom by a living example. There were always children at handround Him, when He wanted them. Their quick instinct for pure andloving souls drew them to Him; and this little one was not afraid tobe 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 thathe was Ignatius the martyr should have been current; for surely theremembrance of that tender clasping arm and gentle breast would notfade nor be fruitless. The disciples had made very sure that theywere to be in the kingdom, and that the only question concerningthem was how high up in it they were each to be. Christ's answer islike 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 ambitiousminds. ' Verse 3 lays down the condition of entrance into the kingdom, fromwhich necessarily follows the condition of supremacy in it. What achild is naturally, and without effort or merit, by reason of ageand position, we must become, if we are to pass the narrow portalwhich admits into the large room. That 'becoming' is impossiblewithout a revolution in us. 'Be converted' is corrected, in theRevised Version, into 'turn, ' and rightly; for there is in the worda distinct reference to the temper of the disciples as displayed bytheir question. As long as they cherished it they could not even getinside, to say nothing of winning promotion to dignities in thekingdom. Their very question condemned them as incapable ofentrance. So there must be a radical change, not unaccompanied, ofcourse, with repentance, but mainly consisting in the substitutionof the child's temper for theirs. What is the temper thus enjoined?We are to see here neither the entirely modern and shallowsentimental way of looking at childhood, in which popular writersindulge, nor the doctrine of its innocence. It is not Christ'steaching, either that children are innocent, or that men enter thekingdom by making themselves so. But the child is, by its veryposition, lowly and modest, and makes no claims, and lives byinstinctive confidence, and does not care about honours, and hasthese qualities which in us are virtues, and is not puffed up bypossessing them. That is the ideal which is realised more generallyin the child than analogous ideals are in mature manhood. Suchsimplicity, modesty, humility, must be ours. We must be made smallere we can enter that door. And as is the requirement for entrance, so is it for eminence. The child does not humble himself, but ishumble by nature; but we must humble ourselves if we would be great. Christ implies that there are degrees in the kingdom. It has anobility, but of such a kind that there may be many greatest; forthe principle of rank there is lowliness. We rise by sinking. Thedeeper our consciousness of our own unworthiness and weakness, themore capable are we of receiving the divine gifts, and therefore themore fully shall we receive them. Rivers run in the hollows; themountain-tops are dry. God works with broken reeds, and the princesin His realm are beggars taken from the dunghill. A lowliness whichmade itself lowly for the sake of eminence would miss its aim, forit would not be lowliness. The desire to be foremost must be castout, in order that it may be fulfilled. II. The question has been answered, and our Lord passes to otherthoughts rising out of His answer. Verses 5 and 6 set forthantithetically our duties to His little ones. He is not now speakingof 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 fromthe emphatic 'one _such_ child, ' and from verse 6 ('which_believe_ on Me'). The subject, then, of these verses is the blessedness of recognisingand welcoming Christlike lowly believers, and the fatal effect ofthe opposite conduct. To 'receive one such little child in My name'is just to have a sympathetic appreciation of, and to be ready towelcome to heart and home, those who are lowly in their own and inthe world's estimate, but princes of Christ's court and kingdom. Such welcome and furtherance will only be given by one who himselfhas the same type of character in some degree. He who honours andadmires 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 offair things painted or sung. Our admiration is an index of ouraspiration, and our aspiration is a prophecy of our attainment. Soit 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 receptionincludes all forms of sympathy and aid. 'In My name' is equivalentto 'for the sake of My revealed character, ' and refers both to thereceiver and to the received. The blessedness of such reception, sofar as the receiver is concerned, is not merely that he therebycomes into happy relations with Christ's foremost servants, but thathe gets Christ Himself into his heart. If with true appreciation ofthe beauty of such a childlike disposition, I open my heart or myhand to its possessor, I do thereby enlarge my capacity for my ownpossession of Christ, who dwells in His child, and who comes withhim where He is welcomed. There is no surer way of securing Him forour own than the loving reception of His children. Whoso lodges theKing's favourites will not be left unvisited by the King. Torecognise and reverence the greatest in the kingdom is to be oneselfa member of their company, and a sharer in their prerogatives. On the other hand, the antithesis of 'receiving' is 'causing tostumble, ' by which is meant giving occasion for moral fall. Thatwould be done by contests about pre-eminence, by arrogance, bynon-recognition. The atmosphere of carnality and selfishness inwhich the disciples were moving, as their question showed, wouldstifle the tender life of any lowly believer who found himself init; and they were not only injuring themselves, but becomingstumbling-blocks to others, by their ambition. How much of thepresent life of average Christians is condemned on the sameground! It is a good test of our Christian character to ask--wouldit help or hinder a lowly believer to live beside us? How manyprofessing Christians are really, though unconsciously, doingtheir utmost to pull down their more Christlike brethren to theirown low level! The worldliness and selfish ambitions of the Churchare responsible for the stumbling of many who would else have beenof Christ's 'little ones. ' But perhaps we are rather to think ofdeliberate and consciously laid stumbling-blocks. Knowingly to tryto make a good man fall, or to stain a more than usually pureChristian character, is surely the very height of malice, andpresupposes such a deadly hatred of goodness and of Christ that nofate can be worse than the possession of such a temper. To beflung into the sea, like a dog, with a stone round his neck, wouldbe better for a man than to live to do such a thing. The deeditself, apart from any other future retribution, is its ownpunishment; yet our Lord's solemn words not only point to such afuture retribution, which is infinitely more terrible than themiserable fate described would be for the body, but to theconsequences of the act, as so bad in its blind hatred of thehighest type of character, and in its conscious preference of evil, as well as so fatal in its consequences, that it were better to diedrowned 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 theseclosing verses is exclusively to His lowly followers. The warningnot to despise them is needed at all times, and, perhaps, seldommore, even by Christians, than now, when so many causes induce a fartoo high estimate of the world's great ones, and modest, humblegodliness looks as dull and sober as some russet-coated little birdamong gorgeous cockatoos and birds of paradise. The world's standardis only too current in the Church; and it needs a spirit kept inharmony with Christ's spirit, and some degree of the child-nature inourselves, to preserve us from overlooking the delicate hiddenbeauties and unworldly greatness of His truest disciples. The exhortation is enforced by two considerations, --a glimpse intoheaven, and a parable. Fair interpretation can scarcely deny thatChrist here teaches that His children are under angel-guardianship. We should neither busy ourselves in curious inferences from Hisreticent words, nor try to blink their plain meaning, but rathermark their connection and purpose here. He has been teaching thatpre-eminence belongs to the childlike spirit. He here opens a doorinto the court of the heavenly King, and shows us that, as thelittle ones are foremost in the kingdom of heaven, so the angels whowatch over them are nearest the throne in heaven itself. Therepresentation is moulded on the usages of Eastern courts, andsimilar language in the Old Testament describes the principalcourtiers as 'the men who see the King's face continually. ' So highis the honour in which the little ones are held, that the highestangels are set to guard them, and whatever may be thought of them onearth, 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 purposeof Christ's mission; and the 'for' would refer back to theinjunction, not to the glimpse into heaven which enforced it. The exhortation is further confirmed by the parable of the ninetyand nine, which is found, slightly modified in form and in anotherconnection, in Luke xv. Its point here is to show the importance ofthe little ones as the objects of the seeking love of God, and as soprecious 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 theloving will of God becomes more direct. In that case God is theowner of the sheep. Christ does not emphasise His own love or sharein the work, reference to which was not relevant to His purpose, but, leaving that in shadow, casts all the light on the lovingdivine will, which counts the little ones as so precious that, ifeven one of them wanders, all heaven's powers are sent forth to findand recover it. The reference does not seem to be so much to the onegreat act by which, in Christ's incarnation and sacrifice, a sinfulworld has been sought and redeemed, as to the numberless acts bywhich God, in His providence and grace, restores the souls of thosehumble ones if ever they go astray. For the connection requires thatthe wandering sheep here should, when it wanders, be 'one of theselittle ones'; and the parable is introduced to illustrate the truththat, because they belong to that number, the least of them is tooprecious to God to be allowed to wander away and be lost. They havefor their keepers the angels of the presence; they have God Himself, in His yearning love and manifold methods of restoration, to lookfor 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, ' eachof whom is held by the divine will in the grasp of an individualisinglove 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 weourselves 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 makethem stumbling-blocks. The obstacle in the path would do us no hurtif it were not for the erring foot, nor the attractive prize if itwere not for the hand that itched to lay hold of it, nor theglittering bauble if it were not for the eye that kindled at thesight of it. So our Lord here, having been speaking of the men thatput stumbling-blocks in the way of His little ones, draws the netcloser and bids us look at home. A solemn woe of divine judgment isdenounced on those who cause His followers to stumble; let us leaveGod to execute that, and be sure that we have no share in theirguilt, but let us ourselves be the executioners of the judgment uponthe things in ourselves which alone give the stumbling-blocks, whichothers put before us, their fatal power. There is extraordinary energy in these words. Solemnly they arerepeated twice here, verbatim; solemnly they are repeated verbatimthree times in Mark's edition. The urgent stringency of the command, the terrible plainness of the alternative put forth by the lips thatcould say nothing harsh, and the fact that the very same injunctionappears in a wholly different connection in the Sermon on the Mount, show us how profoundly important our Lord felt the principle to bewhich He was here laying down. We mark these three points. First, the case supposed, 'If thy handor thy foot cause thee to stumble. ' Then the sharp, prompt remedyenjoined, 'Cut them off and cast them from thee. ' Then the solemnmotive by which it is enforced, 'It is better for thee to enter intolife 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 theinward self, and symbols of its tastes and capacities. We mayperhaps see in them the familiar distinction between the practicaland the theoretical:--hand and foot being instruments of action, andthe eye the organ of perception. Our Lord takes an extreme case. Ifmembers of the body are to be amputated and plucked out should theycause us to stumble, much more are associations to be abandoned andoccupations to be relinquished and pleasures to be forsaken, ifthese draw us away. But it is to be noticed that the whole stringencyof the commandment rests upon that _if_. '_If_ they cause theeto stumble, ' then, and not else, amputate. The powers are natural, the operation of them is perfectly innocent, but a man may be ruinedby 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 ofinnocent occupations, rests upon the principles that our nature hasan ideal order, so as that some parts of it are to be suppressed andsome are to rule, and that there are degrees of importance in men'spursuits, and that where the lower interfere and clog the operationsof the higher, there they are harmful. And so the only wisdom is toexcise and cut them off. We see illustrations in abundance every day. There are many peoplewho are being ruined in regard to the highest purposes of theirlives, simply by an over-indulgence in lower occupations which inthemselves may be perfectly right. Here is a young woman that spendsso much of her day in reading novels that she has no time to lookafter the house and help her mother. Here is a young man so given toathletics that his studies are neglected--and so you may go allround the circle, and find instances of the way in which innocentthings, and the excessive or unwise exercise of natural faculties, are destroying men. And much more is that the case in regard toreligion, which is the highest object of pursuit, and in regard tothose capacities and powers by which we lay hold of God. These areto be ministered to by the rest, and if there be in my nature or inthe order of my life something which is drawing away to itself theenergy that ought to go in that other direction, then, howsoeverinnocent it may be, _per se_, it is harming me. It is a wenthat is sucking all the vital force into itself, and turning it intopoison. 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 ofpersonal experience. No one else has the right to decide for youwhat it is safe and wise for you to do in regard to things which arenot in themselves wrong. If they are wrong in themselves, of coursethe consideration of consequences is out of place altogether; but ifthey be not wrong in themselves, then it is you that must settlewhether they are legitimate for you or not. Do not let yourChristian liberty be interfered with by other people's dictation inregard to this matter. How often you hear people say, _'I_could not do it'; meaning thereby, 'therefore _he_ ought not todo it!' But that inference is altogether illegitimate. True, thereare limitations of our Christian liberty in regard to thingsindifferent and innocent. Paul lays down the most important of thesein three sentences. 'All things are lawful for me, but all thingsare not expedient. ' 'All things are lawful for me, but all thingsedify 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 thepower of any'; keep master of them, and rather abstain altogetherthan become their slave. But these three limitations being observed, then, in regard to all such matters, nobody else can prescribe foryou or me. 'To his own Master he standeth or falleth. ' But, on the other hand, do not you be led away into things thatdamage you, because some other man does them, as he supposes, without injury. 'Happy is he that condemneth not himself in thatthing which he alloweth. ' There are some Christian people who aresimply very unscrupulous and think themselves very strong; and whoseconsciences are not more enlightened, but less sensitive, than thoseof the 'narrow-minded brethren' upon whom they look askance. And so, dear friend, you ought to take the world--to inhale it, if Imay so say, as patients do chloroform; only you must be your owndoctor and keep your own fingers on your pulse, and watch the firstsign of failure there, and take no more. When the safety lamps beginto burn blue you may be quite sure there is choke-damp about; andwhen Christian men and women begin to find prayer wearisome, andreligious thoughts dull, and the remembrance of God an effort or apain, then, whatever anybody else may do, it is time for them topull up. 'If thy hand offend thee, ' never mind though your brother'shand 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 theapplication of such a principle. It does not mean that we are toabandon all things that are susceptible of abuse, for everything isso; and if we are to regulate our conduct by such a rule, it is notthe amputation of a hand that will be sufficient. We may as well cutoff our heads at once, and go out of the world altogether; foreverything is capable of being thus abused. Nor does the injunction mean that unconditionally we are to abandonall occupations in which there is danger. It can never be a duty toshirk a duty because it is dangerous. And sometimes it is as much aChristian man's duty to go into, and to stand in, positions that arefull of temptation and danger, as it is a fireman's business to gointo a burning house at the risk of suffocation. There were saintsin Caesar's household, flowers that grew on a dunghill, and theywere not bidden to abandon their place because it was full ofpossible danger to their souls. Sometimes Christ sets His sentinelsin places where the bullets fly very thick; and if we are posted insuch a place--and we all are so some time or other in our lives--theonly course for us is to stand our ground until the relieving guardcomes, 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 theassurance that if they drank any deadly thing it should not hurtthem. II. So much, then, for the first of the points here. Now a word, inthe second place, as to the sharp remedy enjoined. 'Cut it off and cast it from thee. ' Entire excision is the onlysafety. I myself am to be the operator in that surgery. I am to laymy hand upon the block, and with the other hand to grasp the axe andstrike. That is to say, we are to suppress capacities, to abandonpursuits, to break with associates, when we find that they aredamaging our spiritual life and hindering our likeness to JesusChrist. That is plain common-sense. In regard to physical intoxication, itis a great deal easier to abstain altogether than to take a verylittle and then stop. The very fumes of alcohol will sometimes drivea reclaimed drunkard into a bout of dissipation that will last forweeks; therefore, the only safety is in entire abstinence. The ruleholds in regard to everyday life. Every man has to give up a greatmany things if he means to succeed in one, and has to be a man ofone pursuit if anything worth doing is to be done. Christian menespecially have to adopt that principle, and shear off a great dealthat is perfectly legitimate, in order that they may keep a reserveof strength for the highest things. True, all forms of life are capable of being made Christian serviceand Christian discipline, but in practice we shall find that if weare earnestly seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, notonly shall we lose our taste for a great deal that is innocent, butwe shall have, whether we lose our taste for them or not--and moreimperatively if we have not lost our taste for them than if we have--togive 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 nohalf-measures to be kept; the only thing to do with the viper is toshake it off into the fire and let it burn there. We have to empty ourhands of earth's trivialities if we would grasp Christ with them. Wehave 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 mayadvance in the divine life. It is the only way to ensure progress. There is no such certain method of securing an adequate flow of sapup the trunk as to cut off all the suckers. If you wish to have acurrent going down the main bed of the stream, sufficient to keep itclear, you must dam up all the side channels. But it is not to be forgotten that this commandment, stringent andnecessary as it is, is second best. The man is maimed, although itwas 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 thehighest thing would have been that in hand and foot and eye heshould have been anointed, like the priests of old, for the serviceof his Master. But until he is strong enough to use the faculty forGod, the wisest thing is not to use it at all. Abandon the outworksto keep the citadel. And just as men pull down the pretty houses onthe outskirts of a fortified city when a siege is impending, in orderthat they may afford no cover to the enemy, so we have to sweep awaya great deal in our lives that is innocent and fair, in order thatthe 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. ' Wemust 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 'runwith patience the race that is set before us. ' 'If thy foot offendthee, ' do not hesitate, do not adopt half-measures, do not trymoderation, do not seek to sanctify the use of the peccant member;all these may be possible and right in time, but for the present thereis 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 whichthis injunction is enforced. Christ rests His command of self-denial and self-mutilation upon thehighest ground of self-interest. 'It is better for thee. ' We aretold nowadays that this is a very low motive to appeal to, thatChristianity 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 fantasticobjections of this sort when the men that urge them refuse to turndown another street, if they are warned that in the road on whichthey are going they will meet their death. As long as they admitthat it is a wise and a kind thing to say to a man, 'Do not go thatway or your life will be endangered, ' I think we may listen to ourMaster saying to us, 'Do not do that lest thou perish; do this, thatthou may'st enter into life. ' And then, notice that a maimed man may enter into life, and acomplete man may perish. The first may be a very poor creature, veryignorant, with a limited nature, undeveloped capacities, intellectand the like all but dormant in him, artistic sensibilities quiteatrophied, and yet he may have got hold of Jesus Christ and Hislove, and be trying to love Him back again and serve Him, and so beentering into life even here, and be sure of a life more perfectyonder. And the complete man, cultured all round, with all hisfaculties polished and exercised to the full, may have one side ofhis nature undeveloped--that which connects him with God in Christ. And so he may be like some fair tree that stands out there in theopen, on all sides extending its equal beauty, with its stemsymmetrical, cylindrical, perfect in its green cloud of foliage, yetthere may be a worm at the root of it, and it may be given up torottenness and destruction. Cultivated men may perish, anduncultured men may have the life. The maimed man may touch Christwith his stump, and so receive life, and the complete man may layhold of the world and the flesh and the devil with his hands, and soshare in their destruction. Ay! and in that case the maimed man has the best of it. It is a veryplain axiom of the rudest common-sense, this of my text: 'It isbetter for thee to enter into life maimed, than to go into hell-firewith both thy hands. ' That is to say, it is better to live maimedthan to die whole. A man comes into a hospital with gangrene in hisleg; 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, 'Iwill keep it and I will die'? 'Better to enter into life maimed, ' because you will not always bemaimed. The life will overcome the maiming. There is a wonderfulrestoration of capacities and powers that have been sacrificed forChrist's sake, a restoration even here. As crustaceans will developa new claw in place of one that they have thrown off in their perilto save their lives, so we, if we have for Christ's sake maimedourselves, will find that in a large measure the suppression will berecompensed even here on earth. And hereafter, as the Rabbis used to say, 'No man will rise from thegrave a cripple. ' All the limitations which we have imposed uponourselves, for Christ's sake, will be removed then. 'Then shall theeyes 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 dumbshall sing. ' 'Verily I say unto thee, there is no man that hath leftany' of his possessions, affections, tastes, capacities, 'for Mysake but he shall receive a hundredfold more in this life, and inthe world to come, life everlasting. ' No man is a loser by giving upanything for Jesus Christ. And, on the other hand, the complete man, complete in everythingexcept 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 JesusChrist will fade from you when you go yonder. 'His glory shall notdescend after him'; 'as he came, so shall he go. ' 'Tongues, theyshall cease; knowledge, it shall vanish away'; gifts will fail, capacities will disappear when the opportunities for the exercise ofthem in a material world are at an end, and there will be littleleft to the man who _would_ carry hands and feet and eyes allinto the fire and forgot the 'one thing needful, ' but a thin thread, if I may so say, of personality quivering with the sense ofresponsibility, and preyed upon by the gnawing worm of a too-lateremorse. My brother, the lips of Incarnate Love spoke those solemn words ofmy text, which it becomes not me to repeat to you as if they weremine; but I ask you to weigh this, His urgent commandment, and tolisten to His solemn assurance, by which He enforces the wisdom ofthe self-suppression: 'It is better for thee to enter into lifemaimed, than having two hands, to be cast into hell-fire. ' Give your hearts to Jesus Christ, and set the following in Hisfootsteps and the keeping of His commandments high above all otheraims. You will have to suppress much and give up much, but suchsuppression is the shortest road to becoming perfect men, completein Him, and such surrender is the surest way to possess all things. 'He that loseth his life'--which is more than hand or eye--forChrist'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 moreexpanded form, as the first of the incomparable three in the fifteenthchapter of Luke's Gospel. Perhaps our Lord repeated the parable morethan once. It is an unveiling of His inmost heart, and therein arevelation of the very heart of God. It touches the deepest things inHis relation to men, and sets forth thoughts of Him, such as man neverdared to dream. It does all this by the homeliest image and by anappeal to the simplest instincts. The most prosaic shepherd looks forlost sheep, and everybody has peculiar joy over lost things found. They may not be nearly so valuable as things that were not lost. Theunstrayed may he many, and the strayed be but one. Still there is akeener joy in the recovery of the one than in the unbroken possessionof 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, itbecomes the means of uttering and illustrating that truth concerningGod which no religion but that of the Cross has ever been bold enoughto proclaim, that He cares most for the wanderers, and rejoices over thereturn of the one that went astray more than over the ninety-and-ninewho never wandered. There are some significant differences between this edition of theparable and the form which it assumes in the Gospel according toLuke. There it is spoken in vindication of Christ's consorting withpublicans and sinners; here it is spoken in order to point thelesson of not despising the least and most insignificant of the sonsof men. There the seeking Shepherd is obviously Christ; here theseeking Shepherd is rather the Divine Father; as appears by thewords of the next verse: 'For it is not the will of your Fatherwhich is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish. 'There the sheep is lost; here the sheep goes astray. There theShepherd seeks till He find, here the Shepherd, perhaps, fails tofind; for our Lord says, '_If so be_ that he find it. ' But I am not about to venture on all the thoughts which this parablesuggests, nor even to deal with the main lesson which it teaches. Iwish 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 immediateapplication of the parable in Luke's Gospel, the ninety-and-ninewere the respectable people who thought the publicans and harlotsaltogether too dirty to touch, and regarded it as very doubtfulconduct on the part of this young Rabbi from Nazareth to be mixed upwith persons whom no one with a proper regard for whited sepulchreswould have anything to do with. To them He answers, in effect--I ama shepherd; that is my vindication. Of course a shepherd goes afterand cares for the lost sheep. He does not ask about its worth, oranything else. He simply follows the lost because it is lost. It maybe a poor little creature after all, but it is lost, and that isenough. And so He vindicates Himself to the ninety-and-nine: 'You donot need Me, you are found. I take you on your own estimation ofyourselves, and tell you that My mission is to the wanderers. ' I do not suppose, however, that any of us have need to be remindedthat 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; andthat in the wider application of the parable _all_ men arewanderers. Remembering, then, this universal application, I wouldpoint out two or three things about the condition of these strayedsheep, which include the whole race. The ninety-and-nine may shadowfor us a number of beings, in unfallen worlds, immensely greaterthan even the multitudes of wandering souls that have lived herethrough weary ages of sin and tears, but that does not concern usnow. The first thought I gather from the parable is that all men areChrist's sheep. That sounds a strange thing to say. What? all thesemen 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 narrowforeheads, and blighted, blasted lives, the despair of our moderncivilisation--are they all His? And in those great wide-lyingheathen lands where men know nothing of His name and of His love, are they all His too? Let Him answer, 'Other sheep I have'--thoughthey look like goats to-day--'which are not of this fold, them alsomust I bring, and they shall hear My voice. ' All men are Christ's, because He has been the Agent of divine creation, and the grandwords of the hundredth Psalm are true about Him. 'It is He that hathmade us, and we are His. We are His people and the sheep of Hispasture. ' They are His, because His sacrifice has bought them forHis. 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 inparticular, only there is a sweet tuft of grass here, and it cropsthat; and here is a bit of ground where there is soft walking, and itgoes there; and so, step by step, not meaning anything, not knowingwhere it is going, or that it _is_ going anywhere; it goes, andgoes, and goes, and at last it finds out that it is away from itsbeat 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 mosthelpless of creatures, fluttering and excited, rushes about amongstthe thorns and brambles, or gets mired in some quag or other, and itwill 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 notmean to go wrong; you are not going anywhere in particular, you donot start on your course with any intentions either way, of doingright or wrong, of keeping near God, or going away from Him, but yousimply go where the grass is sweetest, or the walking easiest. Butlook at the end of it; where you have got to. You have got away fromHim. ' Now, if you take that series of parables in Luke xv. , and note themetaphors there, you will see three different sides given of theprocess by which men's hearts stray away from God. There is thesheep that wanders. That is partly conscious, and voluntary, but ina large measure simply yielding to inclination and temptation. Thenthere 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, withoutvolition, almost mechanically sometimes, slides into sins anddisappears 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 knowledgeof what he was doing. 'I am going into a far-off country; I cannotstand this any longer--all restraint and no liberty, and no power ofdoing what I like with my own; and always obliged to obey and bedependent on my father for my pocket-money! Give me what belongs tome, for good and all, and let me go!' That is the picture of theworst kind of wandering, when a man knows what he is about, andlooks at the merciful restraint of the law of God, and says: 'No! Ihad 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, butit carries the poor creature away from the shepherd as completely asif it had been wholly intelligent and voluntary. Let us learn thelesson. In a world like this, if a man does not know very clearlywhere he is going, he is sure to go wrong. If you do not exercise adistinct determination to do God's will, and to follow in Hisfootsteps who has set us an example; and if your main purpose is toget succulent grass to eat and soft places to walk in, you arecertain before long to wander tragically from all that is right andnoble 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 otherpeople--'from want of thought than is wrought by' an evil will. Andthe sheep has strayed as effectually, though, when it set out on itsjourney, it never thought of straying. Young men and women beginninglife, remember! and take this lesson. But then there is another point that I must touch for a moment. Inthe Revised Version you will find a very tiny alteration in thewords 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, 'Andseeketh that which is _gone_ astray'; the Revised Version morecorrectly reads, 'And seeketh that which _is going_ astray. 'Now, look at the difference in these two renderings. In the formerthe process is represented as finished, in the correct rendering itis represented as going on. And that is what I would press on you, the awful, solemn, necessarily progressive character of ourwanderings from God. A man never gets to the end of the distancethat separates between him and the Father, if his face is turnedaway from God. Every moment the separation is increasing. Two linesstart from each other at the acutest angle and diverge more thefurther they are produced, until at last the one may be away up bythe side of God's throne, and the other away down in the deepestdepths 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 dailyand hourly increasing the distance between themselves and theirmerciful Father. Now the last thing here in this picture is the contrast between thedescription given of the wandering sheep in our text, and that inSt. Luke. Here it is represented as wandering, there it isrepresented as lost. That is very beautiful and has a meaning oftennot noticed by hasty readers. Who is it that has lost it? We talkabout the lost soul and the lost man, as if it were the man that hadlost _himself_, and that is true, and a dreadful truth it is. But that is not the truth that is taught in this parable, and meantby us to be gathered from it. Who is it that has lost it? He to whomit belonged. That is to say, wherever a heart gets ensnared and entangled withthe love of the treasures and pleasures of this life, and so departsin allegiance and confidence and friendship from the living God, there God the Father regards Himself as the poorer by the loss ofone of His children, by the loss of one of His sheep. He does notcare to possess you by the hold of mere creation and supremacy andrule. 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 issomething 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 thepurest love in God, and that there is nothing in the whole revelationwhich Christianity makes of the character of God more wonderful thanthis, that He judges that He has lost His child when His child hasforgotten to love Him. II. So much, then, for one of the great pictures in this text. I canspare but a sentence or two for the other--the picture of theSeeker. I said that in the one form of the parable it was more distinctlythe Father, and in the other more distinctly the Son, who isrepresented as seeking the sheep. But these two do still coincide insubstance, inasmuch as God's chief way of seeking us poor wanderingsheep is through the work of His dear Son Jesus, and the coming ofChrist is the Father's searching for His sheep in the 'cloudy anddark day. ' According to my text God leaves the ninety-and-nine and goes intothe mountains where the wanderer is, and seeks him. And this, couched in veiled form, is the great mystery of the divine love, theincarnation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ our Lord. Here is theanswer by anticipation to the sarcasm that is often levelled atevangelical Christianity: 'You must think a good deal of humannature, and must have a very arrogant notion of the inhabitant ofthis little speck that floats in the great sea of the heavens, ifyou suppose that with all these millions of orbs he is so importantthat the divine Nature came down upon this little tiny molehill, andtook his nature and died. ' 'Yes!' says Christ, 'not because man was so great, not because manwas so valuable in comparison with the rest of creation--he was butone amongst ninety-nine unfallen and unsinful--but because he was sowretched, because he was so small, because he had gone so far awayfrom God; _therefore_, the seeking love came after him, andwould draw him to itself. ' That, I think, is answer enough to thecavil. And then, there is a difference between these two versions of theParable in respect to their representation of the end of the seeking. The one says 'seeks until He finds. ' Oh! the patient, incredibleinexhaustibleness of the divine love. God's long-suffering, if I maytake such a metaphor, like a sleuth-hound, will follow the objectof its search through all its windings and doublings, until it comesup to it. So that great seeking Shepherd follows us through all thedevious courses of our wayward, wandering footsteps doubling backupon themselves, until He finds us. Though the sheep may increase itsdistance, the Shepherd follows. The further away we get the moretender His appeal; the more we stop our ears the louder the voicewith which He calls. You cannot wear out Jesus Christ, you cannotexhaust the resources of His bounteousness, of His tenderness. However we may have been going wrong, however far we may havebeen wandering, however vehemently we may be increasing, at everymoment, 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 isreally seeking you, seeking you by my poor words now, seeking you bymany a providence, seeking you by His Gospel, by His Spirit; andwill never be satisfied till He has found you in your finding Himand turning your soul to Him! But, I beseech you, do not forget the solemn lesson drawn from theother form of the parable which is given in my text: _If so bethat He find it_. There is a possibility of failure. What anawful power you have of burying yourself in the sepulchre, as itwere, of your own self-will, and hiding yourself in the darkness ofyour own unbelief! You can frustrate the seeking love of God. Someof you have done so--some of you have done so all your lives. Someof you, perhaps at this moment, are trying to do so, and consciouslyendeavouring to steel your hearts against some softening that mayhave been creeping over them whilst I have been speaking. Are youyielding to His seeking love, or wandering further and further fromHim? He has come to find you. Let Him not seek in vain, but let theGood Shepherd draw you to Himself, where, lifted on the Cross, He'giveth His life for the sheep. ' He will restore your soul and carryyou back on His strong shoulder, or in His bosom near His lovingheart, to the green pastures and the safe fold. There will be joy inHis heart, more than over those who have never wandered; and therewill be joy in the heart of the returning wanderer, such as they whohad not strayed and learned the misery could never know, for, as theprofound Jewish saying has it, 'In the place where the penitentsstand, 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 ofview and utterances which came naturally to His lips. There areseveral instances in the gospels of His repeating the same sayingsin entirely different connections and with different applications. One of these habitual points of view seems to have been the thoughtof men as wandering sheep, and of Himself as the Shepherd. Themetaphor has become so familiar that we need a moment's reflectionto grasp the mingled tenderness, sadness, and majesty of it. Hethought habitually of all humanity as a flock of lost sheep, and ofHimself as high above them, unparticipant of their evil, and havingone errand--to bring them back. And not only does He frequently refer to this symbol, but we havethe two editions, from which my texts are respectively taken, of theParable of the Lost Sheep. I say two editions, because it seems tome a great deal more probable that Jesus should have repeatedHimself than that either of the Evangelists should have ventured totake this gem and set it in an alien setting. The two versionsdiffer slightly in some unimportant expressions, and Matthew's isthe more condensed of the two. But the most important variation isthe one which is brought to light by the two fragments which I haveventured to isolate as texts. '_If_ He find' implies thepossible 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 solemnconsiderations, which I pray for strength to lay upon your minds andhearts now. I. But first let me say a word or two upon the more general thoughtbrought out in both these clauses--of the Shepherd's search. Now, beautiful and heart-touching as that picture is, of theShepherd away amongst the barren mountains searching minutely inevery ravine and thicket, it wants a little explanation in order tobe brought into correspondence with the fact which it expresses. ForHis 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 itsdiscovery of its Shepherd. We have to remember wherein consists theloss before we can understand wherein consists the search. Now, if we ask ourselves that question first, we get a flood oflight on the whole matter. The great hundredth Psalm, according toits true rendering, says, 'It is He that hath made us, _and we areHis_; . .. We are . .. The sheep of His pasture. ' But God's truepossession of man is not simply the possession inherent in the actof creation. For there is only one way in which spirit can ownspirit, or heart can possess heart, and that is through thevoluntary yielding and love of the one to the other. So JesusChrist, who, in all His seeking after us men, is the voice and handof Almighty Love, does not count that He has found a man until theman has learned to love Him. For He loses us when we are alienatedfrom 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, isfor our love, our trust, our obedience; and in reality it consistsof all the energies by which Jesus Christ, as God's embodiment andrepresentative, 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 wholeaggregate of the ways by which the love that is divine and human inJesus Christ moves round about our closed hearts, as water may feelround some hermetically sealed vessel, seeking for an entrance, thensurely the first and chiefest of them, which makes its appeal to eachof us as directly as to any man that ever lived, is that great mysterythat Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, left the ninety-and-ninethat were safe on the high pastures of the mountains of God, and camedown among us, out into the wilderness, 'to seek and to save thatwhich was lost. ' And, brother, that method of winning--I was going to say, of_earning_--our love comes straight in its appeal to everysingle soul on the face of the earth. Do not say that thou wert notin Christ's heart and mind when He willed to be born and willed todie. Thou, and thou, and thou, and every single unit of humanitywere there clear before Him in their individuality; and He died forthee, and for me, and for _every_ man. And, in one aspect, thatis more than to say that He died for _all_ men. There was aspecific intention in regard to each of us in the mission of JesusChrist; and when He went to the Cross the Shepherd was not givingHis life for a confused flock of which He knew not the units, butfor sheep the face of each of whom He knows, and each of whom Heloves. There was His first seeking; there is His chief seeking. There is the seeking which ought to appeal to every soul of man, andwhich, ever since you were children, has been making its appeal toyou. Has it done so in vain? Dear friend, let not your heart stillbe 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 limitationsand imperfections, as I am speaking it now. 'As though God didbeseech 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; butmy word, in so far as it is true and tender, is Christ's word toyou. And here, in our midst, that unseen Form is passing along thesepews and speaking to these hearts, and the Shepherd is seeking Hissheep. He seeks each of us by the inner voices and emotions in our heartsand minds, by those strange whisperings which sometimes we hear, bythe suddenly upstarting convictions of duty and truth which sometimes, without manifest occasion, flash across our hearts. These voices areChrist's voice, for, in a far deeper sense than most men superficiallybelieve, 'He is the true Light that lighteth every man coming intothe world. ' He is seeking us by our unrest, by our yearnings after we know notwhat, by our dim dissatisfaction which insists upon making itselffelt in the midst of joys and delights, and which the world fails tosatisfy as much as it fails to interpret. There is a cry in everyheart, little as the bearer of the heart translates it into its truemeaning--a cry after God, even the living God. And by all yourunrests, your disappointments, your hopes unfulfilled, your hopesfulfilled and blasted in the fulfilment, your desires that perishunfruited; by all the mystic movements of the spirit that yearns forsomething beyond the material and the visible, Jesus Christ isseeking His sheep. He seeks us by the discipline of life, for I believe that Christ isthe active Providence of God, and that the hands that were piercedon the Cross do move the wheels of the history of the world, andmould the destinies of individual spirits. The deepest meaning of all life is that we should be won to seek Himwho in it all is seeking us, and led to venture our hopes, and flingthe anchor of our faith beyond the bounds of the visible, that itmay fasten in the Eternal, even in Christ Himself, 'the sameyesterday and to-day and for ever' when earth and its training aredone with. Brethren, it is a blessed thing to live, when weinterpret life's smallnesses aright as the voice of the Master, who, by them all--our sadness and our gladness, the unrest of our heartsand the yearnings and longings of our spirits, by the ministry ofHis word, by the record of His sufferings--is echoing the invitationof the Cross itself, 'Come unto Me, all ye . .. And I will give yourest!' So much for the Shepherd's search. II. And now, in the second place, a word as to the possiblethwarting of the search. 'If so be that He find. ' That is an awful _if_, when we thinkof what lies below it. The thing seems an absurdity when it isspoken, and yet it is a grim fact in many a life--viz. That Christ'seffort can fail and be thwarted. Not that His search is perfunctoryor careless, but that we shroud ourselves in darkness through whichthat love can find no way. It is we, not He, that are at fault whenHe fails to find that which He seeks. There is nothing more certainthan that God, and Christ the image of God, desire the rescue ofevery man, woman, and child of the human race. Let no teaching blurthat sunlight fact. There is nothing more certain than that JesusChrist has done, and is doing, all that He can do to secure thatpurpose. 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 centralmystery of creation, which if we could solve there would be fewknots that would resist our fingers, that a finite will like yoursor mine can lift itself up against God, and that, having thecapacity, it has the desire. He says, 'Come!' We say, 'I will not. 'That door of the heart opens from within, and He never breaks itopen. He stands at the door and knocks. And then the same solemn_if_ comes--'If any man opens, I will come in'; if any mankeeps it shut, and holds on to prevent its being opened, I will stopout. Brethren, I seek to press upon you now the one plain truth, that ifyou are not saved men and women, there is no person in heaven orearth or hell that has any blame in the matter but yourself alone. God appeals to us, and says, 'What more _could_ have been doneto 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 theblame lies at our own doors. I must not dwell upon the various reasons which lead so many menamong us--as, alas! the utmost charity cannot but see that thereare--to turn away from Christ's appeals, and to be unwilling to'have this Man' either 'to reign over' them or to save them. Thereare many such, I am sure, in my audience now; and I would fain, if Icould, draw them to that Lord in whom alone they have life, andrest, 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 stillmore in their feelings--as to their sin. Oh dear friends, if youwould only submit your consciences for one meditative half-hour tothe light of God's highest law, I think you would find out somethingmore 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 haveseen a sheep comfortably cropping the short grass on a down over thesea, with one foot out in the air, and a precipice of five hundredfeet below it, and at the bottom the crawling water. It did not knowthat there was any danger of going over. That is like some of us. Ifyou believed what is true--that 'sin when it is finished, bringethforth death, ' and understood what 'death' meant, you would feel themercy of the Shepherd seeking you. Some of us think we are in theflock when we are not. Some of us do not like submission. Some of ushave no inclination for the sweet pastures that He provides, andwould rather stay where we are, and have the fare that is goingthere. We do not need to _do_ anything to put Him away. I have nodoubt that some of us, as soon as my voice ceases, will plunge againinto worldly talk and thoughts before they are down the chapelsteps, and so blot out, as well as they can, any vagrant andsuperficial impression that may have been made. Dear brethren, it isa very easy matter to turn away from the Shepherd's voice. 'Icalled, and ye refused. I stretched out My hands, and _no manregarded_. ' 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. Itindicates the infinitude of Christ's patient forgiveness andperseverance. _We_ tire of searching. 'Can a mother forget' orabandon her seeking after a lost child? Yes! if it has gone on forso long as to show that further search is hopeless, she will go homeand nurse her sorrow in her heart. Or, perhaps, like some poormothers and wives, it will turn her brain, and one sign of hermadness will be that, long years after grief should have been calmbecause hope was dead, she will still be looking for the little oneso long lost. But Jesus Christ stands at the closed door, as a greatmodern picture shows, though it has been so long undisturbedlyclosed that the hinges are brown with rust, and weeds grow highagainst it. He stands there in the night, with the dew on His hair, unheeded or repelled, like some stranger in a hostile villageseeking for a night's shelter. He will not be put away; but, afterall refusals, still with gracious finger, knocks upon the door, andspeaks 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 toyou still. He 'suffereth long, is not easily provoked, is not soonangry; 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 awayand have been longest away. The world has a great deal to say aboutincurable cases of moral obliquity and deformity. Christ knowsnothing about 'incurable cases. ' If there is a worst man in theworld--and perhaps there is--there is nothing but his owndisinclination to prevent his being brought back, and made as pureas an angel. But do not let us deal with generalities; let us bring the truths toourselves. Dear brethren, I know nothing about the most of you. Ishould not know you again if I met you five minutes after we partnow. 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 youhave gone, you have not gone so far but that His love feels outthrough the remoteness to grasp you, and would fain draw you toitself. I dare say you have seen upon some dreary moor, or at the foot ofsome 'scaur' on the hillside, the bleached bones of a sheep, lyingwhite and grim among the purple heather. It strayed, unthinking ofdanger, tempted by the sweet herbage; it fell; it vainly bleated; itdied. But what if it had heard the shepherd's call, and hadpreferred to lie where it fell, and to die where it lay? We talkabout 'silly sheep. ' Are there any of them so foolish as men andwomen listening to me now, who will not answer the Shepherd's voicewhen they hear it, with, 'Lord, here am I, come and help me out ofthis 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 lastof 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 kingdomwhich they thought was presently to appear. They had ventured torefer their selfish and ambitious dispute to Christ's arbitrament. He answered by telling them the qualifications of 'the greatest inthe kingdom'--that they are to be humble like little children; thatthey are to be placable; that they are to use all means to reclaimoffenders; and that, even if the offence is against themselves, theyare to ignore the personal element, and to regard the offender, notso much as having done them harm, as having harmed himself by hisevil-doing. Peter evidently feels that that is a very hard commandment for a manof his temperament, and so he goes to Jesus Christ for a littlefurther direction, and proposes a question as to the limits of thisdisposition: 'How often shall my brother sin?' The very questionbetrays that he does not understand what forgiveness means; for itis not real, if the 'forgiven' sin is stowed away safely in thememory. 'I can forgive, but I cannot forget, ' generally means, 'I donot _quite_ forgive. ' We are not to take the pardoned offence, and carry it to a kind of 'suspense account, ' to be revived ifanother is committed, but we are to blot it out altogether. Peterthought that he had given a very wide allowance when he said 'seventimes. ' Christ's answer lifts the whole subject out of the realm ofhard and fast lines and limits, for He takes the two perfect numbers'ten' and 'seven, ' and multiplies them together, and then Hemultiplies that by 'seven' once more; and the product is _not_four hundred and ninety, but is innumerableness. He does not meanthat the four hundred and ninety-first offence is outside the pale, but He suggests indefiniteness, endlessness. So, as I say, He liftsthe question out of the region in which Peter was keeping it, thereby betraying that he did not understand what he was talkingabout, and tells us that there are no limits to the obligation. The parable which follows, and follows with a 'therefore, ' does notdeal so much with Peter's question as to the limits of thedisposition, but sets forth its grounds and the nature of itsmanifestations. If we understand why we ought to forgive, and whatforgiveness is, we shall not say, 'How often?' The question willhave answered itself. I turn to the parable rather than the words which I have read as ourstarting-point, to seek to bring out the lessons which it containsin regard to our relations to God, and to one another. There arethree sections in it: the king and his debtor; the forgiven debtorand _his_ debtor; and the forgiven debtor unforgiven becauseunforgiving. And if we look at these three points I think we shallget the lessons intended. I. The king and his debtor. A certain king has servants, whom he gathers together to give intheir reckoning. And one of them is brought that owes him tenthousand talents. Now, it is to be noticed at the very outset thatthe analogy between debt and sin, though real, is extremelyimperfect. No metaphor of that sort goes on all fours, and there hasbeen a great deal of harm done to theology and to evangelicalreligion by carrying out too completely the analogy between moneydebts and our sins against God. But although the analogy isimperfect, it is very real. The first point that is to be broughtout in this first part of the parable is the immense magnitude ofevery man's transgressions against God. Numismatists andarithmeticians may jangle about the precise amount represented bythe thousand talents. It differs according to the talent which istaken as the basis of the calculation. There were several talents inuse in the currency of ancient days. But the very point of theexpression is not the specification of an exact amount, but the useof a round number which is to suggest an undefined magnitude. 'Tenthousand talents, ' according to one estimate, is some two millionsand 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 ofthese; and the reason why the account is made out in terms oftalents, the largest denomination in the currency of the period, isbecause 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 islarge, although the deed which embodies it may be, when measured bythe world's foot-rule, very small. For the essence of sin isrebellion against God and the enthroning of self as His victoriousrival; and all rebellion is rebellion, whether it is found in armsin the field, or whether it is simply sulkily refusing obedience andcherishing thoughts of treason. We are always apt to go wrong in ourestimate of the great and small in human actions, and, although theterms of magnitude do not apply properly to moral questions at all, there is no more conspicuous misuse of language than when we speakof anything which has in it the virus of rebellion against God, andthe 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 rattlesand poison fangs as really as the most monstrous of the brood thatcoils and hisses in some cave. So the account is made out in termsof talents, because every sin is a great one. I need not dwell uponthe numerousness that is suggested. 'Ten thousand' is the naturalcurrent expression for a number that is not innumerable, but is onlyknown to be very great. The psalmist says: 'They are more than thehairs of my head. ' How many hairs had you in your head, David? Doyou 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 byHim against whom they are done. Do you believe that about yourself, my friend, that the debit side of your account has filled all thepage and has to be carried forward on to another? Do we any of usrealise, as we all of us ought to do, the infinite number, and thetranscendent greatness, of our transgressions against the Father? But the next point to be noticed is the stern legal right of thecreditor. It sounds harsh, cruel, almost brutal, that the man andhis wife and his children should be sold into slavery, and all thathe had should be taken from him, in order to go some little waytowards the reduction of the enormous debt that he owed. Christ putsin that harsh and apparently cruel conduct in the story, not tosuggest that it was harsh and cruel, but because it was according tothe law of the time. A recognised legal right was exercised by thecreditor when he said, 'Take him; sell him for a slave, and bring mewhat he fetches in the open markets. ' So that we have here suggestedthe solemn thought of the right that divine justice, actingaccording to strict retributive law, has over each of us. Our ownconsciences attest it as perfectly within the scope of the divineretributive justice that our enormous sin should bring down atremendous punishment. I said that the analogy between sin and debt was a very imperfectone. It is imperfect in regard to one point--viz. The implication ofother people in the consequences of the man's evil; for although itis quite true that 'the evil that men do lives after them, andspreads far beyond their sight, and involves many people, no otheris amenable to divine justice for the sinner's debt. It is quitetrue that, when we do an evil action, we never can tell how far itswind-borne seeds may be carried, or where they may alight, or whatsort of unwholesome fruit they may bear, or who may be poisoned bythem; but, on the other hand, we, and we only, are responsible forour individual transgressions against God. 'If thou be wise, thoushalt be wise for thyself; and if thou scornest, thou alone shaltbear it. ' The same imperfection in the analogy applies to the next point in theparable--viz. The bankrupt debtor's prayer, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. ' Easy to promise! I wonder how long it wouldhave taken a penniless bankrupt to scrape together two and a quartermillions 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 thatbecomes a penitent at God's throne. We have not to offer to makefuture satisfaction. No! that is impossible. 'What I have written Ihave written, ' and the page, with all its smudges and blots andmisshapen letters, cannot be made other than it is by any futurepages fairly written. No future righteousness has any power to affectthe guilt of past sin. There is one thing that does _discharge_ thewriting from the page. Do you remember Paul's words, 'blotting outthe handwriting that was against us--nailing it to His Cross'? Yousometimes dip your pens into red ink, and run a couple of linesacross the page of an account that is done with. Jesus Christ doesthe same across our account, and the debt is non-existent, becauseHe has died. But the prayer is the expression, if not of penitence yet ofpetition, and all the stern rigour of the law's requirement at oncemelts 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 theheavens are higher than the earth, so great is His mercy toward' thesinful soul. II. So much, then, for the first part of this parable. Now a word asto the second, the forgiven debtor and his debt. Our Lord uses in the 27th and 28th verses of our text the sameexpression very significantly and emphatically. 'The lord of _thatservant_ was moved with compassion. ' And then again, in the 28thverse, 'But that _servant_ went out and found one of hisfellow-servants. ' The repetition of the same phrase hooks the twohalves together, emphasises the identity of the man, and thedifference 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'--somethree pounds, ten shillings--and with the hands that a minute beforehad been wrung in agony, and extended in entreaty, he throttled him;and with the voice that had been plaintively pleading for mercy aminute before, he gruffly growled, 'Pay me that thou owest. ' He hadjust come through an agony of experience that might have made himtender. He had just received a blessing that might have made hisheart glow. But even the repetition of his own petition does nottouch him, and when the poor fellow-servant, with his paltry debt, says, 'Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all, ' it availsnothing. He durst not sell his fellow-servant. God's rights over aman 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 byflinging the poor debtor into prison, but if he cannot get hisducats he will gloat over his 'pound of flesh. ' So he hurries himoff to gaol. Could a man have done like that? Ah! brethren, the things that wouldbe monstrous in our relations to one another are common in ourrelations to God. Every day we see, and, alas! do, the very samething, in our measure and degree. Do you never treasure up somebody'sslights? 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 sometrivial 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 comparedwith what many of us have been doing all our lives toward God. I daresay that some of us will go out from this place, and the next man thatwe meet that 'rubs us the wrong way, ' or does us any harm, we shallscore down his act against him with as implacable and unmerciful anunforgivingness as that of this servant in the parable. Do not believethat he was a monster of iniquity. He was just like us. We all of ushave one human heart, and this man's crime is but too natural to usall. The essence of it was that having been forgiven, he did notforgive. So, then, our Lord here implies the principle that God's mercy to usis to set the example to which our dealings with others is to beconformed. 'Even as I had mercy on thee' plainly proposes thatmiracle of divine forgiveness as our pattern as well as our hope. The world's morality recognises the duty of forgiveness. Christshows us God's forgiveness as at once the model which is the perfectrealisation of the idea in its completeness and inexhaustibleness, and also the motive which, brought into our experience, inclines andenables us to forgive. III. And now I come to the last point of the text--the debtor whohad been forgiven falling back into the ranks of the unforgiven, because he does not forgive. The fellow-servants were very much disgusted, no doubt. Ourconsciences work a great deal more rapidly, and rigidly, about otherpeople's faults than they do about our own. And nine out of ten ofthese fellow-servants that were very sorry, and ran and told theking, 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 hisrighteous indignation. The unmercifulness of Christian people is aworse 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 histruculence to his fellow-servant, had betrayed the baseness of hisnature and the ingratitude of his heart, is, 'Put him back where hewas! Tie the two and a quarter millions round his neck again! Let ussee what he will do by way of discharging it now!' Now, do not let any theological systems prevent you from recognisingthe solemn truth that underlies that representation, that there maybe things in the hearts and conduct of forgiven Christians which maycancel the cancelling of their debt, and bring it all back again. Noman can cherish the malicious disposition that treasures up offencesagainst himself, and at the same moment feel that the divine love iswrapping him round in its warm folds. If we are to retain ourconsciousness of having been forgiven by God, and received into theamplitude of His heart, we must, in our measure and degree, imitatethat on which we trust, and be mirrors of the divine mercy which wesay has saved us. Our parable lays equal stress on two things. First, that thefoundation of all real mercifulness in men is the reception offorgiving mercy from God. We must have experienced it before we canexercise it. And, second, we must exercise it, if we desire tocontinue to experience it. 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shallobtain mercy. ' That applies to Christian people. But behind thatthere lies the other truth, that in order to be merciful we mustfirst of all have received the initial mercy of cancelledtransgression. 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 wellpleased, for its abolishment and forgiveness; and then to go outinto the world, and live like Him, and show to others love kindledby and kindred to that to which we trust for our own salvation. 'Beye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk inlove, 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 truesoul's tragedy. The young man is in earnest, but his earnestness hasnot volume and force enough to float him over the bar. He wishes tohave some great thing bidden him to do, but he recoils from thesharp test which Christ imposes. He truly wants the prize, but thecost is too great; and yet he wishes it so much that he goes awaywithout it in deep sorrow, which perhaps, at another day, ripenedinto the resolve which then was too high for him. There is a certainseverity in our Lord's tone, an absence of recognition of the muchgood in the young man, and a naked stringency in His demand fromhim, which sound almost harsh, but which are set in their true lightby Mark's note, that Jesus 'loved him, ' and therefore treated himthus. The truest way to draw ingenuous souls is not to flatter, norto make entrance easy by dropping the standard or hiding therequirements, but to call out all their energy by setting beforethem the lofty ideal. Easy-going disciples are easily made--andlost. Thorough-going ones are most surely won by calling for entiresurrender. I. We may gather together the earlier part of the conversation, asintroductory to the Lord's requirement (vs. 16-20), in which we havethe picture of a real though imperfect moral earnestness, and maynote how Christ deals with it. Matthew tells us that the questionerwas young and rich. Luke adds that he was a 'ruler'--a synagogueofficial, that is--which was unusual for a young man, and indicatesthat his legal blamelessness was recognised. Mark adds one of histouches, which are not only picturesque, but character-revealing, bythe information that he came 'running' to Jesus in the way, so eagerwas he, and fell at His feet, so reverential was he. His firstquestion is singularly compacted of good and error. The fact that hecame to Christ for a purely religious purpose, not seeking personaladvantage for himself or for others, like the crowds who followedfor loaves and cures, nor laying traps for Him with puzzles whichmight entangle Him with the authorities, nor asking theologicalquestions for curiosity, but honestly and earnestly desiring to behelped 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 milesabove the dusty speculations and casuistries of the rabbis. Probablyfrom Christ Himself. He was right in recognising that the conditionsof possessing it were moral, but his conception of 'good' wassuperficial, and he thought more of doing good than of being good, and of the desired life as payment for meritorious actions. In aword, he stood at the point of view of the old dispensation. 'Thisdo, and thou shalt live, ' was his belief; and what he wished wasfurther instruction as to what 'this' was. He was to be praised inthat he docilely brought his question to Jesus, even though, asChrist's answer shows, there was error mingling in his docility. Such is the character--a young man, rich, influential, touched withreal longings for the highest life, ready, so far as he knowshimself, to do whatever he is bidden, in order to secure it. We might have expected Christ, who opened His arms wide forpublicans and harlots, to have welcomed this fair, ingenuous seekerwith some kindly word. But He has none for him. We adopt the readingof the Revised Version, in which our Lord's first word is repellent. It is in effect--'There is no need for your question, which answersitself. There is one good Being, the source and type of every goodthing, and therefore the good, which you ask about, can only beconformity to His will. You need not come to Me to know what you areto do. ' He relegates the questioner, not to his own conscience, butto the authoritative revealed will of God in the law. Modern viewsof Christ's work, which put all its stress on the perfection of Hismoral character, and His office as a pattern of righteousness, maywell be rebuked by the fact that He expressly disclaimed thischaracter, and declared that, if He was only to be regarded asrepublishing the law of human conduct, His work was needless. Menhave enough knowledge of what they must do to enter into life, without Jesus Christ. No doubt, Christ's moral teaching transcendsthat given of old; but His special work was not to tell men what todo, 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 fulfilthe law. On another occasion He answered a similar question in adifferent manner. When the Jews asked Him, 'What must we do, that wemay work the works of God?' He replied by the plain evangelicalstatement: 'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom Hehath sent. ' Why did He not answer the young ruler thus? Only becauseHe knew that he needed to be led to that thought by having his ownself-complacency shattered, and the clinging of his soul to earthlaid bare. The whole treatment of him here is meant to bring him tothe 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-wornprecepts, and might be rendered, 'What sort of commandments?' as iftaking it for granted that they must be new and peculiar. It is thesame spirit as that which in all ages has led men who with partialinsight longed after eternal life, to seek it by fantastic andunusual roads of extraordinary sacrifices or services--the spiritwhich filled monasteries, and invented hair shirts, and fastings, and swinging with hooks in your back at Hindoo festivals. Thecraving for more than ordinary 'good works' shows a profound mistakein the estimate of the ordinary, and a fatal blunder as to therelation between 'goodness' and 'eternal life. ' So Christ answers the question by quoting the second half of theDecalogue, which deals with the homeliest duties, and appending toit the summary of the law, which requires love to our neighbour asto ourselves. Why does He omit the earlier half? Probably because Hewould meet the error of the question, by presenting only theplainest, most familiar commandments, and because He desired toexcite the consciousness of deficiency, which could be most easilydone in connection with these. There is a touch of impatience in the rejoinder, 'All these have Ikept, ' and more than a touch of self-satisfaction. The law hasfailed to accomplish one of its chief purposes in the young man, inthat it has not taught him his sinfulness. No doubt he had a rightto say that his outward life had been free from breaches of suchvery elementary morality which any old woman could have taught him. He had never gone below the surface of the commandments, nor belowthe 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 byadding some strange new performances to the threadbare precepts ofeveryday duty, but by digging deep into these, and bottoming thefabric of our lives on their inmost spirit. He had yet to learn thatwhoever says, 'All these have I kept, ' thereby convicts himself ofunderstanding neither them nor himself. Still he was not at rest, although he had, as he fancied, kept themall. His last question is a plaintive, honest acknowledgment of thehungry void within, which no round of outward obediences can everfill. He knows that he has not the inner fountain springing up intoeternal life. He is dimly aware of something wanting, whether in hisobedience or no, at all events in his peace; and he is right inbelieving that the reason for that conscious void is somethingwanting in his conduct. But he will not learn what Christ has beentrying to teach him, that he needs no new commandment, but a deeperunderstanding and keeping of the old. Hence his question, half awail of a hungry heart, half petulant impatience with Christ'sreiteration of obvious duties. There are multitudes of this kind inall ages, honestly wishing to lay hold of eternal life, able topoint 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 brilliantbubble. Mark tells us that Jesus accompanied His word with one ofthose looks which searched a soul, and bore His love into it. 'Ifthou wouldest be perfect, ' takes up the confession of something'lacking, ' and shows what that is. It is unnecessary to remark thatthis commandment to sell all and give to the poor is intended onlyfor the individual case. No other would-be disciple was called uponto 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 thatthe command of renunciation is only half of Christ's answer, theother being, 'Come, follow Me. ' But we are not to slide easily overthe precept with the comfortable thought that it was specialtreatment for a special case. The principle involved in it ismedicine for all, and the only way of healing for any. This man wastied to earth by the cords of his wealth. They did not hinder himfrom keeping the commandments, for he had no temptations to murder, or adultery, or theft, or neglect of parents. But they did hinderhim from giving his whole self up, and from regarding eternal lifeas the most precious of all things. Therefore for him there was nosafety short of entire outward denuding himself of them; and, if hewas in earnest out and out in his questions, here was a new thingfor him to do. Others are hindered by other things, and they arecalled to abandon these. The one thing needful for entrance intolife is at bottom self-surrender, and the casting away of all elsefor its sovereign sake. 'I do count them but dung' must be thelanguage of every one who will win Christ. The hands must be emptiedof treasures, and the heart swept clear of lesser loves, if He is tobe grasped by our hands, and to dwell in our hearts. More of us thanwe are willing to believe are kept from entire surrender to JesusChrist, by money and worldly possessions; and many professingChristians are kept shrivelled and weak and joyless because theylove their wealth more than their Lord, and would think it madnessto do as this man was bidden to do. When ballast is thrown out, theballoon shoots up. A general unlading of the 'thick clay' whichweighs down the Christian life of England, would let thousands soarto heights which they will never reach as long as they love moneyand what it buys as much as they do. The letter of this commandmentmay be only applicable in a special case (though, perhaps, this oneyoung man was not the only human being that ever needed thistreatment), but the spirit is of universal application. No manenters into life who does not count all things but loss, and doesnot die to them all, that he may follow Christ. III. Then comes the collapse of all the enthusiasm. The questioner'searnestness chills at the touch of the test. What has become of theeagerness which brought him running to Jesus, and of the willingnessto 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 selfishworldliness which lay beneath. How many radiant enthusiasms, whichcheat their subjects quite as much as their beholders, disappearlike tinted mist when the hard facts of self-sacrifice strikeagainst them! How much sheer worldliness disguises itself fromitself and from others in glistering garments of noble sentiments, which fall at a touch when real giving up is called for, and showthe ugly thing below! How much 'religion' goes about the world, andgets made 'a ruler' of the synagogue in recognition of itsexcellence, which needs but this Ithuriel's spear to start up in itsown shape! The completeness and immediateness of the collapse arenoticeable. The young man seems to speak no word, and to take notime for reflection. He stands for a moment as if stunned, and thensilently turns away. What a moment! his fate hung on it. Once morewe see the awful mystery enacted before our eyes, of a soulgathering up its power to put away life. Who will say that thedecision of a moment, which is the outcome of all the past, may notfix the whole future? This man had never before been consciouslybrought to the fork in the road; but now the two ways are beforehim, and, knowingly, he chooses the worse. Christ did not desire himto do so; but He did desire that he should choose, and should knowthat he did. It was the truest kindness to tear away the veil ofsurface goodness which hid him from himself, and to force him to aconscious decision. One sign of grace he does give, in that he went away 'sorrowful. ' Heis not angry nor careless. He cannot see the fair prospect of theeternal life, which he had in some real fashion desired, fade away, without a pang. If he goes back to the world, he goes back feelingmore acutely than ever that it cannot satisfy him. He loves it toowell 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 thefoolish choice, and we may hope that he found no rest till he castaway all else to make Christ his own. A soul which has travelled asfar on the road to life eternal as this man had done, can scarcelythereafter walk the broad road of selfishness and death with entiresatisfaction. IV. The section closes with Christ's comment on the sad incident. Hespeaks no word of condemnation, but passes at once from theindividual to the general lesson of the difficulty which rich men(or, as He explains it in Mark, men who 'trust in riches') have inentering the kingdom. The reflection breathes a tone of pity, and isnot so much blame as a merciful recognition of special temptationswhich affect His judgment, and should modify ours. A camel with itsgreat body, long neck, and hump, struggling to get through aneedle'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. Thedisciples, with childish _naļveté_, wonder. We may wonder thatthey wondered. They could not understand what sort of a kingdom itwas into which capitalists would find entrance difficult. All doorsfly open for them to-day, as then. They do not find much difficultyin getting into the church, however hard it may be to get into thekingdom. But it still remains true that the man who has wealth has ahindrance to his religious character, which, like all hindrances, may be made a help by the use he makes of it; and that the man whotrusts in riches, which he who possesses them is wofully likely todo, has made the hindrance into a barrier which he cannot pass. That is a lesson which commercial nations, like England, have needto lay to heart, not as a worn-out saying of the Bible, which meansvery little for us, but as heavy with significance, and pointing tothe special dangers which beset Christian perfection. So real is the peril of riches, that Christ would have His disciplesregard the victory over it as beyond our human power, and beckons usaway from the effort to overcome the love of the world in ourstrength, pointing us to God, in whose mighty grace, breathed intoour feeble wills and treacherous hearts, is the only force which canovercome the attraction of perishable riches, and make any of uswilling or able to renounce them all that we may win Christ. Theyoung ruler had just shown that 'with men this is impossible. 'Perhaps he still lingered near enough to catch the assurance thatthe surrender, which had been too much for him to achieve, might yetbe 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 byour translators in this verse. That supplement is quite unnecessary, and, as is sometimes the case, is even worse than unnecessary. Itpositively obscures the true meaning of the words before us. As they stand in our Bibles, the impression that they leave uponone's mind is that Christ in them abjures the power of giving to Hisdisciples their places in the kingdom of heaven, and declares thatit belongs not to His function, but relegates it, to His ownexclusion, to the Father; whereas what He says is the very oppositeof this. He does not put aside the granting of places at His righthand or His left as not being within His province, but He states theprinciples and conditions on which He does make such a grant, and sois really claiming it as in His province. All that would have been agreat deal clearer if our translators had been contented to renderthe 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 Mineto give, but to them for whom it is prepared of My Father. ' Another introductory remark may be made, to the effect that our Lorddoes not put aside this prayer of His apostles as if they wereseeking an impossible thing. It is never safe, I know, to argue fromthe silence of Scripture. There may be many reasons for that silencebeyond our ken in any given case; but still it does strike one asnoteworthy that, when this fond mother and her ambitious sons camewith their prayer for pre-eminence in His kingdom, our Lord did notanswer what would have been so obvious to answer if it had beentrue, 'You are asking a thing which cannot be granted to anybody, for they are all upon one level in that kingdom of the heavens. ' Hesays by implication the very opposite. Not only does His silenceconfirm their belief that when He came in His glory, some would becloser to His side than others; but the plain statement of the textis that, in the depth of the eternal counsels, and by thepreparation of divine grace, there were thrones nearest to His ownwhich some men should fill. He does _not_ say, 'You are askingwhat cannot be. ' He does say, 'There are men for whom it is preparedof My Father. ' And then, still further, Jesus does not condemn the prayer asindicating a wrong state of mind on the part of James and John, though good and bad were strangely mingled in it. We are toldnowadays that it is a very selfish thing, far below the lofty heightto which our transcendental teachers have attained, to be heartenedand encouraged, strengthened and quickened, by the prospect of thecrown and the rest that remain for the people of God. If so, Christought to have turned round to these men, and have rebuked thepassion for reward, which, according to this new light, is sounworthy and so low. But, instead of that, He confines Himself toexplaining the conditions on which the fulfilment of the desire ispossible, and by implication permits and approves the desire. 'Youwant 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 aboveyour brethren, but for the sake of being nearest to Me. Hearken! Areye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?' They say untoHim (and I do not know that there are anywhere grander words thanthe calm, swift, unhesitating, modest, and yet confident answer ofthese two men), 'We are able. ' 'You shall have your desire if youfulfil the conditions. It is given to them for whom it is preparedof My Father. ' I. So, then, if we rightly understand these words, and take themwithout the unfortunate comment which our translators have inserted, they contain, first, the principle that some will be nearer Christthan others in that heavenly kingdom. As I have said, the words of our Lord do not merely imply, by theabsence 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 thepreparation of the Father. Probably the two brothers thought thatthey were only asking for preeminence in an earthly kingdom, and hadno idea that their prayer pointed beyond the grave; but thatconfusion of thought could not be cured in their then stage ofgrowth, and our Lord therefore leaves it untouched. But the othererror, if it were an error, was of a different kind, and might, foraught that one sees, have been set right in a moment. Instead ofwhich the answer adopts it, and seems to set Christ's ownconfirmation on it, as being no Jewish dream, but a truth. They were asking for earth. He answers--for heaven. He leaves themto learn in after days--when the one was slain with the sword, firstmartyr among the apostles, and the other lived to see them all passto their thrones, while he remained the 'companion in tribulation'of the second generation of the Church--how far off was thefulfilment which they fancied so near. We need not he surprised that so large a truth should be spoken byChrist so quietly, and as it were incidentally. For that is inkeeping with His whole tone when speaking of the unseen world. Oneknows not whether to wonder more at the decisive authority withwhich He tells us of that mysterious region, or at the small spacewhich such revelations occupy in His words. There is an air ofsimplicity and unconsciousness, and withal of authority, and withalof divine reticence about them all, which are in full harmony withthe 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 inevitablylead, is distinctly taught in many other places of Scripture. Weshould have had less difficulty about it, and should have felt morewhat a solemn and stimulating thought it is, if we had tried alittle more than most of us do to keep clear before us what reallyis the essential of that future life, what is the lustre of itslight, the heaven of heaven, the glory of the glory. Men talk aboutphysical theories of another life. I suppose they are possible. Theyseem to me infinitely unimportant. Warm imaginations, working bysense, write books about a future state which wonderfully succeed inmaking it real by making it earthly. Some of them read more like abook of travels in this world than forecastings of the next. Theymay be true or not. It does not matter one whit. I believe thatheaven is a place. I believe that the corporeity of our future lifeis essential to the perfection of it. I believe that Christ wears, and will wear for ever, a glorified human body. I believe that thatinvolves locality, circumstance, external occupations; and I say, all that being so, and in its own place very important, yet if westop there, we have no vision of the real light that makes thelustre, no true idea of the glory that makes the blessedness. For what is heaven? Likeness to God, love, purity, fellowship withHim; the condition of the spirit and the relation of the soul toHim. The noblest truth about the future world flows from the wordsof our Master--'This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only trueGod, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. ' Not 'this brings'; not'this will lead up to'; not 'this will draw after it'; but 'thisis'; and whosoever possesses that eternal life hath already in himthe germ of all the glories that are round the throne, and theblessedness that fills the hearts of perfected spirits. If so, if already eternal life in the bud standeth in the knowledgeof God in Christ, what makes its fruitage and completeness? Surely, not physical changes or the circumstances of heaven, at least notthese primarily, however much such changes and circumstances maysubserve our blessedness there, and the anticipation of them mayhelp our sense-bound hopes here. But the completeness of heaven isthe completion of our knowledge of God and Christ, with all theperfecting of spirit which that implies and produces. The faith, andlove, and happy obedience, and consecration which is calm, thatpartially occupied and ruled the soul here, are to be thought of asenlarged, perfected, delivered from the interruption of opposingthoughts, of sensuous desires, of selfish purposes, of earthly andsinful occupations. And that perfect knowledge and perfect union andperfect likeness are perfect bliss. And that bliss is heaven. Andif, whilst heaven is a place, the heaven of heaven be a state, thenno more words are needed to show that, then, heaven can be no deadlevel, nor can all stand at the same stage of attainments, thoughall be perfect; but that in that solemn company of the blessed, 'thespirits of just men made perfect, ' there are indefinitely numerousdegrees of approximation to the unattainable Perfection, whichstretches above them all, and draws them all to itself. We have notto think of that future life as oppressed, if I may so say, with theunbroken monotony of perfect identity in character and attainments. All indeed are like one another, because all are like Jesus, butthat basis of similarity does not exclude infinite variety. The sameglory belongs to each, but it is reflected at differing angles andreceived in divers measures. Perfect blessedness will belong toeach, but the capacity to receive it will differ. There will be thesame crown on each head, the same song on each lip, the same fulnessof joy filling each heart; but star differeth from star, and thegreat condition of happy intercourse on earth will not be wanting inheaven--a deep-seated similarity and a superficial diversity. Does not the very idea of an endless progress in that kingdom involvesuch variety? We do not think of men passing into the heavens, andbeing perfected by a bound so as that there shall be no growth. Wethink of them indeed as being perfected up to the height of theirthen capacity, from the beginning of that celestial life, so as thatthere shall be no sin, nor any conscious incompleteness, but not soas that there shall be no progress. And, if they each grow throughall the ages, and are ever coming nearer and nearer to Christ, thatseems necessarily to lead to the thought that this endless progress, carried on in every spirit, will place them at different points ofapproximation to the one centre. As in the heavens there are planetsthat roll nearer the central sun, and others that circle farther outfrom its rays, yet each keeps its course, and makes music as it moves, as well as planets whose broader disc can receive and reflect moreof the light than smaller sister spheres, and yet each blazes overits whole surface and is full to its very rim with white light; soround that throne the spirits of the just made perfect shall move inorder and peace--every one blessed, every one perfect, every onelike Christ at first, and becoming liker through every moment ofthe eternities. Each perfected soul looking on his brother shallsee there another phase of the one perfectness that blesses andadorns him too, and all taken together shall make up, in so far asfinite creatures can make up, the reflection and manifestation ofthe fulness of Christ. 'Having then gifts differing according tothe grace that is given to us' is the law for the incompletenessof earth. 'Having then gifts differing according to the glory thatis 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 theyshall sit in special nearness to Him. II. Still further, these words rightly understood assert that truthwhich, at first sight, our Authorised Version's rendering seems tomake them contradict, viz. That Christ is the giver to each of thesevarious 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 itto them. To deny or to doubt that Christ is the giver of theblessedness, whatsoever the blessedness may be, that fills thehearts and souls of the redeemed, is to destroy His whole work, todestroy all the relations upon which our hopes rest, and tointroduce confusion and contradiction into the whole matter. For Scripture teaches us that He is God's unspeakable gift; that inHim is given to us everything; that He is the bestower of all whichwe need; that 'out of His fulness, ' as one of those two discipleslong afterwards said, 'all we have received, and grace for grace. 'There is nothing within the compass of God's love to bestow of whichChrist is not the giver. There is nothing divine that is done in theheavens and the earth, as I believe, of which Christ is not thedoer. The representation of Scripture is uniformly that He is themedium of the activity of the divine nature; that he is the energyof the divine will; that He is, to use the metaphor of the OldTestament, 'the arm of the Lord'--the forthputting of God's power;that He is, to use the profound expression of the New Testament, theWord of the Lord, cognate with, and the utterance of, the eternalnature, the light that streams from the central brightness, theriver that flows from the else sealed fountain. As the arm is to thebody, and as is the word to the soul, so is Christ to God--theeternal divine utterance and manifestation of the divine nature. And, therefore, to speak of anything that a man can need andanything that God can give as not being given by Christ, is tostrike at the very foundation, not only of our hopes, but at thewhole scheme of revealed truth. He is the giver of heaven andeverything else which the soul requires. And then, again, let me remind you that on this matter we are notleft to such general considerations as those that I have beensuggesting, but that the plain statements of Scripture do confirmthe assertion that Christ is the determiner and the bestower of allthe differing grades of glory and blessedness yonder. For do we notread of Him that He is the Judge of the whole earth? Do we not readof Him that His word is acquittal and His frown condemnation--thatto 'be accepted of Him' is the highest aim and end of the Christianlife? Do we not read that it is He who says, 'Come, ye blessed of MyFather, enter into the kingdom prepared for you'? Do we not readthat the apostle, dying, solaced himself with the thought that'there was laid up for him a crown of glory, which the Lord, therighteous Judge, would give him at that day'? And do we not read inthe very last book of Scripture, written by one of those twobrothers, and containing almost verbal reference to the words of mytext, the promise seven times spoken from the immortal lips of theglorified Son of Man, walking in the midst of the candlesticks, 'Tohim that overcometh will I give'? The fruit of the tree of life isplucked by His hands for the wearied conquerors. The crown of lifeis set by Him on the faithful witnesses' brows. The hidden manna andthe new name are bestowed by Him on those who hold fast His name. Itis He who gives the victors kingly power over the nations. Heclothes in white garments those who have not defiled their robes. His hand writes upon the triumphant foreheads the name of God. Andhighest of all, beyond which there is no bliss conceivable, 'To himthat overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne. ' Christ is the bestower of the royalties of the heavens as of theredemptions of earth, and it is His to give that which we crave atHis hands, when we ask pardon here and glory hereafter. 'To him thatis athirst will He give of the water of life freely, ' and to himthat overcometh will He give the crown of glory. III. These words lead us, in the third place, to the furtherthought, 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 thatpre-eminence as conferred because you chose to ask it--as given by apiece of favouritism. Not so. I cannot make a man foremost in mykingdom in that fashion. There are conditions which must precedesuch 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 theheavenly world were dependent solely on Christ's arbitrary will, andcould be bestowed by an exercise of mere power, as an Eastern princemay make this man his vizier and that other one his water-carrier. The same principles which we have already applied to the elucidationof the idea of varieties and stages of nearness to Christ in Hisheavenly kingdom have a bearing on this matter. If we rightlyunderstand that the essential blessedness of heaven is likeness toChrist, we shall feel that mere wishing carries no man thither, andthat mere sovereign will and power do not avail to set us there. There are conditions indispensable, from the very nature of thecase, and unless they are realised it is as impossible for us toreceive, as for Him to give, a place at His side. If, indeed, thefuture blessedness consisted in mere external circumstances andhappier conditions of life, it might be so bestowed. But if placeand surroundings, and a more exquisite and ethereal frame, are butsubordinate sources of it, and its real fountain is union with Jesusand assimilation to Him, then something else than idle desires mustwing the soul that soars thither, and His transforming grace, notHis arbitrary will, must set us at His own right hand 'in theheavenly places. ' Of all the profitless occupations with which men waste their lives, none are more utterly useless than wishing without acting. Ourwishes are meant to impel us to the appropriate forms of energy bywhich they can be realised. When a pauper becomes a millionaire bysitting and vehemently wishing that he were rich, when ignorancebecomes learning by standing in a library and wishing that thecontents of all these books were in its head, there will be somehope that the gates of heaven will fly open to your desire. But tillthen, 'many, I say unto you, shall seek to enter in and not beable. ' Many shall _seek_; you must _strive_. For wishing is one thing, and _willing_ is another, and _doing_ is yet another. And in regardto entrance into Christ's kingdom, our 'doing' is trusting in Him whohas done all for us. 'This is the work of God, that ye should believeon Him whom He hath sent. ' Does our wish lead us to the acceptanceof the condition? Then it will be fulfilled. If not, it will remainfruitless, 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, Isuppose. Some of its characteristics attract you. You believe inpunishment for sin, and you would willingly escape that. You believein a place of rest after toil, of happiness after sorrow, wherenipping frosts of disappointment, and wild blasts of calamity, andslow, gnawing decay no more harm and kill your joys--and you wouldlike that. But do you wish to be pure and stainless, to have yourhearts fixed on God alone, to have your whole being filled with Him, and emptied of self and sense and sin? The peace of heaven attractsyou--but its praise repels, does it not? Its happiness draws yourwishes--does its holiness seem inviting? It would be joyful to befar 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 apart of the whole, and are exchanged for positive aversion when thereal 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 tothat region of outer darkness, is conscious of an idle wish forpeace and joy beyond the grave. In common matters a man may bedevoured by vain desires all his lifetime, because he will not passbeyond wishing to acting accordingly. 'The desire of the slothfulkilleth him; because his hands refused to labour, he covetethgreedily all the day long. ' And with like but infinitely moretragical issues do these vain wishes for a place in that calm world, where nothing but holiness enters, gnaw at many a soul. 'Let me diethe death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his, ' wasthe aspiration of that Gentile prophet, whose love of the worldobscured even the prophetic illumination which he possessed--and hisepitaph is a stern comment on the uselessness of such empty wishes, 'Balaam, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword. ' It needs morethan 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 couldnot, if He would, set a man at His right hand whose heart was notthe home of simple trust and thankful love, whose nature and desireswere unprepared for that blessed world. It would be like taking oneof those creatures--if there be such--that live on the planet whoseorbit is farthest from the sun, accustomed to cold, organised fordarkness, and carrying it to that great central blaze, with all itsfierce flames and tongues of fiery gas that shoot up a thousandmiles in a moment. It would crumble and disappear before itsblackness could be seen against the blaze. His loving will embraces us all, and is the foundation of all ourhopes. But it had to reach its purpose by a bitter road which He didnot shrink from travelling. He desires to save us, and to realisethe desire He had to die. 'It became Him for whom are all things, inbringing many sons unto glory, to make the Captain of theirsalvation perfect through suffering. ' What He had to do, we have toaccept. Unless we accept the mercy of God in Christ, no wish on ourparts, nor any exercise of power on His, will carry us to the heavenwhich He has died to open, and of which He is at once the giver andthe gift. IV. These glorious places are given as the result of a divinepreparation. 'To them for whom it is prepared of My Father. ' We have seen thatChrist is not to be regarded as abjuring the office, with which Hisdisciples' confidence led them to invest Him--that of allotting toHis servants their place in His kingdom. He neither refers it to theFather without Himself, nor claims it for Himself without theFather. The living unity of will and work which subsists between theFather and the Son forbids such a separation and distribution ofoffice. And that unity is set forth on both its sides in His owndeep words, 'The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeththe Father do: for whatsoever things He doeth, these also doeth theSon likewise. ' So, then, while the gift of thrones at His side is His act and theFather's, in like manner the preparation of the royal seats fortheir occupants, and of the kings for their thrones, is the Father'sact and His. Our text does not tell us directly what that preparation is, anymore than it tells us directly what the principles are on whichentrance into and pre-eminence in the kingdom are granted. But weknow enough in regard to both, for our practical guidance, for thevigour of our hope, and the grasp of our faith. There is a twofold divine preparation of the heavens for men. One isfrom of old. The kingdom is 'prepared for you before the foundationof the world. ' That preparation is in the eternal counsel of thedivine love, which calleth the things that are not as though theywere, and before which all that is evolved in the generations of menand the epochs of time, lies on one plane, equally near to dim fromwhose throne diverge far beneath the triple streams of past, present, and future. And beside that preparation, the counsel of pardoning mercy andredeeming grace, there is the other preparation--the realisation ofthat eternal purpose in time through the work of Jesus Christ ourLord. His consolation to His disciples in the parting hour was, 'Igo to prepare a place for you. ' How much was included in these wordswe shall never know till we, like Him, see of the travail of Hissoul, and like Him are satisfied. But we can dimly see that on theone hand His death, and on the other hand His entrance into thatholiest of all, make ready for us the many mansions of the Father'shouse. He was crucified for our offences, He was raised again forour justification, He is passed through the heavens to stand ourForerunner in the presence of God--and by all these mighty acts Heprepares the heavenly places for us. As the sun behind a cloud, which hides it from us, is still pouring out its rays on far-offlands, so He, veiled in dark, sunset clouds of Calvary, sent theenergy of His passion and cross into the unseen world and made itpossible that we should enter there. 'When Thou didst overcome thesharpness of death, Thou didst open the gates of the kingdom ofheaven to all believers. ' As one who precedes a mighty host providesand prepares rest for their weariness, and food for their hunger, insome city on their line of march, and having made all things ready, is at the gates to welcome their travel-stained ranks when theyarrive, and guide them to their repose; so He has gone before, ourForerunner, to order all things for us there. It may be that unlessChrist were in heaven, our brother as well as our Lord, it were noplace for mortals. It may be that we need to have His glorifiedbodily presence in order that it should be possible for humanspirits to bear the light, and be at home with God. Be that as itmay, this we know, that the Father prepares a place for us by theeternal counsel of His love, and by the all-sufficient work ofChrist, by whom we have access to the Father. And as His work is the Father's preparation of the place for us bythe Son, the issue of His work is the Father's preparation of us forthe place, through the Son, by the Spirit. 'He that hath wrought usfor the self-same thing is God. ' If so, then what follows? This, among other things, that wishes arevain, for heaven is no gift of arbitrary favouritism, but that faithin Christ, and faith alone, leads us to His right hand--and themeasure of our faith and growing Christlikeness here, will be themeasure of our glory hereafter, and of our nearness to Him. It ispossible to be 'saved, _yet so as by fire_. ' It is possible tohave 'an entrance ministered unto us _abundantly_ into theeverlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. ' If wewould be near Him then, we must be near Him now. If we would shareHis throne, we must bear His cross. If we would be found in thelikeness of His resurrection, we must be 'conformable unto Hisdeath. ' Then such desires as these true-hearted, and yet mistaken, disciples expressed will not be the voice of selfish ambition, butof dependent love. They will not be vain wishes, but be fulfilled byHim, who, stooping from amid the royalties of heaven, with love uponHis face and pity in His heart, will give more than we ask. 'Seekestthou a place at My right hand? Nay, I give thee a more wondrousdignity. To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in Mythrone. ' 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 thatthe ambitious request of James and John and their foolish mother, that they should sit at Christ's right hand and His left in Hiskingdom, should have been occasioned by, and have followedimmediately upon, our Lord's solemn and pathetic announcement of Hissufferings. But the connection is not difficult to trace. Thedisciples believed that, in some inexplicable way, the sufferingswhich our Lord was shadowing forth were to be the immediateprecursors of His assuming His regal dignity. And so they took timeby the forelock, as they thought, and made haste to ensure theirplaces in the kingdom, which they believed was now ready to burstupon them. Other occasions in the Gospels in which we find similarquarrelling among the disciples as to pre-eminence are similarlyassociated with references made by our Lord to His approachingcrucifixion. On a former occasion He cured these misplaced ambitionsby setting a child in the midst of them. On this He cures them by astill more pathetic and wonderful example, His own; and He says, 'I, in My lowliness and service, am to be your Pattern. In Me see thebasis of all true greatness, and the right use of all influence andauthority. The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but tominister. ' I. So, then, let us look first at the perfect life of service of theServant-Lord. Now, in order to appreciate the significance of that life of service, we must take into account the introductory words, 'The Son of Mancame. ' They declare His pre-existence, His voluntary entrance intothe conditions of humanity, and His denuding Himself of 'the glorywhich He had with the Father before the world was. ' We shall neverunderstand the Servant-Christ until we understand that He is theEternal Son of the Father. His service began long before any of Hisacts of sympathetic and self-forgetting lowliness rendered help tothe miserable here upon earth. His service began when He laid aside, not the garments of earth, but the vesture of the heavens, andgirded Himself, not with the cincture woven in man's looms, but withthe flesh of our humanity, 'and being found in fashion as a man, 'bowed Himself to enter into the conditions of earth. This was thefirst, the chiefest of all His acts of service, and the sanctity andawfulness of it run through the list of all His deeds and make themunspeakably great. It was much that His hands should heal, that Hislips should comfort, that His heart should bleed with sympathy forsorrow. But, oh! it was more that He _had_ hands to touch, lips tospeak 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 isthe transcendent example of the true use of greatness; there is theconspicuous instance of the true basis of authority and rule. For itwas because He was 'found in fashion as a Man' that He has won a 'namethat 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 ofself-oblivious and self-sacrificing ministration to others. Think ofthe purity of the source from all which these wonders andblessednesses of service for man flowed. The life of Jesus Christ isself-forgetting love made visible. Scientists tell us that, by thearrangement of particles of sand upon plates of glass, there can bemade, as it were, perceptible to the eye, the sweetness of musicalsounds; and each note when struck will fling the particles intovarying forms of beauty. The life of Jesus Christ presents in shapesof loveliness and symmetry the else invisible music of a divinelove. He lets us see the rhythm of the Father's heart. The sourcefrom which His ministrations have flowed is the pure source of aperfect love. Ancient legends consolidated the sunbeams into thebright figure of the far-darting god of light. And so the sunbeamsof the divine love have, as it were, drawn themselves together andshaped themselves into the human form of the Son of Man who 'camenot to be ministered unto, but to minister. ' No taint of bye-ends was in that service; no sidelong glances atpossible advantages of influence or reputation or the like, which sooften deform men's philanthropies and services to one another. Nomore than the sunbeam shines for the sake of collateral issues whichmay benefit itself, did Jesus Christ seek His own advantage inministering to men. There was no speck of black in that lustrouswhite robe, but all was perfectly unselfish love. Like the clearsea, weedless and stainless, that laves the marble steps of thepalaces of Venice, the deep ocean of Christ's service to man waspure to the depths throughout. That perfect ministry of the Servant-Lord was rendered with strangespontaneity and cheerfulness. One of the evangelists says, in a verystriking and beautiful phrase, that 'He healed them that had need ofhealing, ' as if the presence of the necessity evoked the supply, bythe instinctive action of a perfect love. There was never in Him onetrace of reluctance to have leisure broken in upon, reposedisturbed, or even communion with God abbreviated. All men couldcome always; they never came inopportunely. We often cheerfully takeup a burden of service, but find it very hard to continue bearingit. But He was willing to come down from the mountain ofTransfiguration because there was a demoniac boy in the plain; andtherefore He put aside the temptation--'Let us build here threetabernacles. ' He was willing to abandon His desert seclusion becausethe multitude sought Him. Interrupted in His communion with theFather by His disciples, He had no impatient word to say, but 'Letus go into other cities also, for therefore am I sent. ' When Hestepped from the fishing-boat on the other side of the lake to whichHe had fled for a moment of repose, He was glad when He saw themultitude who had pertinaciously outrun Him, and were waiting forHim on the beach. On His Cross He had leisure to turn from His ownphysical sufferings and the weight of a world's sin, which lay uponHim, to look at that penitent by His side, and He ended His life inthe ministry of mercy to a brigand. And thus cheerfully, and alwayswithout 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 tosympathisers. Think of the variety of the gifts which He brought inHis 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 equallove. And think of how that ministering was always ministration by 'theLORD. ' For there is nothing to me more remarkable in the Gospelnarrative than the way in which, side by side, there lie in Christ'slife the two elements, so difficult to harmonise in fact, and soimpossible to have been harmonised in a legend, the consciousness ofauthority and the humility of a servant. The paradox with which Johnintroduces his sweet pathetic story of our Lord's washing thedisciples' feet is true of, and is illustrated by, every instance ofmore than ordinary lowliness and self-oblivion which the Gospelcontains. 'Jesus, knowing that He had come from God, and went toGod, and that the Father had given all things into His hand'--didwhat? 'Laid aside His garments and took a towel and girded Himself. 'The two things ever go together. And thus, in His lowliestabasement, as in a star entangled in a cloud, there shine out, allthe 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, andspeak stern words, as all true service must. For it is not servicebut cruelty to sympathise with the sinner, and say nothing incondemnation of his sin. And yet no sternness is blessed which isnot plainly prompted by desire to help. Now, I know far better than you do how wretchedly inadequate allthese poor words of mine have been to the great theme that I havebeen trying to speak of, but they may at least--like a little waterpoured 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 andheart that picture of Him who was and is amongst us as 'One thatserveth, ' how sharp a test, and how stringent, and, as it seems tous sometimes, impossible, a commandment are involved in the 'evenas' of my text. When we think of our grudging services; when wethink of how much more apt we are to insist upon what men owe to usthan of what we owe to them; how ready we are to demand, how slow weare to give; how we flame up in what we think is warrantedindignation if we do not get the observance, or the sympathy, or theattention that we require, and yet how little we give of these, wemay well say, 'Thou hast set a pattern that can only drive us todespair. ' If we would read our Gospels more than we do with thefeeling, as we trace that Master through each of His phases ofsympathy and self-oblivion and self-sacrifice and service, 'that iswhat I should be, ' what a different book the New Testament would beto us, and what different people you and I would be! There is no ground on which we can rest greatness or superiority inChrist's kingdom except this ground of service. And there is no usethat we can make either of money or of talents, of acquirements oropportunities, except the use of helping our fellows with them, which will stand the test of this model and example. 'It is moreblessed to give than to receive. ' The servant who serves for love ishighest in the hierarchy of Heaven. God, who is supreme, has stoopedlower than any that are beneath Him, and His true rule follows, notbecause He is infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, or anyof those other pompous Latin words which describe what men call Hisattributes, 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 lessonto ourselves. I have no space, and, I hope, no need to enlarge uponit; but be sure of this, that if we are ever to be near the rightand the left of the Master in His kingdom, there is one way, andonly one way, to come thither, and that is to make self abdicate itsauthority as the centre of our lives, and to enthrone there Christ, and for His sake all our brethren. Be ambitious to be first, butremember, _Noblesse oblige_. He that is first must become last. He that is Servant of all is Master of all. That is the only masterythat is worth anything, the devotion of hearts that circle round thesource from which they draw light and warmth. What is it that makesa mother the queen of her children? Simply that all her life she hasbeen their servant, and never thought about herself, but alwaysabout them. Now much might be said as to the application of these threadbareprinciples in the Church and in society, but I do not enlarge onthat; only let me say in a word--that here is the one law on whichpreeminence in the Church is to be allocated. What becomes of sacerdotal hierarchies, what becomes of the 'lordsover God's heritage, ' if the one ground of pre-eminence is service?I know, of course, that there may be different forms embodying oneprinciple, but it seems to me that that form of Church polity isnearest the mind of Christ in which the only dignity is dignity ofservice, and the only use of place is the privilege of stooping andhelping. This fruitful principle will one day shape civil as well asecclesiastical societies. For the present, our Lord draws a contrastbetween the worldly and the Christian notions of rank and dignity. 'It shall not be so among you, ' says He. And the nobler conceptionof eminence and service set forth in His disciples, if they are trueto their Lord and their duty, will leaven, and we may hope finallytransform society, sweeping away all vulgar notions of greatness asdepending on birth, or wealth, or ruder forms of powers, andmarshalling men according to Christ's order of precedence, in whichhelpfulness is preeminence and service is supremacy, whileconversely pre-eminence is used to help and superiority stoops toserve. One remark will close my sermon. You have to take the last words ofthis 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 tominister, '--if Jesus Christ had stopped there He would only havebeen one more of the long roll of ineffectual preachers and prophetswho 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 giveHis 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 forthe loftiness of Christlike service. I know that there is plenty ofentirely irreligious and Christless beneficence in the world. AndGod forbid that I should say a word to seem to depreciate that. Butsure I am that for the noblest, purest, most widely diffused andblessedly operative kinds of service of man, there is no motive andspring anywhere except 'He loved me, and gave Himself for me. ' And, bought by that service and that blood, it will be possible, and itis obligatory upon all of us, to 'do unto others, ' as He Himselfsaid, 'as I have done to you. ' 'The servant is not greater than hisLord. ' 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 ofthe Gospels. ' In so far as that phrase and the movement of thoughtwhich it describes are a protest against the substitution ofdoctrines for the Person whom the doctrines represent, I, for one, rejoice in it. But I believe that the antithesis suggested by thephrase, and by some of its advocates avowed, between the Christ ofthe Gospels and the Christ of the Epistles, is false. The Christ ofthe Gospels is the Christ of the Epistles, as I humbly venture tobelieve. And I cannot but see that there is a possibility of amovement which, carried out legitimately, should command the fullestsympathy of every Christian heart, degenerating into the rejectionof 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 wholeChrist of all the Gospels, the Christ over whose cradle angels sang, by whose empty grave angels watched, whose ascending form angelsbeheld and proclaimed that He should come again to be our Judge. Goback to that Christ, and all will be well. Now it seems to me that one direction in which there is apossibility of such movement as I have referred to being one-sidedand harmful is in reference to the conception which we form of thedeath of Jesus Christ. And therefore I ask you to listen for a fewmoments to me at this time whilst I try to bring out what is plainin the words before us; and is, as I humbly believe, interwoven inthe whole texture of all the Gospels--viz. , the conception whichJesus Christ Himself formed of the meaning of His death. I. The first thing that I notice is that the Christ of the Gospelsthought and taught that His death was to be His own act. I do not think that it is an undue or pedantic pressing of thesignificance of the words before us, if I ask you to notice two ofthe significant expressions in this text. 'The Son of Man_came_, ' and came 'to _give_ His life. ' The one word refers to the actof entrance into, the other to the act of departure from, this earthlylife. They correspond in so far as that both bring into prominenceChrist's own consent, volition, and action in the very two thingsabout which men are least consulted, their being born and their dying. 'The Son of Man came. ' Now if that expression occurred but once itmight be minimised as being only a synonym for birth, having nospecial force. But if you will notice that it is our Lord's habitualword about Himself, only varied occasionally by another one equallysignificant when he says that He 'was sent'; and if you will furthernotice that all through the Gospels He never but once speaks ofHimself as being 'born, ' I think you will admit that I am not makingtoo much of a word when I say that when Christ, out of the depths ofHis consciousness, said 'the Son of Man _came_, ' He was teachingus that He lived before He was born, and that behind the natural factof birth there lay the supernatural fact of His choosing to beincarnated for man's redemption. The one instance in which He doesspeak of Himself as 'being born' is most instructive in thisconnection. For it was before the Roman governor; and He accompaniedthe clause in which He said, 'To this end was I born'--which wasadapted to Pilate's level of intelligence--with another one whichseemed to be inserted to satisfy His own sense of fitness, ratherthan for any light that it would give to its first hearer, 'And forthis cause came I into the world. ' The two things were not synonymous;but before the birth there was the coming, and Jesus was born becausethe Eternal Word willed to come. So says the Christ of the Gospels;and the Christ of the Epistles is represented as 'taking upon Himthe form of a servant, and being found in fashion as a man. ' Do youaccept that as true of 'the historic Christ'? With precise correspondence, if we turn to the other end of Hislife, we find the equally significant expression in my text whichasserts for it, too, that the other necessity to which mennecessarily and without their own volition bow was to Christ amatter of choice. 'The Son of Man came to _give_. ' 'No mantaketh it from Me, ' as He said on another occasion. 'I lay it downof Myself. ' 'The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep. ' 'Myflesh . .. I give for the world's life. ' Now, brethren, we are not toregard these words as mere vague expressions for a willing surrenderto the necessity of death, but as expressing what I believe istaught us all through Scripture, and is fundamental to any realgrasp of the real Christ, that He died because He chose, and chosebecause He loved. What meant that 'loud voice' with which He said'It is finished, ' but that there was no physical exhaustion, such aswas usually the immediate occasion of death by crucifixion? Whatmeant that surprising rapidity with which the last moment came inHis case, to the astonishment of the stolid bystanders? They meantthe 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 declarationsof its voluntary character. 'He gave up the ghost. ' 'He yielded HisSpirit. ' He breathed forth His life, and so He died. As one of the old fathers said, 'Who is this that thus falls asleepwhen He wills? To die is weakness, but thus to die is power. ' 'Theweakness of God is stronger than man. ' The desperate king of Israelbade his slave kill him, and when the menial shrunk from suchsacrilege he fell upon his own sword. Christ bade His servant Death, 'Do this, ' and he did it; and dying, our Lord and Master declaredHimself the Lord and Master of Death. This is a part of the historyof the historic Christ. Do you believe it? II. Then, secondly, the Christ of the Gospels thought and taughtthat His death was one chief aim of His coming. I have omitted words from my text which intervene between its firstand its last ones; not because I regard them as unimportant, butbecause they would lead us into too wide a field to cover in onesermon. But I would pray you to observe how the re-insertion of themthrows immense light upon the significance of the words which I havechosen. 'The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but tominister. ' That covers the whole ground of His gracious and gentledealings here on earth, His tenderness, self-abnegation, sympathy, healing, and helpfulness. Then, side by side with that, and as thecrowning manifestation of His work of service, without which Hislife--gracious, radiant, sweet as it is--would still want somethingof its power, He sets His death. Surely that is an altogether unexampled phenomenon; altogether aunique and unparalleled thing, that a _man_ should regard thatwhich for all workers, thinkers, speakers, poets, philanthropists, is the sad term of their activity, as being a part of His work; andnot only a part, but so conspicuous a part that it was a purposewhich He had in view from the very beginning, and before thebeginning, of His earthly life. So Calvary was to Jesus Christ nointerruption, tragic and premature, of His life's activities. Hisdeath was no mere alternative set before Him, which He chose ratherthan be unfaithful or dumb. He did not die because He was hounded byhostile priests, but He came on purpose that He might so end Hiscareer. I need not remind you of, and space would not permit me to dwellupon, other instances in the Gospels in which our Lord speaks thesame language. At the very beginning of His public ministry He toldthe inquiring rabbi, who came to Him with the notion that He wouldbe somewhat flattered by His recognition by one of the authoritativeand wise pundits of the nation, that 'the Son of Man must be liftedup. ' The necessity was before Him, but it was no unwelcomenecessity, for it sprung from His own love. It was the very aim ofHis coming, to live a Servant and to die a Ransom. Dear brethren, let me press upon you this plain truth, that noconception of Christ's death which looks upon it merely as theclose, by pathetic sufferings, of a life to the activities of whichit adds nothing but pathos, approaches the signification of it whichinheres in the thought that this was the aim and purpose with whichJesus Christ was incarnate, that He should live indeed the pure andsweet life which He lived, but equally that He should die thepainful and bitter death which He died. He was not merely a martyr, though the first of them, but something far more, as we shall seepresently. If to you the death of Jesus Christ is the same in kind, however superior in degree, as those of patriots and reformers andwitnesses for the truth and martyrs for righteousness, then I humblyventure to represent that, instead of going back to, you have goneaway 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 butan imaginary one. III. So, thirdly, notice that the Christ of the Gospels thought andtaught that His death was a ransom. A ransom is a price paid in exchange for captives that they may beliberated; or for culprits that they may be set free. And that wasChrist'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 thatword. We are all bound and held by the chain of our sins. We allstand guilty before God, and, as I believe, there is a necessity inthat loving divine nature whereby it is impossible that without aransom there can be, in the interests of mankind and in theinterests of righteousness, forgiveness of sins. I do not mean thatin the words before us there is a developed theory of atonement, butI do mean that no man, dealing with them fairly, can strike out ofthem the notion of vicarious suffering in exchange for, or insteadof, 'the many. ' This is no occasion for theological discussion, noram I careful now to set forth a fully developed doctrine; but I amdeclaring, 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 ismade the sacrifice for the world's sins. And, dear brethren, I beseech you to consider, how can we save thecharacter of Jesus Christ, accepting these Gospels, which on thehypothesis about which I am now speaking are valid sources ofknowledge, without recognising that He deliberately led Hisdisciples to believe that He died for--that is, instead of--themthat put their trust in Him? For remember that not only such wordsas these of my text are to be taken into account. Remember that itwas the Christ of the Gospels who established that last rite of theLord's Supper, in which the broken bread, and the separation betweenthe bread and the wine, both indicated a violent death, and who saidabout both the one and the other of the double symbols, 'For you. ' Ido not understand how any body of professing believers, rejectingChrist's death as the sacrifice for sin, can find a place in theirbeliefs or in their practice for that institution of the Lord'sSupper, or can rightly interpret the sacred words then spoken. Thisis why the Cross was Christ's aim. This is why He said, with Hisdying breath, 'It is finished. ' This truth is the explanation of Hiswords, 'The Good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep. ' And this truth of a ransom-price lies at the basis of all vigorousChristianity. A Christianity without a dying Christ is a dyingChristianity. And history shows us that the expansiveness andelevating power of the Gospel depend on the prominence given to thesacrifice on the Cross. An old fable says that the only thing thatmelts adamant is the blood of a lamb. The Gospel reveals theprecious blood of Jesus Christ, His death for us as a ransom, as theone power which subdues hostility and binds hearts to Him. TheChrist of the Gospels is the Christ who taught that He died for us. IV. Lastly, the Christ of the Gospels thought and taught that Hisdeath had world-wide power. He says here, 'A ransom for _many_. ' Now that word is not usedin this instance in contradistinction to 'all, ' nor incontradistinction to 'few. ' It is distinctly employed as emphasisingthe contrast between the single death and the wide extent of itsbenefits; and in terms which, rigidly taken, simply expressindefiniteness, it expresses universality. That that is so seems tome to be plain enough, if we notice other places of Scripture towhich, 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'ssacrifice for men. And the Apostle in another place, where probablythere may be an allusion to the words of the text, so varies them asthat 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 avague word, and in it we see dim crowds stretching away beyond ourvision, for whom that death was to be the means of salvation. I takeit that the words of our text have an allusion to those in the greatprophecy in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, in which we read, 'ByHis knowledge shall My righteous Servant' (mark the allusion in ourtext, 'Who came to _minister_') 'justify many, for He shallbear their iniquities. ' So, brethren, I believe that I am not guilty of unduly widening out ourLord's thought when I say that the indefinite 'many' is practically'all. ' And, brother, if 'all, ' then _you_; if all, then _me_; ifall, then _each_. Think of a man, nineteen centuries ago, awayin a little insignificant corner of the world, standing up and saying, 'My death is the price paid in exchange for the world!' That ismeekness and lowliness of heart, is it? That is humility, so beautifulin a teacher, is it? How any man can accept the veracity of thesenarratives, believe that Jesus Christ said anything the least likethis, not believe that He was the Divine Son of the Father, theSacrifice for the world's sin, and yet profess--and honestly profess, I doubt not, in many cases--to retain reverence and admiration, allbut adoration, for Him, I confess that I, for my poor part, cannotunderstand. But I ask you, what you are going to do with these thoughts andteachings of the Christ of the Gospels. Are you going to take themfor true? Are, you going to trust your salvation to Him? Are yougoing to accept the ransom and say, 'O Lord, truly I am Thy servant;Thou hast loosed my bonds'? Brethren, the Christ of the Gospels, byall means; but the Christ that said, 'The Son of Man came to . .. Give His life a ransom for many. ' My Christ, and your Christ, andthe world's Christ is 'the Christ that died; yea, rather, that isrisen again; who is even at the right hand of God, who also makethintercession 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 withLazarus and his sisters. Some sense of His approaching death tingedthe modest festivities of that evening with sadness, and spoke inMary'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 roadto the cross. Who can doubt that He felt the relief of thatmomentary relaxation of the strain on His spirit, and thecorresponding pressure of its renewed tightening? This passage showsHim putting out from the quiet haven and facing the storm again. Itis in two main sections, dealing respectively with the royalprocession, and the acts of the King in the temple. I. The procession of the King. The first noteworthy point is thatour Lord initiates the whole incident, and deliberately sets Himselfto evoke the popular enthusiasm, by a distinct voluntary fulfilmentof a Messianic prophecy. The allusion to the prophecy, in Hissending for the colt and mounting it, may have escaped the disciplesand the crowds of pilgrims; but they rightly caught His intention tomake a solemn triumphal entry into the city, and responded with aburst of enthusiasm, which He expected and wished. The poor garmentsflung hastily on the animals, the travel-stained cloaks cast on therocky path, the branches of olive and palm waved in the hands, andthe tumult of acclaim, which shrilly echoed the words of the psalm, and proclaimed Him to be the Son of David, are all tokens that thecrowds hailed Him as their King, and were all permitted and welcomedby Him. All this is in absolute opposition to His usual action, which had been one long effort to damp down inflammable andunspiritual Messianic hopes, and to avoid the very enthusiasm whichnow surges round Him unchecked. Certainly that calm figure, sittingon the slow-pacing ass, with the noisy multitude pressing round Him, is strangely unlike Him, who hid Himself among the hills when theysought to make Him a King. His action is the more remarkable, if itbe remembered that the roads were alive with pilgrims, most of whompassing through Bethany would be Galileans; that they had seenLazarus walking about the village, and knew who had raised him; thatthe Passover festival was _the_ time in all the year whenpopular tumults were to be expected; and that the crowds going toJerusalem were met by a crowd coming from it, bent on seeing thedoer and the subject of the great miracle. Into this heap ofcombustibles our Lord puts a light. He must have meant that itshould blaze as it did. What is the reason for this contrast? The need for the formerreticence no longer existed. There was no fear now of His teachingand ministry being interrupted by popular outburst. He knew that itwas finished, and that His hour had come. Therefore, the same motiveof filial obedience which had led Him to avoid what would preventHis discharging His Father's commission, now impelled Him to drawthe attention of the nation and its rulers to the full extent of Hisclaims, and to put the plain issue of their acceptance or rejectionin the most unmistakable manner. A certain divine decorum, if we mayso call it, required that once He should enter the city as its King. Some among the shouting crowds might have their enthusiasm purifiedand spiritualised, if once it were directed to Him. It was for us, no less than for them, that this one interruption of His ordinarymethod was adopted by Him, that we too might ponder the fact that Helaid His hand on that magnificent prophecy, and said, 'It is mine. Iam the King. ' The royal procession is also a revelation of the character of theKing and the nature of His kingdom. A strange King this, indeed, whohas not even an ass of His own, and for followers, peasants withpalm branches instead of swords! What would a Roman soldier or oneof Herod's men have thought of that rustic procession of a pauperprince on an ass, and a hundred or two of weaponless, penniless men?Christ's one moment of royal pomp is as eloquent of His humiliationas the long stretch of His lowly life is. And yet, as is always thecase, side by side with the lowliness there gleams the veiledsplendour. He had to borrow the colt, and the message in which Heasks for it is a strange paradox. 'The Lord hath need of him'--sogreat was the poverty of so great a King. But it spoke, too, of amore than human knowledge, and of an authority which had only torequire in order to receive. Some farming villager, no doubt, whowas a disciple but secretly, gladly yielded his beasts. The prophecywhich Matthew quotes, with the omission of some words, fromZechariah, and the addition of the first clause from Isaiah, issymbolic, and would have been amply fulfilled in the mission andcharacter of Christ, though this event had never taken place. Butjust as it is symbolic, so this external fulfilment, which isintended to point to the real fulfilment, is also symbolic. Thechariot and the horse are the emblems of conquerors. It is fittingthat the Prince of Peace should make His state entry on a colt, unridden before, and saddled only with a garment. Zechariah meantthat Zion's King should not reign by the right of the strongest, andthat all His triumphs should be won by lowly meekness. Christ meantthe same by His remarkable act. And has not the picture of Him, throned thus, stamped for ever on the imagination of the world aprofounder sense of the inmost nature of His kingdom than many wordswould have done? Have we learned the lesson of the gentleness whichbelongs to His kingdom, and of the unchristian character of war andviolence? Do we understand what the Psalmist meant when he sang, 'Inthy majesty ride on prosperously, because of . .. Meekness'? Let usnot forget the other picture, 'Behold, a white horse, and He thatsat thereon, called Faithful and True; and in righteousness He dothjudge and make war. ' The entry may remind us also of the worthlessness of mere enthusiasticfeeling in reference to Jesus Christ. The day was the Sunday. How manyof that crowd were shouting as loudly, 'Crucify Him!' and 'Not thisman, but Barabbas!' on the Friday? The palm-branches had not faded, where they had been tossed, before the fickle crowd had swung roundto the opposite mood. Perhaps the very exuberance of feeling at thebeginning, had something to do with the bitterness of the execrationsat the end, of the week. He had not answered their expectations, but, instead of heading a revolt, had simply taught in the temple, andmeekly 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 theremembrance of their Sunday's hosannas by their groans round Hisgibbet. But there is a wider lesson here. No enthusiasm can be toointense which is based upon a true sense of our need of Christ, andof His work for us; but it is easy to excite apparently religiousemotion by partial presentations of Him, and such excitement foamsitself away by its very violence, like some Eastern river that inwinter time dashes down the wady with irresistible force, and insummer is bone dry. Unless we know Christ to be the Saviour of oursouls and the Lamb of God, we shall soon tire of singing hosannas inHis train, and want a king with more pretensions; but if we havelearned 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 theaccuracy of Matthew's arrangement of events here is unnecessary. Hehas evidently grouped, as usual, incidents which have a commonbearing, and wishes to put these three, of the cleansing, thehealing, and the pleasure in the children's praise, as thecharacteristic acts of the King in the temple. We can scarcely avoidseeing in the first of the three a reference to Malachi's prophecy, 'The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple . .. AndHe shall purify the sons of Levi. ' His first act, when in manhood Hevisited the temple, had been to cleanse. His first act when Heenters 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 ofMammon so near the altar of God was sacrilege in His eyes, andthough He had passed the traders unmolested many times since thatfirst driving out, now that He solemnly comes to claim His rights, He cannot but repeat it. It is perhaps significant that His wordsnow 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 thereforenecessarily void of reference to Himself. He is exercising theauthority of a son over His own house, and bears Himself as Lord ofthe temple. Before, He charged them with making it a 'house ofmerchandise'; now, with turning it into a robber's cave. Evilrebuked and done again is worse than before. Trafficking in thingspertaining to the altar is even more likely than other trading tocross the not always very well defined line which separates tradefrom trickery and commerce from theft. That lesson needs to be laidto heart in many quarters now. There is always a fringe of moneyedinterests round Christ's Church, seeking gain out of religiousinstitutions; and their stands have a wonderful tendency to creepinwards from the court of the Gentiles to holier places. Theparasite grows very quickly, and Christ had to deal with it morethan once to keep down its growth. The sellers of doves and changersof money into the sacred shekel were venial offenders compared withmany in the Church, and the race is not extinct. If Christ were tocome to His house to-day, in bodily form, who doubts that He wouldbegin, as He did before, by driving the traders out of His temple?How many 'most respectable' usages and people would have to go, ifHe did! The second characteristic, or we might say symbolical, act is thehealing of the blind and lame. Royal state and cleansing severityare wonderfully blended with tender pity and the gentle hand ofsovereign virtue to heal. The very manifestation of the former drewthe needy to Him; and the blind, though they could not see, and thelame, though they could not walk, managed to grope and hobble theirway to Him, not afraid of His severity, nor daunted by His royalty. No doubt they haunted the temple precincts as beggars, with perhapsas little sense of its sacredness as the money-changers; but theirmisery kindled a flicker of confidence and desire, to which He whotends the dimmest wick till it breaks into clear flame could not butrespond. Though in His house He casts out the traders, He will healthe cripples and the blind, who know their need, and faintly trustHis heart and power. Such a trait could not be wanting in thistypical representation of the acts of the King. Finally, He encourages and casts the shield of His approval roundthe children's praises. How natural it is that the children, pleasedwith the stir and not yet drilled into conventionalism, should havekept up their glad shouts, even inside the temple enclosure! Howtheir fresh treble voices ring yet through all these centuries! Thepriests had, no doubt, been nursing their wrath at all that had beengoing on, but they had not dared to interfere with the cleansing, nor, for very shame, with the healings; but now they see theiropportunity. This is a clear breach of all propriety, and that isthe crime of crimes in the eyes of such people. They had kept quitecool and serenely contemptuous, amid the stir of the gladprocession, and they did not much care though He healed somebeggars; but to have this unseemly noise, though it was praise, wasmore than they could stand. Ecclesiastical martinets, and men whosereligion is mostly ceremony, are, of course, more 'moved withindignation' at any breach of ceremonial regulations than at holesmade in graver laws. Nothing makes men more insensitive to the ringof real worship than being accustomed to the dull decorum of formalworship. Christ answers their 'hearest thou?' with a 'did ye neverread?' and shuts their mouths with words so apposite in theirplainest meaning that even they are silenced. To Him these youngringing hosannas are 'perfect praise, ' and worth any quantity ofrabbis' preachments. In their deeper sense, His words declare thatthe ears of God and of His Son, the Lord of the temple, are moregladly filled with the praises of the 'little ones, ' who know theirweakness, and hymn His goodness with simple tongue, than withheartless eloquence of words or pomp of worship. The psalm fromwhich the words are taken declares man's superiority over thehighest works of God's hands, and the perfecting of the divinepraise from his lips. We are but as the little children of creation, but because we know sin and redemption, we lead the chorus ofheaven. As St. Bernard says, 'Something is wanting to the praise ofheaven, if those be wanting who can say, "We went through fire andthrough water; and Thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place. "' Inlike manner, those praise Him most acceptably among men who knowtheir feebleness, and with stammering lips humbly try to breathetheir 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 fewevents which are recorded in all the four Gospels. Its singularunlikeness to the rest of His life, and its powerful influence inbringing about the Crucifixion, may account for its prominence inthe narratives. It took place probably on the Sunday of PassionWeek. Before the palm branches were withered the enthusiasm had diedaway, and the shouting crowd had found out that this was not thesort of king that they wanted. They might have found that out, evenby the very circumstances of the entrance, for they were profoundlysignificant; though their meaning, like so much of the rest ofChrist's life, was less clear to the partakers and spectators thanit is to us. 'These things understood not the disciples at thefirst, ' says John in closing his narrative of the entrance, 'butwhen Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that they had donethese things unto Him. ' My object in this sermon is not at all to attempt a pictorialtreatment of this narrative, for these Gospels tell it us a greatdeal better than any of us can tell it after them; but to seek tobring out, if it may be, two or three aspects of its significance. I. First, then, I ask you to consider its significance as analtogether exceptional fact in Christ's life. Throughout the whole of the preceding period, He had had two aimsdistinctly in view. One was to shun publicity; and the other was todamp down the heated, vulgar anticipations of the multitude, whoexpected a temporal king. And now here He deliberately, and of setpurpose, takes a step which is like flinging a spark into a powderbarrel. The nation was assembled in crowds, full of the unwholesomeexcitement which attended their meeting for the annual feast. Allwere in a quiver of expectation; and knowing that, Jesus Christoriginates this scene by His act of sending the two disciples intothe village over against them, to 'bring the ass, and the colt thefoal of an ass. ' The reasons for a course so entirely opposed to allthe preceding must have been strong. Let us try to see what theywere. First, He did it in order to precipitate the conflict which was to endin His death. Now, had He any right to do that? Knowing as He did theferment of expectation into which He was thrusting this new elementof disturbance, and foreseeing, as He must have done, that it wouldsharpen the hostility of the rulers of the people to a murderousdegree, how can He be acquitted of one of two things--either singularshortsightedness or rash foolhardiness in taking such a step? Was Hejustified, or was He not? If we are to look at His conduct from ordinary points of view, theanswer must certainly be that He was not. And we can only understandthis, and all the rest of His actions during the fateful three orfour days that followed it, if we recognise in them the fixedresolve of One who knew that His mission was not only to live and toteach by word and life, but to die, and by death to deliver theworld. I take it that it is very hard to save the character of JesusChrist for our reverence if we refuse to regard His death as for ourredemption. But if He came, and knew that He came, not only 'tominister' but 'to give His life a ransom for many, ' then we canunderstand how He hastened to the Cross, and deliberately set alight to the train which was to end in that great explosion. On anyother hypothesis it seems to me immensely hard to account for Hisact here. Then, still further, looking at this distinctly exceptional fact inour Lord's life, we see in it a very emphatic claim to very singularprerogative and position. He not only thereby presented Himselfbefore the nation in their collective capacity as being the King ofIsrael, but He also did a very strange thing. He dressed Himself, soto speak, in order to fulfil a prophecy. He posed before the worldas being the Person who was meant by sacred old words. And HisEntrance upon the slow-pacing colt was His voluntary and solemnassertion that He was the Person of whom the whole stream andcurrent of divinely sent premonitions and forecasts had beenwitnessing from the beginning. He claimed thereby to be the King ofIsrael and the Fulfiller of the divine promises that were of old. Now again, I have to ask the question, Was He right, or was Hewrong? If He was right, then He is a great deal more than a wiseTeacher, and a perfect Example of excellence. If He was wrong, He isa great deal less. There is no escape from that alternative, as itseems to me, but by the desperate expedient of denying that He everdid this thing which this narrative tells us that He did. At allevents I beseech you all, dear friends, to take fairly into youraccount of the character of Jesus Christ, this fact, that He, themeek, the gentle, said that He was meek, and everybody has believedHim; and that once, in the very crisis of His life, and incircumstances which make the act most conspicuous, He who alwaysshunned publicity, nor 'caused His voice to be heard in thestreets, ' and steadfastly put away from Himself the vulgar homagethat would have degraded Him into a mere temporal monarch, didassert 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 ourLord'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 lastbolt in His quiver. All else had failed, perhaps this might succeed. We know not the depths of the mysteries of that divine foreknowledgewhich, even though it foresees failure, ceases not to plead and towoo obstinate hearts. But this we may thankfully learn, that, justas with despairing hope, but with unremitting energy, Jesus Christ, often rejected, offered Himself once more if perchance He might winmen to repentance, so the loving patience and long-suffering of ourGod cease not to plead ever with us. 'Last of all He sent unto themHis Son, saying, They will reverence My Son when they see Him'; andyet the expectation was disappointed, and the Son was slain. Wetouch deep mysteries, but the persistence of the pleading andrejected love and pity of our God shine through this strange fact. II. And now, secondly, let me ask you to note its significance as asymbol. The prophecy which two out of the four evangelists--viz. , Matthew andJohn--regard as having been, in some sense, fulfilled by the Entranceinto Jerusalem, would have been fulfilled quite as truly if there hadbeen no Entrance. For the mere detail of the prophecy is but apicturesque 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 andthe outward details of Old Testament prophecy, is intended for littlemore than a picture or a signpost which may direct our thoughts to theinward correspondence, which is the true fulfilment. So then, the deed, like the prophecy after which it is moulded, iswholly 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 ascythe-armed chariot, like the Pharaohs and the Assyrian monarchs, who have left us their vainglorious monuments, but mounted on theemblem of meekness, patience, gentleness, and peace. And He is apauper King, for He has to borrow the beast on which He rides, andHis throne is draped with the poor, perhaps ragged, robes of ahandful of fishermen. And His attendants are not warriors bearingspears, but peasants with palm branches. And the salutation of Hisroyalty is not the blare of trumpets, but the 'Hosanna!' from athousand throats. That is not the sort of King that the world callsa King. The Roman soldiers might well have thought they wereperpetrating an exquisite jest when they thrust the reed into Hisunresisting hand, and crushed down the crown of thorns on Hisbleeding brows. But the symbol discloses the very secret of His Kingdom, theinnermost mysteries of His own character and of the forces to whichHe intrusts the further progress of His word. Gentleness is royaland omnipotent; force and violence are feeble. The Lord is in thestill, small voice, not in the earthquake, nor the fire, nor themighty wind. The dove's light pinion will fly further than the wingsof Rome's eagles, with their strong talons and blood-dyed beaks. Andthe kingdom that is established in meekness, and rules by gentlenessand for gentleness, and has for its only weapons the power of loveand the omnipotence of patience, that is the kingdom which shall beeternal and universal. Now all that is a great deal more than pretty sentiment; it has theclosest practical bearing upon our lives. How slow God's Church hasbeen 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 otherof the weapons out of the world's armoury, to promote the kingdom ofChrist. But it has all been in vain. There is only one power thatconquers hate, and that is meek love. There is only one way by whichChrist's kingdom can stand firm, and that is its unworldly contrastto all the manner of human dominion. Wheresoever God's Church hasallied itself with secular sovereignties, and trusted in the arm offlesh, there has the fine gold become dimmed. Endurance wears outpersecution, patient submission paralyses hostile violence, for youcannot keep on striking down unresisting crowds with the sword. TheChurch of Christ is an anvil that has been beaten upon by manyhammers, and it has worn them all out. Meekness is victorious, andthe kingdom of Christ can only be advanced by the faithfulproclamation of His gentle love, from lips that are moved by heartswhich themselves are conformed to His patient image. Then, still further, let me remind you that this symbol carries init, as it seems to me, the lesson of the radical incompatibility ofwar with Christ's kingdom and dominion. It has taken the world allthese centuries to begin to learn that lesson. But slowly men arecoming 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 itstimulates, will be felt to be as utterly incompatible with thespirit of Christianity as slavery is felt to-day. The prophecy whichunderlies our symbol is very significant in this respect. Immediately upon that vision of the meek King throned on the coltthe foal of an ass, follows this: 'And I will cut off the chariotfrom Ephraim, and the horses from Jerusalem; and the battle bowshall be cut off, and He shall speak peace unto the heathen. ' Let me beseech you, Christian men and women, to lay to heart theduty of Christ's followers in reference to the influence andleavening of public opinion upon this matter, and to see to it that, in so far as we can help, we set ourselves steadfastly against thatdevilish spirit which still oppresses with an incubus almostintolerable, the nations of so-called Christendom. Lift up yourvoices be not afraid, but cry, 'We are the followers of the Princeof Peace, and we war against the war that is blasphemy against Hisdominion. ' And so, still further, note the practical force of this symbol asinfluencing our own conduct. We are the followers of the meekChrist. 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 virtuehas altered since Jesus Christ taught us how to love. The oldheathen virtues of magnanimity, fortitude, and the like have 'withshame to take a lower room. ' There is something better than these. The saint has all the virtues of the old heathen hero, and some morebesides, which are higher than these, and those which he has incommon, he has in different proportion. The flaunting tulips andpeonies of the garden of the world seem to outshine the whitesnowdrops 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-travelthe fiery warhorse, and will pursue its patient, steadfast path tillHe 'bring forth righteousness unto judgment, ' and 'all the uprightin heart shall follow Him. ' III. Lastly, notice the significance of this fact as a prophecy. Itwas, 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 isimpossible to look at it without seeing, besides all its othermeanings, gleaming dimly through it, the anticipations of that othercoming, when the Lord Himself 'shall descend with a shout, with thevoice 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 Psalmwe find, side by side with the great words, 'Ride on prosperouslybecause of truth and _meekness_ and righteousness, ' the others, 'Thine arrows are sharp in the hearts of the king's enemies; thepeople shall fall under Thee. ' Now, though it is possible that thatlater warlike figure may be merely the carrying out of the thoughtwhich is more gently put before us in the former words, still itlooks as if there were two sides to the conquering manifestation ofthe king--one being in 'meekness and truth and righteousness, ' andthe other in some sense destructive and punitive. But, however that may be, my second scene is drawn from the lastbook of Scripture, where we read that, when the first seal wasopened, there rode forth a Figure, crowned, mounted upon a whitesteed, bearing bow and arrow, 'conquering and to conquer. ' And, though that again may be but an image of the victorious progress ofthe gentle Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the whole earth, stillit comes as one in a series of judgments, and may rather be taken toexpress the punitive effects which follow its proclamation even hereand now. But there can be no doubt with regard to the third of the sceneswhich I connect with the incident of which we are discoursing: 'AndI saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse; and He that sat uponHim was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth He judgeand make war. .. . And out of His mouth goeth a sharp sword, that withit He should smite the nations; and He shall rule them with a rod ofiron; and He treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath ofAlmighty God. ' That is the Christ who came into Jerusalem on the coltthe 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 wrathof infinite gentleness? In the triumphal entry, we find that, whenthe procession turned the rocky shoulder of Olivet, and the long lineof the white city walls, with the gilding of the Temple glittering inthe sunshine, burst upon their view, the multitude lifted up theirvoices in gladness. But Christ sat there, and as He looked across thevalley, and beheld, with His divine prescience, the city, now sojoyous and full of stir, sitting solitary and desolate, He lifted upHis 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 gentleJesus is our Judge, therefore let us not presume. I beseech you, brethren, lay, as these poor people did their garments, your lustsand proud wills in His way, and join the welcoming shout that hailsthe King, 'meek and having salvation. ' And then, when He comes forthto judge and to destroy, you will not be amongst the ranks of theenemies, whom He will ride down and scatter, but amongst 'the armiesthat follow Him, . .. Clothed in fine linen, clean and pure. ' 'Kiss the Son lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way when Hiswrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put theirtrust 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 PassionWeek. It was a day of hand-to-hand conflict with the Jewishauthorities and of exhausting toil, as the bare enumeration of itsincidents shows. It included all that Matthew records between verse20 of this chapter and the end of the twenty-fifth chapter--theanswer to the deputation from the Sanhedrin; the three parablesoccasioned by it, namely, those of the two sons, this one, and thatof the marriage of the king's son; the three answers to the traps ofthe Pharisees and Herodians about the tribute, of the Sadduceesabout the resurrection, and of the ruler about the chiefcommandment; Christ's question to His questioners about the Son andLord of David; the stern woes hurled at the unmasked hypocrites; towhich must be added, from other gospels, the sweet eulogium on thewidow's mite, and the deep saying to the Greeks about the corn ofwheat, with, possibly, the incident of the woman taken in adultery;and then, following all these, the solemn prophecies of the endcontained in Matthew xxiv. And xxv. , spoken on the way to Bethany, as the evening shadows were falling. What a day! What a fountain ofwisdom and love which poured out such streams! The pungent severityof this parable, with its transparent veil of narrative, is onlyappreciated by keeping clearly in view the circumstances and thelisteners. They had struck at Jesus with their question as to Hisauthority, and He parries the blow. Now it is His turn, and thesharp point goes home. I. The first stage is the preparation of the vineyard, in whichthree steps are marked. It is planted and furnished with allappliances needful for making wine, which is its great end. Thedirect divine origin of the religious ideas and observances of'Judaism' is thus asserted by Christ. The only explanation of themis that God enclosed that bit of the wilderness, and with His ownhands set growing there these exotics. Neither the theology nor theritual is of man's establishing. We need not seek for specialmeanings for wall, wine-press, and tower. They simply express thecompleteness of the equipment of the vineyard, as in Isaiah's song, which lies at the foundation of the parable, and suggest hisquestion, '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 arethe people. No doubt it was 'like people, like priest. ' The strangedominion of the Pharisees rested entirely on popular consent, andtheir temper accurately indexed that of the nation. The Sanhedrinwas the chief object at which Christ aimed the parable. But it onlygave form and voice to the national spirit, and 'the people loved tohave it so. ' National responsibilities are not to be slipped out ofby being shifted on to the broad shoulders of governments orinfluential 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 oftheir privileges. They prided themselves on these as their own, butthey were only tenants. They made their 'boast of the law'; but theyforgot that fruit was the end of the divine planting and equipment. Holiness and glad obedience were what God sought, and when He foundthem, He was refreshed as with 'grapes in the wilderness. ' Having installed the husbandmen, the owner goes into anothercountry. The cluster of miracles which inaugurate an epoch ofrevelation are not continued beyond its beginning. Centuries ofcomparative divine silence followed the planting of the vineyard. Having given us our charge, God, as it were, steps aside to leave usroom to work as we will, and so to display what we are made of. Heis absent in so far as conspicuous oversight and retribution areconcerned. He is present to help, love, and bless. The faithfulhusbandman has Him always near, a joy and a strength, else no fruitwould grow; but the sin and misery of the unfaithful are that theythink of Him as far off. II. Then comes the habitual ill-treatment of the messengers. Theseare, of course, the prophets, whose office was not only to foretell, but to plead for obedience and trust, the fruits sought by God. Thewhole history of the nation is summed up in this dark picture. Generation after generation of princes, priests, and people had donethe same thing. There is no more remarkable historical fact thanthat of the uniform hostility of the Jews to the prophets. That anation of such a sort as always to hate and generally to murder themshould have had them in long succession, throughout its history, issurely inexplicable on any naturalistic hypothesis. Such men werenot the natural product of the race, nor of its circumstances, astheir fate shows. How did they spring up? No 'philosophy of Jewishhistory' explains the anomaly except the one stated here, --'He sentHis servants. ' We are told nowadays that the Jews had a naturalgenius for religion, just as the Greeks for art and thought, and theRomans for law and order, and that that explains the origin of theprophets. Does it explain their treatment? The hostility of the husbandmen grows with indulgence. From beatingthey go on to killing, and stoning is a specially savage form ofkilling. The opposition which began, as the former parable tells us, with polite hypocrisy and lip obedience, changed, under the stimulusof prophetic appeals, to honest refusal, and from that to violencewhich did not hesitate to slay. The more God pleads with men, themore self-conscious and bitter becomes their hatred; and the morebitter their hatred, the more does He plead, sending othermessengers, more perhaps in number, or possibly of more weight, withlarger commission and clearer light. Thus both the antagonisticforces grow, and the worse men become, the louder and morebeseeching is the call of God to them. That is always true; and itis 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 theacts of the same set of husbandmen. The class or nation was one, asa stream is one, though all its particles are different; and thePharisees and scribes, who stood with frowning hatred before Him asHe spoke, were the living embodiment of the spirit which hadanimated all the past. In so far as they inherited their taint, andrepeated their conduct, the guilt of all the former generations waslaid at their door. They declared themselves their predecessors'heirs; and as they reproduced their actions, they would have to bearthe accumulated weight of the consequences. III. Verses 37-39 tell of the mission of the Son and of its fatalissue. Three points are prominent in them. The first is the uniqueposition which Christ here claims, with unwonted openness anddecisiveness, as apart from and far above all the prophets. Theyconstitute one order, but He stands alone, sustaining a closerrelation to God. They were faithful 'as servants, ' but He 'as aSon, ' or, as Mark has it, 'the only and beloved Son. ' The listenersunderstood Him well enough. The assertion, which seemed audaciousblasphemy 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 theirKing, and they must do it with their eyes open. Jesus claimed tofill a unique position. Was He right or wrong in His claim? If Hewas wrong, what becomes of His wisdom, His meekness, His religion?Is a religious teacher, who made the mistake of thinking that He wasthe Son of God in a sense in which no other man is so, worthy ofadmiration? If He was right, what becomes of a Christianity whichsees in Him only the foremost of the prophets? The next point marked is the owner's vain hope, in sending his Son. Hethought that He would be welcomed, and He was disappointed. It was Hislast attempt. Christ knew Himself to be God's last appeal, as He is toall men, as well as to that generation. He is the last arrow in God'squiver. When it has shot that bolt, the resources even of divine loveare exhausted, and no more can be done for the vineyard than He hasdone for it. We need not wonder at unfulfilled hopes being hereascribed to God. The startling thought only puts into language thegreat mystery which besets all His pleadings with men, which arecarried on, though they often fail, and which must, therefore, in viewof His foreknowledge, be regarded as carried on with the knowledge thatthey will fail. That is the long-suffering patience of God. Thedifficulty is common to the words of the parable and to the facts ofGod's unwearied pleading with impenitent men. Its surface is adifficulty, its heart is an abyss of all-hoping charity. The last point is the vain calculation of the husbandmen. Christputs hidden motives into plain words, and reveals to these rulerswhat they scarcely knew of their own hearts. Did they, in theirsecret conclaves, look each other in the face, and confess that Hewas the Heir? Did He not Himself ground His prayer for their pardonon their ignorance? But their ignorance was not entire, else theyhad had no sin; neither was their knowledge complete, else they hadhad no pardon. Beneath many an obstinate denial of Him lies a secretconfession, or misgiving, which more truly speaks the man than doesthe loud negation. And such strange contradictions are men, that thesecret conviction is often the very thing which gives bitterness andeagerness to the hostility. So it was with some of those whosehidden suspicions are here set in the light. How was the rulers' orthe people's wish to 'seize on His inheritance' their motive forkilling Jesus? Their great sin was their desire to have theirnational prerogatives, and yet to give no true obedience. The rulingclass clung to their privileges and forgot their responsibilities, while the people were proud of their standing as Jews, and carelessof God's service. Neither wished to be reminded of their debt to theLord of the vineyard, and their hostility to Jesus was mainlybecause He would call on them for fruits. If they could get thisunwelcome and persistent voice silenced, they could go on in thecomfortable old fashion of lip-service and real selfishness. It isan account, in vividly parabolic language, not only of _their_hostility, but of that of many men who are against Him. They wish topossess life and its good, without being for ever pestered withreminders of the terms on which they hold it, and of God's desirefor their love and obedience. They have a secret feeling that Christhas the right to ask for their hearts, and so they often turn fromHim angrily, and sometimes hate Him. With what sad calmness does Jesus tell the fate of the son, socertain that it is already as good as done! It _was_ done intheir counsels, and yet He does not cease to plead, if perchancesome hearts may be touched and withdraw themselves from theconfederacy of murder. IV. We have next the self-condemnation from unwilling lips. Our Lordturns to the rulers with startling and dramatic suddenness, whichmay have thrown them off their guard, so that their answer leapedout before they had time to think whom it hit. His solemnearnestness laid a spell on them, which drew their own condemnationfrom them, though they had penetrated the thin veil of the parable, and knew full well who the husbandmen were. Nor could they refuse toanswer a question about legal punishments for dishonesty, which wasput to them, the fountains of law, without incurring a second timethe humiliation just inflicted when He had forced them toacknowledge that they, the fountains of knowledge, did not knowwhere John came from. So from all these motives, and perhaps from amingling of audacity, which would brazen it out and pretend not tosee the bearing of the question, they answer. Like Caiaphas in hiscounsel, and Pilate with his writing on the Cross, and many another, they spoke deeper things than they knew, and confessed beforehandhow just the judgments were, which followed the very lines markedout 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 thecorner-stone, nor on the original application of the psalm. We mustbe content with remarking that our Lord, in this last portion of Hisaddress, throws away even the thin veil of parable, and speaks thesternest truth in the nakedest words. He puts His own claim in theplainest fashion, as the corner-stone on which the true kingdom ofGod was to be built. He brands the men who stood before Him asincompetent builders, who did not know the stone needed for theiredifice when they saw it. He declares, with triumphant confidence, the futility of opposition to Himself--even though it kill Him. Heis sure that God will build on Him, and that His place in thebuilding, which shall rise through the ages, will be, to evencareless eyes, the crown of the manifest wonders of God's hand. Strange words from a Man who knew that in three days He would becrucified! Stranger still that they have come true! He is thefoundation of the best part of the best men; the basis of thought, the motive for action, the pattern of life, the ground of hope, forcountless individuals; and on Him stands firm the society of HisChurch, and is hung all the glory of His Father's house. Christ confirms the sentence just spoken by the rulers onthemselves, but with the inversion of its clauses. All disguise isat an end. The fatal 'you' is pronounced. The husbandmen'scalculation had been that killing the heir would make them lords ofthe vineyard; the grim fact was that they cast themselves out whenthey cast him out. He is the heir. If we desire the inheritance, wemust get it through Him, and not kill or reject, but trust and obeyHim. The sentence declares the two truths, that possession of thevineyard depends on honouring the Son, and on bringing forth thefruits. The kingdom has been taken from the churches of Asia Minor, Africa, and Syria, because they bore no fruit. It is not held by uson other conditions. Who can venture to speak of the awful doom setforth in the last words here? It has two stages: one a lessermisery, which is the lot of him who stumbles against the stone, while it lies passive to be built on; one more dreadful, when it hasacquired motion and comes down with irresistible impetus. To stumbleat Christ, or to refuse His grace, and not to base our lives andhopes on Him is maiming and damage, in many ways, here and now. Butsuppose the stone endowed with motion, what can stand against it?And suppose that the Christ, who is now offered for the rock onwhich we may pile our hopes and never be confounded, comes to judge, will He not crush the mightiest opponent as the dust of the summerthreshing-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 itsgentleness both increased; its severity to the class to whom it wasalways severe, and its gentleness to the class from whom it neverturned away. Side by side, through all His manifestation of Himself, there were the two aspects: 'He showed Himself _froward_' (if Imay quote the word) to the self-righteous and the Pharisee; and Hebent with more than a woman's tenderness of yearning love over thedarkness and sinfulness, which in its great darkness dimly knewitself blind, and in its sinfulness stretched out a lame hand offaith, and groped after a divine deliverer. Here, in my text, thereare only words of severity and awful foreboding. Christ has beentelling those Pharisees and priests that the kingdom is to be takenfrom them, and given to a nation that brings forth the fruitsthereof. He interprets for them an Old Testament figure, oftenrecurring, which we read in the 118th Psalm (and I may just say, inpassing, that we get here His interpretation of that psalm, and thevindication of our application of it, and other similar ones, to Himand His office); 'The stone which the builders rejected, ' said He, 'is become the head of the corner'; and then, falling back on otherOld Testament uses of the same figure, He weaves into one the wholeof them--that in Isaiah about the 'sure foundation, ' and that inDaniel about 'the stone cut out without hands, which became a greatmountain, ' crushing down all opposition, --and centres them all inHimself; as fulfilled in Himself, in His person and His work. The two clauses of my text figuratively point to two differentclasses of operation on the rejecters of the Gospel. What are thesetwo classes? 'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken:but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder. ' Inthe one case, the stone is represented as passive, lying quiet; inthe other, it has acquired motion. In the one case, the man stumblesand hurts himself; a remediable injury, a self-inflicted injury, anatural injury, without the active operation of Christ to produce itat all; in the other case the injury is worse than remediable, it isutter, absolute, grinding destruction, and it comes from the activeoperation of the 'stone of stumbling. ' That is to say, the one classrepresents the present hurts and harms which, by the naturaloperation of things, without the action of Christ judicially at all, every man receives in the very act of rejecting the Gospel; and theother represents the ultimate issue of that rejection, whichrejection is darkened into opposition and fixed hostility, when thestone that was laid 'for a foundation' has got wings (if I may sosay), and comes down in judgment, crushing and destroying theantagonist utterly. 'Whosoever falls on this stone is broken, ' hereand now; and 'on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him topowder, ' hereafter and yonder. Taking, then, into account the weaving together in this passage ofthe three figures from the Old Testament to which I have alreadyreferred, --the rejected stone, the foundation, and the mountain-stoneof Daniel, and looking in the light of these, at the twofold issues, one present and one future, which the text distinctly brings beforeus, --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, utterdestruction. I. In the first place, every man has some kind of connection withChrist. I am not going to enter at all now upon any question about thecondition of the 'dark places of the earth' where the Gospel has notcome as a well-known preached message; we have nothing to do withthat; the principles on which _they_ are judged is not thequestion before us now. I am speaking exclusively about persons whohave heard the word of salvation, and are dwelling in the midst ofwhat we call a Christian land. Christ is offered to each of us, ingood faith on God's part, as a means of salvation, a foundation onwhich 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 contactand connection with that rejected Saviour, but he still sustains arelation to Him; and the message that he has refused to believe, isexercising an influence upon his character and his destiny. Christ comes, I say, offered to us all in good faith on the part ofGod, as a foundation upon which we may build. And then comes in thatstrange mystery, that a man, consciously free, turns away from theoffered mercy, and makes Him that was intended to be the basis ofhis life, the foundation of his hope, the rock on which, steadfastand serene, he should build up a temple-home for his soul to dwellin, --makes Him a stumbling-stone against which, by rejection andunbelief, he breaks himself! My friend, will you let me lay this one thing upon your heart, --youcannot hinder the Gospel from influencing you somehow. Taking it inits lowest aspects, it is one of the forces of modern society, anelement in our present civilisation. It is everywhere, it obtrudesitself on you at every turn, the air is saturated with itsinfluence. To be unaffected by such an all-pervading phenomenon isimpossible. To no individual member of the great whole of a nationis it given to isolate himself utterly from the community. Whetherhe oppose or whether he acquiesce in current opinions, to denudehimself of the possessions which belong in common to his age andstate of society is in either case impracticable. 'That which comethinto your mind, ' said one of the prophets to the Jews who weretrying to cut themselves loose from their national faith and theirancestral prerogatives, 'That which cometh into your mind shall notbe at all, that ye say, We will be as the heathen, as the familiesof the countries to serve wood and stone. ' Vain dream! You can nomore 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 upfrom other influences proper to my time and nation. You cannot goback to the old naked barbarism, and you cannot reduce the influenceof Christianity, even considered merely as one of the characteristicsof the times, to zero. You may fancy you are letting it alone, butit does not let you alone; it is here, and you cannot shut yourselfoff from it. But it is not merely as a subtle and diffused influence that theGospel exercises a permanent effect upon us. It is presented to eachof us here individually, in the definite form of an actual offer ofsalvation for each, and of an actual demand of trust from each. Thewords pass into our souls, and thenceforward we can never be thesame as if they had not been there. The smallest ray of lightfalling on a sensitive plate produces a chemical change that cannever be undone again, and the light of Christ's love, once broughtto the knowledge and presented for the acceptance of a soul, stampson it an ineffaceable sign of its having been there. The Gospel onceheard, is always the Gospel which has been heard. Nothing can alterthat. Once heard, it is henceforward a perpetual element in thewhole condition, character, and destiny of the hearer. Christ does something to every one of us. His Gospel will tell uponyou, it _is_ telling upon you. If you disbelieve it, you arenot the same as if you had never heard it. Never is the box ofointment opened without some savour from it abiding in every nostrilto 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 theillustration of the text, Christ is something, and does something toevery one of us. He is either the rock on which I build, poor, weak, sinful creature as I am, getting security, and sanctity, andstrength from Him, I being a living stone' built upon 'the livingstone, ' and partaking of the vitality of the foundation; or else Heis the other thing, 'a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence tothem which stumble at the word. ' Christ stands for ever in some kindof 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 fora moment, by way of illustrating this principle, first of all, ofthe _positive_ harm which you do to yourself in the act ofturning away from the mercy offered you in Christ; and then thinkfor a moment of the _negative_ loss which you sustain by thesame act. Note the _positive_ harm. Am I uncharitable when I say that noman ever yet _passively neglected_ the message of love in God'sSon; but that always _this_ is the rude outline of the experienceof people who know what it is to have a Saviour offered to them, andknow what it is to put Him away, --that there is a feeble and transitorymovement of heart and will; that Conscience says, 'Thou oughtest'; thatWill says, 'I would'; that the heart is touched by some sense of thatgreat and gentle vision of light and love which passes before the eye;that the man, as it were, like some fever-ridden patient, lifts himselfup for an instant from the bed on which he is lying, and puts out ahand, and then falls back again, the vacillating, fevered, paralysedwill recoiling from the resolution, and the conscience having power tosay, 'Thou oughtest, ' but no power to enforce the execution of itsdecrees, and the heart turning away from the salvation that it wouldhave found in the love of love, to the loss that it finds in the loveof self and earth? Or in other words, is it not true that every manwho rejects Christ does in simple verity _reject_ Him, and notmerely neglect Him; that there is always an effort, that there is astruggle, feeble, perhaps, but real, which ends in the turning away? Itis not that you stand there, and simply let Him go past. That were badenough; but the fact is worse than that. It is that you turn your backupon Him. It is not that His hand is laid on yours, and yours remainsdead and cold, and does not open to clasp it; but it is that His handbeing laid on yours, you clench yours the tighter, and _will not_have it. And so every man (I believe) who rejects Christ does thesethings thereby--wounds his own conscience, hardens his own heart, makes himself a worse man, just because he has had a glimpse, andhas willingly, and almost consciously, 'loved darkness rather thanlight. ' Oh, brethren, the message of love can never come into ahuman soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving thatspirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, andall its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection. I have nothingto do now with pursuing that process to its end; but the naturalresult--if there were no future Judgment at all, if there were nomovement ever given to the stone that you ought to build on--thenatural result of the simple rejection of the Gospel is that, bit bybit, 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 ruleover me, ' the whole being degenerates, until manhood becomesdevil-hood, and the soul is lost by its own want of faith. Unbeliefis its own judgment; unbelief is its own condemnation; unbelief, assin, is punished, like all other sins, by the perpetuation of deeperand darker forms of itself. Every time that you stifle a conviction, fight down a conviction, or drive away a conviction; and every timethat you feebly move towards the decision, 'I _will_ trust Him, andlove Him, and be His, ' yet fail to realise it, you have harmed yoursoul, you have made yourself a worse man, you have lowered the toneof your conscience, you have enfeebled your will, you have made yourheart harder against love, you have drawn another horny scale overthe eye, that will prevent you from seeing the light that is yonder;you have, as much as in you is, withdrawn from God, and approximatedto the other pole of the universe (if I may say that), to the darkand deadly antagonist of mercy, and goodness, and truth, and grace. 'Whosoever falls on this stone, ' by the natural result of hisunbelief, '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, thatdivine Spirit in us, by which only we are ever made what we ought tobe. 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 intheir season. All other men are half-men, quarter-men, fragments ofmen, parts of humanity exaggerated and contorted and distorted fromthe reconciling whole which the Christian ought to be, and inproportion to his Christianity is on the road to be, and one day willassuredly and actually be, a 'complete and entire man, wantingnothing'; nothing maimed, nothing broken, the realisation of theideal of humanity, the renewed copy 'of the second Adam, the Lordfrom heaven. ' There is another consideration closely connected with this secondpart of my subject, that I just mention and pass on. Not only by theact of rejection of Christ do we harm and maim ourselves, but alsoall attempts at opposition--formal opposition--to the Gospel as asystem, stand self-convicted and self-condemned to speedy decay. What a commentary upon that word, 'Whosoever falls on this stoneshall be broken, ' is the whole history of the heresies of the Churchand the assaults of unbelief! Man after man, rich in gifts, endowedoften with far larger and nobler faculties than the people whooppose 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 thebabblement and noise are like so many bats flying against a light, or like the sea-birds that come sweeping up in the tempest and thenight, to the hospitable Pharos that is upon the rock, and smitethemselves dead against it. Sceptics well known in their generation, who made people's hearts tremble for the ark of God, what has becomeof them? Their books lie dusty and undisturbed on the top shelf oflibraries; whilst there the Bible stands, with all the scribblingswiped off the page, as though they had never been! Opponents firetheir small shot against the great Rock of Ages, and the littlepellets fall flattened, and only scale off a bit of the moss thathas gathered there! My brother, let the history of the past teachyou and me, with other deeper thoughts, a very calm and triumphantconfidence about all that opponents say nowadays; for all the modernopposition to this Gospel will go as all the past has done, and thenewest systems which cut and carve at Christianity, will go to thetomb where all the rest have gone; and dead old infidelities willrise up from their thrones, and say to the bran-new ones of thisgeneration, when their day is worked out, 'Are ye also become weakas we? art thou also become like one of us?' 'Whosoever shall fallon this stone shall be broken': personally, he will be harmed; andhis opinions, and his books, and his talk, and all hisargumentation, will come to nothing, like the waves that break intoimpotent foam against the rocky cliffs. III. Last of all, the issue, the ultimate issue, of unbelief isirremediable destruction when Christ begins to move. The former clause has spoken about the harm that naturally followsunbelief whilst the Gospel is being preached; the latter clause speaksabout the active agency of Christ when the end shall have come, andthe 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 mefar too awful a one to be handled by my hands, at any rate. Let usleave it in the vagueness and dreadfulness of the words of Him whonever spoke exaggerated words, and who, when He said, 'It shall grindhim to powder, ' meant (as it seems to me) nothing less than adestruction which, contrasted with the former remediable wounding andbreaking, was a destruction utter, and hopeless, and everlasting, andwithout remedy. Ground--ground to powder! Any life left in that? anygathering up of that, and making a man of it again? All the humanitybattered out of it, and the life clean gone from it! Does not thatsound very much like 'everlasting destruction from the presence of Godand from the glory of His power'? Christ, silent now, will begin tospeak; passive now, will begin to act. The stone comes down, and thefall of it will be awful. I remember, away up in a lonely Highlandvalley, where beneath a tall black cliff, all weather-worn, and cracked, and seamed, there lies at the foot, resting on the greensward thatcreeps round its base, a huge rock, that has fallen from the face ofthe precipice. A shepherd was passing beneath it; and suddenly, whenthe finger of God's will touched it, and rent it from its ancient bedin the everlasting rock, it came down, leaping and bounding from pinnacleto 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--thatis Christ's. Therefore I say to you, since all that stand against Himshall become 'as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor, ' and be sweptutterly away, make Him the foundation on which you build; and when thestorm 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 apair. They are closely connected in time, as well as subject. 'Jesusanswered. ' What? Obviously, the unspoken murderous hate, restrainedby fear, which had been raised in the rulers' minds, and flashed intheir eyes, and moved in their gestures. Christ answers it byrepeating His blow; for the present parable is, in outline, identical with the preceding, though differing in colouring, andcarrying its thoughts farther. That stopped with the transference ofthe kingdom to the Gentiles; this passes on to speak also of thedevelopment 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 theformer; 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 ofduty and service. The call was to render obedience. The vineyard wasa 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 thepicture of the kingdom. It therein unites two familiar propheticimages for the Messianic times--those of a festival and of amarriage. As Luther says, 'He calls it a marriage feast, not a timeof toil or a time of sorrow, but a time of holiday and a time ofjoy; in which we make ourselves fine, sing, play, dance, eat, drink, are glad, and have a good time; else it would not be a weddingfeast, if people were to be working, mourning, or crying. Therefore, Christ calls His Christianity and gospel by the name of the highestjoy on earth; namely, by the name of a marriage feast. ' How patheticthis designation of His kingdom is on Christ's lips, when weremember how near His bitter agony He stood, and that He tasted itsbitterness already! It is not the whole truth any more than thevineyard 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 toilingamong the vines in the hot sunshine, and feasting at the table. TheChristian life is not all grinding at heavy tasks, nor all enjoymentof 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 inthe midst of toil. We are, at one and the same time, labourers inthe king's vineyard, and guests at the king's table; and the sameduality will, in some unknown fashion, continue in the perfectkingdom, where there will be both work and feasting, and all thelife shall be both in one. The second point to be noticed is the invitations of the king. Therehad 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 ourparable, is the whole series of agencies in Old Testament times. Sothis parable begins almost where the former leaves off. They onlyslightly overlap. The first servants here are Christ Himself, andHis followers in their ministry during His life; and the second setare the apostles and preachers of the gospel during the periodbetween the completion of the preparation of the feast (that is, thedeath of Christ) and the destruction of Jerusalem. The characteristicdifference of their message from that of the servants in the formerparable, embodies the whole difference between the preaching of theprophets, as messengers demanding the fruit of righteousness, and theglad tidings of a gospel of free grace which does not demand, butoffers, 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 stillbrighter light than the former story did; for while it is wonderfulthat 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 kingtoo, should stoop to offer over and over again the refused abundanceof 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 describingthe unbelief of His generation. It is the second set of refusers whoare painted in darker colours. We are accustomed to think that thesin of His contemporaries was great beyond parallel, but he seemshere to hint that the sin of those who reject Him after the Crossand the Resurrection, is blacker than theirs. At any rate, itclearly is so. But note that the parable speaks as if the refuserswere the same persons throughout, thus taking the same point of viewas the former one did, and regarding the generations of the Jews asone whole. There is a real unity, though the individuals bedifferent, if the spirit actuating successive generations be thesame. Note the two classes of rejecters. The first simply pay noattention, because their heads are full of business. They do noteven speak more or less lame excuses, as the refusers in Luke'ssimilar parable had the decency to do. The king's messengeraddresses a group, who pause on their road for a moment, to listenlistlessly to what he has to say, and, when he has done, dispersewithout a word, each man going on his road, as if nothing hadhappened. The ground of their indifference lies in their absorptionwith this world's good, and their belief that it is best. 'His ownfarm, ' as the original puts it emphatically, holds one man by thesolid delight of possessing acres that he can walk over and till;his merchandise draws another, by the excitement of speculation andthe lust of acquiring. It is not only the hurry and fever of a greatcommercial city, but the quiet and leisure of country life, whichshut out taste for God's feast. Strange preference of toil and riskof loss to abundance, repose, and joy! Savages barter gold for glassbeads. We choose lives of weary work and hunting after uncertainriches, rather than listen to His call, despising the open-handedhousekeeping of our Father's house, and trying to fill our hungerwith the swine's husks. The suicidal madness of refusing the kingdomis set in a vivid light in these quiet words. But stranger still is the conduct of the rest. Why should they killmen whose only fault was bringing them a hospitable invitation? Theincongruity of the representation has given offence to someinterpreters, who are not slow to point out how Christ could haveimproved His parable. But the reality is more incongruous still, andthe unmotived outburst of wrath against the innocent bearers of akindly invitation is only too true to life. Mark the distinctiondrawn by our Lord between the bulk of the people who simplyneglected, and the few who violently opposed. He does not charge theguilt on all. The murderers of Him and of His first followers werenot the mass of the nation, who, left to themselves, would not haveso acted, but the few who stirred up the many. But, though He doesnot lay the guilt at the doors of all, yet the punishment falls onall, and, when the city is burned, the houses of the negligent andof the slayers are equally consumed; for simple refusal of themessage and slaying the messengers were but the positive andsuperlative 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 twoparts: the destruction of the rebels, and the passing over of thekingdom to others. But the differences are noteworthy. Here we readthat 'the king was wroth. ' Insult to a king is worse than dishonestyto a landlord. The refusal of God's proffered grace is even morecertain to awake that awful reality, the wrath of God, than thefailure to render the fruits of the good possessed. Love repelledand thrown back on itself cannot but become wrath. That refusal, which is rebellion, is fittingly described as punished by force ofarms and the burning of the city. We can scarcely help seeing thatour Lord here, in a very striking and unusual way, mingles proseprediction 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 Hissoldiers for the time being, the axe which He laid to the root ofthe tree. The city had ceased to be His, just as the temple ceasedto be 'My house, ' and became, by their sin, 'your house. ' The legendtold that, before their destruction, a mighty voice was heardsaying, 'Let us depart, ' and, with the sound of rushing wings, Hispresence left sanctuary and city. When He was no longer 'the gloryin the midst, ' He was no longer 'a wall of fire round about, ' andthe 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 onthe destruction of the city. This may seem to be opposed to thefacts of the transference of the kingdom to the Gentiles, whichcertainly was begun long before Jerusalem fell. But its fall was thefinal and complete severance of Christianity from Judaism, and nottill then had the messengers to give up the summons to Israel ashopeless. Perhaps Paul had this parable floating in his memory whenhe said to the howling blasphemers at Antioch in Pisidia, 'Seeing ye. .. Judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, lo, we turn to theGentiles. For so hath the Lord commanded us. ' 'They which werebidden were not worthy, ' and their unworthiness consisted not in anyother moral demerit, but solely in this, that they had refused theproffered blessings. That is the only thing which makes any of usunworthy. And that will make the best of us unworthy. II. Verses 10-14 carry us beyond the preceding parable, and show usthe judgment on the unworthy accepters of the invitation. There aretwo ways of sinning against God's merciful gift: the one is refusingto accept it; the other is taking it in outward seeming, butcontinuing in sin. The former was the sin of the Jews; the latter isthe sin of nominal Christians. We may briefly note the points ofthis appendix to the parable. The first is the indiscriminateinvitation, which is more emphatically marked as being so, by themention of the 'bad' before the good among the guests. God's offeris for all, and, in a very real sense, is specially sent to theworst, just as the doctor goes first to the most severely wounded. So the motley crew, without the least attempt at discrimination, areseated at the table. If the Church understands its business, it willhave nothing to do in its message with distinctions of character anymore than of class, but, if it makes any difference, will give theoutcast and disreputable the first place in its efforts. Is thatwhat it does? The next point is the king's inspection. The word rendered 'behold'implies a fixed and minute observation. When does that scrutiny takeplace? Obviously, from the sequel, the final judgment is referredto, and it is remarkable that here there is no mention of the king'sson as the judge. No parable can shadow forth all truth, and thoughthe Father 'has committed all judgment to the Son, ' the Son'sjudgment is the Father's, and the exigencies of the parable requiredthat the son as bridegroom should not be brought into view as judge. Note that there is only one guest without the dress needed. That maybe an instance of the lenity of Christ's charity, which hopeth allthings; or it may rather be intended to suggest the keenness of theking's glance, which, in all the crowded tables, picks out the oneragged losel who had found his way there--so individual is hisknowledge, so impossible for us to hide in the crowd. Mark that the feast has not begun, though the guests are seated. Thejudgment stands at the threshold of the heavenly kingdom. The kingspeaks with a certain coldness, very unlike the welcome fit for aguest; and his question is one of astonishment at the rude boldnessof the man who came there, knowing that he had not the proper dress. (That knowledge is implied in the form of the sentence in theGreek. ) What, then, is the wedding garment? It can be nothing elsethan righteousness, moral purity, which fits for sitting at Histable in His kingdom. And the man who has it not, is the nominalChristian, who says that he has accepted God's invitation, and livesin sin, not putting off 'the old man with his deeds, ' nor putting on'the new man, which is created in righteousness. ' How that garmentwas to be obtained is no part of this parable. We know that it isonly to be received by faith in Jesus Christ, and that if we are topass the scrutiny of the king, it must be as 'not having our ownrighteousness, ' but His made ours by faith which makes us righteous, and then by all holy effort, and toil in His strength, we mustclothe our souls in the dress which befits the banqueting hall; foronly they who are washed and clothed in fine linen, clean and white, shall sit there. But Christ's purpose here was not to explain howthe robe was to be procured, but to insist that it must be worn. 'He was speechless, '--or, as the word means, 'muzzled. ' The man isself-condemned, and, having nothing to say in extenuation, thesolemn promise is pronounced of ejection from the lighted hall, withlimbs bound so that he cannot struggle, and consignment to theblackness outside, of which our Lord adds, in words not put into theking's mouth, but which we have heard from Him before, 'There shallbe the [well-known and terrible] weeping and gnashing of teeth--awfulthough figurative expressions for despair and passion. Both parts of the parable come under one law, and exemplify oneprinciple of the kingdom, that its invitations extend more widelythan the real possession of its gifts. The unbelieving Jew, in onedirection, and the unrighteous Christian in another, are instancesof this. This is not the place to discuss that wide and well-worn question ofthe ground of God's choice. That does not enter into the scope ofthe parable. For it, the choice is proved by the actualparticipation in the feast. They who do not choose to receive theinvitation, or to put on the wedding garment, do, in different ways, show that they are not 'chosen' though 'called. ' The lesson is, notof interminable and insoluble questionings about God's secrets, butof earnest heed to His gracious call, and earnest, believing effortto make the fair garment our very own, 'if so be that being clothedwe 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 eachother, patched up an alliance against Jesus, whom they all hated. Their questions were cunningly contrived to entangle Him in thecobwebs of casuistry and theological hair-splitting, but He walkedthrough the fine-spun snares as a lion might stalk away with thenooses set for him dangling behind him. The last of the threequestions put to Jesus, and the one question with which He turnedthe tables and silenced His questioners, are our subject. In theformer, Jesus declares the essence of the law or of religion; in thelatter, He brings to light the essential loftiness of the Messiah. I. The two preceding questions are represented to have been asked bydeputations; this is specially noted as emanating from anindividual. 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 mustnot give that word too hostile a sense, for it may mean no more than'testing' or trying. The legal expert wished to find out theattainments and standpoint of this would-be teacher, and so heproposed a question which would bring out the whereabouts of Jesus, and give opportunity for a theological wrangle. He did not ask thequestion for guidance, but as an inquisitor cross-examining asuspected heretic. Probably the question was a stereotyped one, andthere are traces in the Gospels that the answer recognised asorthodox was that which Jesus gave (Luke x. 27). The twocommandments are quoted from Deuteronomy vi. 5 and Leviticus xix. 18respectively. The lawyer probably only desired to raise a discussionas to the relative worth of isolated precepts. Jesus goes deep downbelow isolated precepts, and unifies, as well as transforms, thelaw. Supreme and undivided love to God is not only the great, butalso the first, commandment. In more modern phrase, it is the sum ofman's duty and the germ of all goodness. Note that Jesus shifts thecentre from conduct to character, from deeds to affections. 'As aman _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, --eitherthe dark love of self and sense, or the white love of God, and allcharacter and conduct are determined by which of these sways us. Note, further, that love to God must needs be undivided. God is oneand all; man is one and finite. To love such an object with half aheart is not to love. True, our weakness leads astray, but the onlyreal love corresponding to the natures of the lover and the loved iswhole-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 itwere, of love to God. The two commandments are alike, for both callfor love, and the second is second because it is a consequence ofthe first. Each sets up a lofty standard; 'with all thy heart' and'as thyself' sound equally impossible, but both result necessarilyfrom the nature of the case. Religion is the parent of all morality, and especially of benevolent love to men. Innate self-regard willyield to no force but that of love to God. It is vain to try tocreate brotherhood among men unless the sense of God's fatherhood isits foundation. Love of neighbours is the second commandment, and tomake it the first, as some do now, is to end all hope of fulfillingit. Still further, Jesus hangs law and prophets on these twoprecepts, which, at bottom, are one. Not only will all other dutiesbe done in doing these, since 'love is the fulfilling of the law, 'but all other precepts, and all the prophets' appeals andexhortations, are but deductions from, or helps to the attainmentof, these. All our forms of worship, creeds, and the like, are ofworth in so far as they are outcomes of love to God, or aid us inloving Him and our neighbours. Without love, they are 'as soundingbrass, or a tinkling cymbal. ' II. The Pharisees remained 'gathered together, ' and may have beenpreparing another question, but Jesus had been long enoughinterrogated. 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, butbrings them full up against a difficulty, that they may open theireyes to the great truth which is its only solution. His firstquestion, 'What think ye of the Christ?' is simply preparatory tothe second. The answer which He anticipated was given, --as, ofcourse, it would be, for the Davidic descent of the Messiah was acommonplace universally accepted. One can fancy that the Phariseessmiled complacently at the attempt to puzzle them with such anelementary question, but the smile vanished when the next one came. They interpreted Psalm 110 as Messianic, and David in it calledMessiah 'my Lord. ' How can He be both? Jesus' question is in twoforms, --'If He is son, how does David call Him Lord?' or, if He isLord, 'how then is He his son?' Take either designation, and theother lands you in inextricable difficulties. Now what was our Lord's purpose in thus driving the Pharisees into acorner? Not merely to 'muzzle' them, as the word in verse 34, rendered 'put to silence, ' literally means, but to bring to lightthe inadequate conceptions of the Messiah and of the nature of Hiskingdom, to which exclusive recognition of his Davidic descentnecessarily led. David's son would be but a king after the type ofthe Herods and Cęsars, and his kingdom as 'carnal' as the wildestzealot expected, but David's Lord, sitting at God's right hand, andhaving His foes made His footstool by Jehovah Himself, --what sort ofa Messiah King would that be? The majestic image, that shapes itselfdimly here, was a revelation that took the Pharisees' breath away, and made them dumb. Nor are the words without a half-disclosed claimon Christ's part to be that which He was so soon to avow Himselfbefore the high priest as being. The first hearers of them probablycaught that meaning partly, and were horrified; we hear it clearlyin 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 theauthor, and that he wrote it by divine inspiration. The presentwriter cannot see how our Lord's argument can be saved from collapseif 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 thetext, there are, in this chapter, seven woes, like seven thunders, launched against the rulers. They are scathing exposures, but, asthe very word implies, full of sorrow as well as severity. They arenot denunciations, but prophecies warning that the end of suchtempers must be mournful. The wailing of an infinite compassion, rather than the accents of anger, sounds in them; and it alone isheard in the outburst of lamenting in which Christ's heart runsover, as in a passion of tears, at the close. The blending ofsternness and pity, each perfect, is the characteristic of thiswonderful climax of our Lord's appeals to His nation. Could suchtones of love and righteous anger joined have been sent echoingthrough the ages in this Gospel, if they had not been heard? I. The woe of the 'whited sepulchres. ' The first four woes aredirected mainly to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees; thelast three to their characters. The two first of these fasten on thesame sin, of hypocritical holiness. There is, however, a differencebetween the representation of hypocrites under the metaphor of theclean outside of the cup and platter, and that of the whitedsepulchre. In the former, the hidden sin is 'extortion and excess';that is, sensual enjoyment wrongly procured, of which the emblems ofcup and plate suggest that good eating and drinking are a chiefpart. In the latter, it is 'iniquity'--a more general and darkername for sin. In the former, the Pharisee is 'blind, ' self-deceivedin part or altogether; in the latter, stress is rather laid on his'appearance unto men. ' The repetition of the same charge in the twowoes teaches us Christ's estimate of the gravity and frequency ofthe sin. The whitened tombs of Mohammedan saints still gleam in the strongsunlight on many a knoll in Palestine. If the Talmudical practice isas old as our Lord's time, the annual whitewashing was lately over. Its purpose was not to adorn the tombs, but to make themconspicuous, so that they might be avoided for fear of defilement. So He would say, with terrible irony, that the apparent holiness ofthe rulers was really a sign of corruption, and a warning to keepaway from them. What a blow at their self-complacency! And howprofoundly true it is that the more punctiliously white thehypocrite's outside, the more foul is he within, and the wider berthwill all discerning people give him! The terrible force of thefigure needs no dwelling on. In Christ's estimate, such a soul wasthe very dwelling-place of death; and foul odours and worms andcorruption filled its sickening recesses. Terrible words to comefrom His lips into which grace was poured, and bold words to beflashed at listeners who held the life of the Speaker in theirhands! There are two sorts of hypocrites, the conscious and theunconscious; 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 businessis to study the documents in which it is embodied. These woes arenot like thunder-peals rolling above our heads, while the lightningstrikes the earth miles away. A religion which is mostly whitewashis as common among us as ever it was in Jerusalem; and its foulaccompaniments of corruption becoming more rotten every year, as thewhitewash is laid on thicker, may be smelt among us, and its fatalend is as sure. II. The woe of the sepulchre builders (vs. 29-36). In these verseswe have, first, the specification of another form of hypocrisy, consisting in building the prophets' tombs, and disavowing thefathers' murder of them. Honouring dead prophets was right; buthonouring dead ones and killing living ones was conscious orunconscious hypocrisy. The temper of mind which leads to glorifyingthe dead witnesses, also leads to supposing that all truth was givenby them; and hence that the living teachers, who carry their messagefarther, are false prophets. A generation which was ready to killJesus in honour of Moses, would have killed Moses in honour ofAbraham, and would not have had the faintest apprehension of themessage 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 messengersmeans, 'It's a good thing they are dead, and that we have nothing todo but to put up a monument. ' Bi-centenaries and ter-centenaries andjubilees do not always imply either the understanding or theacceptance of the principles supposed to be glorified thereby. Butthe magnifiers of the past are often quite unconscious of thehollowness of their admiration, and honest in their horror of theirfathers' acts; and we all need the probe of such words as Christ'sto pierce the skin of our lazy reverence for our fathers' prophets, and let out the foul matter below--namely, our own blindness toGod's messengers of to-day. The statement of the hypocrisy is followed, in verses 31-33, withits unmasking and condemnation. The words glow with righteous wrathat white heat, and end in a burst of indignation, most unfamiliar toHis lips. Three sentences, like triple lightning flash from Hispained heart. With almost scornful subtlety He lays hold of thewords which He puts into the Pharisees' mouths, to convict them ofkindred with those whose deeds they would disown. 'Our fathers, sayyou? Then you do belong to the same family, after all. You confessthat you have their blood in your veins; and, in the very act ofdenying sympathy with their conduct, you own kindred. And, for allyour protestations, spiritual kindred goes with bodily descent. 'Christ here recognises that children probably 'take after theirparents, ' or, in modern scientific terms, that 'heredity' is thelaw, and that it works more surely in the transmission of evil thanof good. Then come the awful words bidding that generation 'fill up themeasure of the fathers. ' They are like the other command to Judas todo his work quickly. They are more than permission, they arecommand; but such a command as, by its laying bare of the truecharacter of the deed in view, is love's last effort at prevention. Mark the growing emotion of the language. Mark the conception of anation's sins as one through successive generations, and the other, of these as having a definite measure, which being filled, judgmentcan no longer tarry. Generation after generation pours itscontributions into the vessel, and when the last black drop which itcan hold has been added, then comes the catastrophe. Mark the fatalnecessity by which inherited sin becomes darker sin. The fathers'crimes are less than the sons'. This inheritance increases by eachtransmission. The cloak strikes one more at each revolution of thehands. It is hard to recognise Christ in the terrible words that follow. Wehave heard part of them from John the Baptist; and it soundednatural for him to call men serpents and the children of serpents, but it is somewhat of a shock to hear Jesus hurling such names ateven 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 tostrip off masks which hide from men their own real character, andthat the revelation of the divine love in Jesus would be a partialand impotent revelation if it did not show us the righteous lovewhich is wrath. There is nothing so terrible as the anger of gentlecompassion, and the fiercest and most destructive wrath is 'thewrath of the Lamb. ' Seldom, indeed, did He show that side of Hischaracter; but it is there, and the other side would not be soblessed as it is, unless that were there too. The woe ends with the double prophecy that that generation wouldrepeat and surpass the fathers' guilt, and that on it would fall theaccumulated penalties of past bloodshed. Note that solemn'therefore, ' which looks back to the whole preceding context, andforward to the whole subsequent. Because the rulers professedabhorrence of their fathers' deeds, and yet inherited their spirit, they too would have their prophets, and would slay them. God goes onsending His messengers, because we reject them; and the more deafmen are, the more does He peal His words into their ears. That ismercy and compassion, that all men may be saved and come to theknowledge of the truth; but it is judgment too, and its foreseeneffect must be regarded as part of the divine purpose in it. Christ's desire is one thing, His purpose another. His desire isthat all should find in His gospel 'the savour of life'; but Hispurpose is that, if it be not that to any, it shall be to them thesavour of death. Mark, too, the authority with which He, in the faceof these scowling Pharisees, assumes the distinct divine prerogativeof sending forth inspired men, who, as His messengers, shall standon a level with the prophets of old. Mark His silence as to His ownfate, which is only obscurely hinted at in the command to fill upthe measure of the fathers. Observe the detailed enumeration of Hismessengers' gifts, --'prophets' under direct inspiration, like thoseof old, which may especially refer to the apostles; 'wise men, ' likea Stephen or an Apollos; 'scribes, ' such as Mark and Luke and many afaithful servant since, whose pen has loved to write the name aboveevery name. Note the detailed prophecy of their treatment, whichbegins with _slaying_ and goes down to the less severe _scourging_, and thence to the milder _persecution_. Do the three punishmentsbelong to the three classes of messengers, the severest falling tothe lot of the most highly endowed, and even the quiet penman beinghunted from city to city? We need not wriggle and twist to try to avoid admitting that thecalling of the martyred Zacharias, 'the son of Barachias, ' is anerror of some one who confused the author of the prophetic book withthe person whose murder is narrated in 2 Chronicles xxiv. We do notknow who made the mistake, or how it appears in our text, but it isnot honest to try to slur it over. The punishment of long ages ofsin, carried on from father to son, does in the course of thathistory 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-upsin to become top-heavy; but when it is so, it buries one generationof those who have worked at piling it up, beneath its down-rushingavalanche. 'The mills of God grind slowly, But they grind exceeding small. ' The catastrophes of national histories are prepared for by continuouscenturies. The generation that laid the first powder-hornful of thetrain is dead and buried, long before the explosion which sendsconstituted order and institutions sky-high. The misery is that oftenthe generation which has to pay the penalty has begun to awake to thesin, and would be glad to mend it, if it could. England in theseventeenth century, France in the eighteenth, America in thenineteenth, had to reap harvests from sins sown long before. Such isthe law of the judgment wrought out by God's providence in history. But there is another judgment, begun here and perfected hereafter, inwhich fathers and sons shall each bear their own burden, and reapaccurately 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 thesevenfold woes end in a rain of pity and tears. His full heartoverflows in that sad cry of lamentation over the long-continuedfoiling of the efforts of a love that would fain have fondled anddefended. What intensity of feeling is in the redoubled naming ofthe city! How yearningly and wistfully He calls, as if He might stillwin the faithless one, and how lingeringly unwilling He is to give uphope! How mournfully, rather than accusingly, He reiterates the actswhich had run through the whole history, using a form of the verbswhich suggests continuance. Mark, too, the matter-of-course way inwhich Christ assumes that He sent all the prophets whom, throughthe generations, Jerusalem had stoned. So the lament passes into the solemn final leave-taking, with whichour Lord closes His ministry among the Jews, and departs from thetemple. As, in the parable of the marriage-feast, the city wasemphatically called 'their city, ' so here the Temple, in whosecourts He was standing, and which in a moment He was to quit forever, is called 'your house, ' because His departure is thewithdrawing of the true Shechinah. It had been the house of God: nowHe casts it off, and leaves it to them to do as they will with it. The saddest punishment of long-continued rejection of His pleadinglove, is that it ceases at last to plead. The bitterest woe forthose who refuse to render to Him the fruits of the vineyard, is toget the vineyard for their own, undisturbed. Christ's utmostretribution for obstinate blindness is to withdraw from our sight. All the woes that were yet to fall, in long, dreary succession onthat nation, so long continued in its sin, so long continued in itsmisery, were hidden in that solemn departure of Christ from thehenceforward empty temple. Let us fear lest our unfaithfulness meetthe like penalty! But even the departure does not end His yearnings, nor close the long story of the conflict between God's beseechinglove and their unbelief. The time shall come when the nation shallonce more lift up, with deeper, truer adoration, the hosannas of thetriumphal entry. And then a believing Israel shall see their King, and serve Him. Christ never takes final leave of any man in thisworld. It is ever possible that dumb lips may be opened to welcomeHim, though long rejected; and His withdrawals are His efforts tobring about that opening. When it takes place, how gladly does Hereturn to the heart which is now His temple, and unveil His beautyto 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, areprobably divergent representations of one original. The reasons forso supposing are manifold and obvious on a little consideration. Inthe first place, the two sayings occur in the Evangelists' reportsof the same prophecy and at the same point therein. In the secondplace, the verbal resemblance is much greater than appears in ourAuthorised Version, because the word rendered 'patience' in Luke isderived from that translated 'endureth' in Matthew; and the trueconnection between the two versions of the saying would have beenmore obvious if we had had a similar word in both, reading in theone 'he that endureth, ' and in the other 'in your endurance. ' In thethird place, the difference between these two sayings presented inour 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 RevisedVersion substitutes for the imperative 'possess' the promise 'yeshall possess, ' and with that variation the two sayings are broughta good deal nearer each other. In both endurance is laid down as thecondition, which in both is followed by a promise. Then, finally, there need be no difficulty in seeing that 'possessing, ' or, moreliterally, 'gaining your souls, ' is an exact equivalent of the otherexpression, 'ye shall be saved. ' One cannot but remember our Lord'ssolemn 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 aresubstantially one. They carry a great weight of warning, ofexhortation, and of encouragement to us all. Let us try now to reapsome of that harvest. I. First, then, notice the view of our condition which underliesthese sayings. It is a sad and a somewhat stern one, but it is one to which, Ithink, most men's hearts will respond, if they give themselvesleisure 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 someof us it is simple endurance; for all of us it has sometimes beenagony; for all of us, always, it presents resistance to every kind ofhigh and noble career, and especially to the Christian one. Easy-goingoptimists try to skim over these facts, but they are not to be solightly set aside. You have only to look at the faces that youmeet in the street to be very sure that it is always a grave andsometimes a bitter thing to live. And so our two texts presupposethat life on the whole demands endurance, whatever may be includedin that great word. Think of the inward resistance and outward hindrances to every loftylife. The scholar, the man of culture, the philanthropist--all whowould live for anything else than the present, the low, and thesensual--find that there is a banded conspiracy, as it were, againstthem, 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, brightpurposes clouding over, and all the cowardice and animalism of ournature 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 pathwas beset on either side by voices, sometimes whispering seductions, and sometimes shrieking maledictions, but always seeking to withdrawhim from his resolute march onwards to his goal. And every one ofus, if we have taken on us the orders of any lofty chivalry, andespecially if we have sworn ourselves knights of the Cross, have tomeet the same antagonism. Then, too, there are golden apples rolledupon our path, seeking to draw us away from our steadfast endurance. Besides the hindrances in every noble path, the hindrances withinand the hindrances without, the weight of self and the drawing ofearth, there come to us all--in various degrees no doubt, and invarious shapes--but to all of us there come the burdens of sorrowsand cares, and anxieties and trials. Wherever two or three aregathered together, even if they gather for a feast, there will besome of them who carry a sorrow which they know well will never belifted off their shoulders and their hearts, until they lay down alltheir burdens at the grave's mouth; and it is weary work to plod onthe path of life with a weight that cannot be shifted, with a woundthat can never be stanched. Oh, brethren, rosy-coloured optimism is all a dream. The recognitionof the good that is in the evil is the devout man's talisman, butthere is always need for the resistance and endurance which my textsprescribe. And the youngest of us, the gladdest of us, the leastexperienced of us, the most frivolous of us, if we will question ourown hearts, will hear their Amen to the stern, sad view of the factsof earthly life which underlies this text. Though it has many other aspects, the world seems to me sometimes tobe like that pool at Jerusalem in the five porches of which lay, groaning under various diseases, but none of them without an ache, agreat multitude of impotent folk, halt and blind. Astronomers tellus that one, at any rate, of the planets rolls on its orbit swathedin clouds and moisture. The world moves wrapped in a mist of tears. God only knows them all, but each heart knows its own bitterness andresponds 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 inthe other 'in your endurance. ' Now, it is very necessary for theunderstanding of many places in Scripture to remember that thenotion either of patience or of endurance by no means exhausts thepower of this noble Christian word. For these are passive virtues, and however excellent and needful they may be, they by no means sumup our duty in regard to the hindrances and sorrows, the burdens andweights, of which I have been trying to speak. For you know it isonly 'what cannot be cured' that 'must be endured, ' and evenincurable things are not merely to be endured, but they ought to beutilised. It is not enough that we should build up a dam to keep thefloods of sorrow and trial from overflowing our fields; we must turnthe turbid waters into our sluices, and get them to drive our mills. It is not enough that we should screw ourselves up to lieunresistingly under the surgeon's knife; though God knows that it isas much as we can manage sometimes, and we have to do as convictsunder 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 notall our duty in regard to our trials and difficulties. There isrequired something more than passive endurance. This noble word of my texts does mean a great deal more than that. Itmeans active persistence as well as patient submission. It is notenough 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 thepath that is marked out for us is especially the virtue that our Lordhere enjoins. It is well to sit still unmurmuring; it is better tomarch on undiverted and unchecked. And when we are able to keepstraight on in the path which is marked out for us, and especially inthe path that leads us to God, notwithstanding all opposing voices, andall inward hindrances and reluctances; when we are able to go to ourtasks of whatever sort they are and to do them, though our hearts arebeating like sledge-hammers; when we say to ourselves, 'It does notmatter a bit whether I am sad or glad, fresh or wearied, helped orhindered by circumstances, this one thing I do, ' then we have come tounderstand and to practise the grace that our Master here enjoins. Theendurance which wins the soul, and leads to salvation, is no merepassive submission, excellent and hard to attain as that often is;but it is brave perseverance in the face of all difficulties, and inspite of all enemies. Mark how emphatically our Lord here makes the space within whichthat virtue has to be exercised conterminous with the whole durationof our lives. I need not discuss what 'the end' was in the originalapplication of the words; that would take us too far afield. Butthis I desire to insist upon, that right on to the very close oflife we are to expect the necessity of putting forth the exercise ofthe very same persistence by which the earlier stages of any noblecareer must necessarily be marked. In other departments of lifethere may be relaxation, as a man goes on through the years; but inthe culture of our characters, and in the deepening of our faith, and in the drawing near to our God, there must be no cessation ordiminution of earnestness and of effort right up to the close. There are plenty of people, and I dare say that I address some ofthem now, who began their Christian career full of vigour and with aheat that was too hot to last. But, alas, in a year or two all thefervency was past, and they settled down into the average, easygoing, unprogressive Christian, who is a wet blanket to the devotion andwork of a Christian church. I wonder how many of us would scarcelyknow 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 runwell; _what_ did hinder you'? The answer is--Myself. But may I say that this emphatic 'to the end' has a special lessonfor us older people, who, as natural strength abates and enthusiasmcools down, are apt to be but the shadows of our old selves in manythings? But there should be fire within the mountain, though theremay be snow on its crest. Many a ship has been lost on the harbourbar; and there is no excuse for the captain leaving the bridge, orthe engineer coming up from the engine-room, stormy as the oneposition 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 citygates, and until we are within these we need to keep our hands onour sword-hilts and be ready for conflict. 'He that endureth to theend, 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 twotexts means both the soul and the life of which it is the seat; andalso to remark that the being saved and the winning of the life orthe soul has distinct application, in our Lord's words, primarily tocorporeal safety and preservation in the midst of dangers; and, still further, to note the emphatic '_in_ your patience, ' assuggesting not only a future but a present acquisition of one's ownsoul, or life, as the result of such persevering endurance andenduring perseverance. All which things being kept in view, I mayexpand the great promise that lies in my text, as follows:-- First, by such persevering persistence in the Christian path, we gainourselves. Self-surrender is self-possession. We never own ourselvestill we have given up owning ourselves, and yielded ourselves to thatLord who gives us back saints to ourselves. Self-control isself-possession. We do not own ourselves as long as it is possiblefor any weakness in flesh, sense, or spirit to gain dominion over usand hinder us from doing what we know to be right. We are not our ownmasters then. 'Whilst they promise them liberty, they themselves arethe bond-slaves of corruption. ' It is only when we have the bit wellinto the jaws of the brutes, and the reins tight in our hands, sothat a finger-touch can check or divert the course, that we are trulylords 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 Ibelieve, thoroughly realised only when, by self-surrender ofourselves to Jesus Christ, we get His help to govern ourselves andso become lords of ourselves. Some little petty Rajah, up in thehills, in a quasi-independent State in India, is troubled bymutineers whom he cannot subdue; what does he do? He sends a messagedown to Lahore or Calcutta, and up come English troops thatconsolidate his dominion, and he rules securely, when he hasconsented to become a feudatory, and recognise his overlord. And soyou and I, by continual repetition, in the face of self and sin, ofour acts of self-surrender, bring Christ into the field; and then, when we have said, 'Lord, take me; I live, yet not I, but Christliveth in me'; and when we daily, in spite of hindrances, stand tothe surrender and repeat the consecration, then 'in our perseverancewe acquire our souls. ' Again, such persistence wins even the bodily life, whether itpreserves it or loses it. I have said that the words of our textshave an application to bodily preservation in the midst of thedreadful dangers of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. But soregarded they are a paradox. For hear how the Master introducesthem: 'Some of you shall they cause to be put to death, but thereshall not a hair of your heads perish. In your perseverance ye shallwin your lives. ' 'Some of you they will put to death, ' but ye 'shallwin your lives, '--a paradox which can only be solved by experience. Whether this bodily life be preserved or lost, it is gained when itis 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 shallperish, ' fulfilled at the very moment when the falling axe shore hislocks in twain, and severed his head from his body. Finally, full salvation, the true possession of himself, and theacquisition of the life which really is life, comes to a man whoperseveres to the end, and thus passes to the land where he willreceive the recompense of the reward. The one moment the runner, with flushed cheek and forward swaying body, hot, with pantingbreath, 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 drawback unto perdition, but of them that believe to the winning oftheir 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 isbest appreciated by dwellers in those lands. They tell us that nosooner is some sickly animal dead, or some piece of carrion thrownout by the way, than the vultures--for the eagle does not prey uponcarrion--appear. There may not have been one visible a moment beforein the hot blue sky, but, taught by scent or by sight that theirbanquet is prepared, they come flocking from all corners of theheavens, a hideous crowd round their hideous meal, fighting withflapping wings and tearing it with their strong talons. And so, saysChrist, wherever there is a rotting, dead society, a carcasehopelessly corrupt and evil, down upon it, as if drawn by someunerring attraction, will come the angels, the vultures of thedivine judgment. The words of my text were spoken, according to the version of themin Luke's Gospel, in answer to a question from the disciples. OurLord had been discoursing, in very solemn words, which, startingfrom the historical event of the impending fall of Jerusalem, hadgradually passed into a description of the greater event of Hissecond coming. And all these solemn warnings had stirred nothingdeeper in the bosoms of the disciples than a tepid and idlecuriosity which expressed itself in the one almost irrelevantquestion, 'Where, Lord?' He answers--Not here, not there, buteverywhere where there is a carcase. The great event which isreferred to in our Lord's solemn words is a future judgment, whichis to be universal. But the words are not exhausted in theirreference to that event. There have been many 'comings of the Lord, 'many 'days of the Lord, ' which on a smaller scale have embodied thesame principles as are to be displayed in world-wide splendour andawfulness at the last. I. The first thing, then, in these most true and solemn words isthis, that they are to us a revelation of a law which operates withunerring certainty through all the course of the world's history. We cannot tell, but God can, when evil has become incurable; orwhen, in the language of my text, the mass of any community hasbecome a carcase. There may be flickerings of life, all unseen byour eyes, or there may be death, all unsuspected by our shallowvision. So long as there is a possibility of amendment, 'sentenceagainst an evil work is not executed speedily'; and God dams back, as it were, the flow of His retributive judgment, 'not willing thatany should perish, but that all should come to the knowledge of thetruth. ' But when He sees that all is vain, that no longer isrestoration 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 offthe 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 theswift execution. There is another metaphor, in the Old Testament, that puts the same idea in a very striking form. It speaks aboutGod's 'awakening, ' as if His judgment slumbered. All round that dialthe hand goes creeping, creeping, creeping slowly, but when it comesto the appointed line, then the bell strikes. And so years andcenturies 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 thatstory which people stumble over in the early part of the OldTestament revelation--the sweeping away of those Canaanitish nationswhose hideous immoralities had turned the land into a perfect sty ofabominations. There they had been wallowing, and God's Spirit, whichstrives with men ever and always, had been striving with them, weknow not for how long, but when the time came at which, according tothe grim metaphor of the Old Testament, 'the measure of theiriniquity was full, ' then He hurled upon them the fierce hosts out ofthe desert, and in a whirlwind of fire and sword swept them off theface of the earth. Take another illustration. These very people, who had been theexecutioners of divine judgment, settled in the land, fell into thesnare--and you know the story. The captivities of Israel and Judahwere other illustrations of the same thing. The fall of Jerusalem, to which our Lord pointed in the solemn context of these words, wasanother. For millenniums God had been pleading with them, sendingHis prophets, rising early and sending, saying, 'Oh, do not do thisabominable thing which I hate!' 'And last of all He sent His Son. 'Christ being rejected, God had shot His last bolt. He had no morethat He could do. Christ being refused, the nation's doom was fixedand sealed, and down came the eagles of Rome, again God's scavengers, to sweep away the nation on which had been lavished such wealth ofdivine love, but which had now come to be a rotting abomination, and to this day remains in a living death, a miraculously preservedmonument of God's Judgments. Take another illustration how, once more, the executants of the lawfall under its power. That nation which crushed the feeble resourcesof Judaea, as a giant might crush a mosquito in his grasp, in itsturn became honeycombed with abominations and immoralities; and thendown from the frozen north came the fierce Gothic tribes over theRoman territory. One of their captains called himself the 'Scourgeof God, ' and he was right. Another swooping down of the vulturesflashed from the blue heavens, and the carrion was torn to fragmentsby their strong beaks. Take one more illustration--that French Revolution at the end of theeighteenth century. The fathers sowed the wind, and the childrenreaped the whirlwind. Generations of heartless luxury, selfishness, carelessness of the cry of the poor, immoral separation of classfrom class, and all the sins which a ruling caste could commitagainst a subject people, had prepared for the convulsion. Then, ina carnival of blood and deluges of fire and sulphur, the rottenthing was swept off the face of the earth, and the world breathedmore freely for its destruction. Take another illustration, through which many of us have lived. Thebitter legacy of negro slavery that England gave to her giant sonacross the Atlantic, which blasted and sucked the strength out ofthat great republic, went down amidst universal execration. It tookcenturies for the corpse to be ready, but when the vultures camethey made quick work of it. And so, as I say, all over the world, and from the beginning oftime, with delays according to the possibilities of restoration andrecovery which the divine eye discerns, this law is working. Verilythere is a God that judgeth in the earth. 'The wheels of God grindslowly, but they grind exceeding small. ' 'Wheresoever the carcaseis, there will the eagles be gathered together. ' And has the law exhausted its force? Are there going to be no moreapplications of it? Are there no European societies at this day thatin their godlessness and social iniquities are hurrying fast to thecondition of carrion? Look around us--drunkenness, sensualimmorality, commercial dishonesty, senseless luxury amongst therich, heartless indifference to the wail of the poor, godlessnessover all classes and ranks of the community. Surely, surely, if thebody politic be not dead, it is sick nigh unto death. And I, for mypart, have little hesitation in saying that as far as one can see, European society is driving as fast as it can, with its godlessnessand immorality, to such another 'day of the Lord' as these words ofmy text suggest. Let us see to it that we do our little part to bethe 'salt of the earth' which shall keep it from rotting, and sodrive away the vultures of judgment. II. But let me turn to another point. We have here a law which is tohave 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, 'theloftiness of man has been bowed down, and the haughtiness of manmade low, and the Lord alone exalted in that day when He arises toshake terribly the earth. And all these 'days of the Lord' areprophecies, and distinctly point to a future 'day' when the sameprinciples which have been disclosed as working on a small scale inthem, shall be manifested in full embodiment. These 'days of theLord' proclaim '_the_ day of the Lord. ' In the prophecies bothof the Old and New Testaments that universal future judgment is seenglimmering through the descriptions of the nearer partial judgments. So interpreters are puzzled to say at what point in a prophecy thetransition is made from the smaller to the greater. The propheciesare like the diagrams in treatises on perspective, in whichdiverging lines are drawn from the eye, enclosing a square or otherfigure, and which, as they recede further from the point of view, enclose a figure, the same in shape but of greater dimensions. Thereis a historical event foretold, the fall of Jerusalem. It is closeup to the eyes of the disciples, and is comparatively small. Carryout the lines that touch its corners and define its shape, and uponthe far distant curtain of the dim future there is thrown a likefigure immensely larger, the coming of Jesus Christ to judge theworld. All these little premonitions and foretastes and anticipatoryspecimens point onwards to the assured termination of the world'shistory in that great and solemn day, when all men shall be gatheredbefore Christ's throne, and He shall judge all nations--judge youand me amongst the rest. That future judgment is distinctly a partof the Christian revelation. Jesus Christ is to come in bodily formas He went away. All men are to be judged by Him. That judgment isto be the destruction of opposing forces, the sweeping away of thecarrion of moral evil. It is therefore distinctly a part of the message that is to bepreached by us, under penalty of the awful condemnation pronouncedon the watchman who seeth the sword coming and gives no warning. Itis not becoming to make such a solemn message the opportunity forpictorial rhetoric, which vulgarises its greatness and weakens itspower. But it is worse than an offence against taste; it isunfaithfulness to the preaching which God bids us, treason to ourKing, and cruelty to our hearers, to suppress the warning--'The dayof the Lord cometh. ' There are many temptations to put it in thebackground. Many of you do not want that kind of preaching. You wantthe gentle side of divine revelation. You say to us in fact, thoughnot in words. 'Prophesy to us smooth things. Tell us about theinfinite love which wraps all mankind in its embrace. Speak to us ofthe Father God, who "hateth nothing that He hath made. " Magnify themercy and gentleness and tenderness of Christ. Do not say anythingabout that other side. It is not in accordance with the tendenciesof modern thought. ' So much the worse, then, for the tendencies of modern thought. Iyield to no man in the ardour of my belief that the centre of allrevelation is the revelation of a God of infinite love, but I cannotforget that there is such a thing as 'the terror of the Lord, ' and Idare not disguise my conviction that no preaching sounds everystring in the manifold harp of God's truth, which does not strikethat solemn note of warning of judgment to come. Such suppression is unfaithfulness. Surely, if we preachers believethat tremendous truth, we are bound to speak. It is cruel kindnessto be silent. If a traveller is about to plunge into some gloomyjungle infested by wild beasts, he is a friend who sits by thewayside to warn him of his danger. Surely you would not call asignalman unfeeling because he held out a red lamp when he knew thatjust round the curve beyond his cabin the rails were up, and thatany train that reached the place would go over in horrid ruin. Surely that preaching is not justly charged with harshness whichrings out the wholesome proclamation of a day of judgment, when weshall each give account of ourselves to the divine-human Judge. Such suppression weakens the power of the Gospel, which is theproclamation of deliverance, not only from the power, but also fromthe future retribution of sin. In such a maimed gospel there is butan enfeebled meaning given to that idea of deliverance. And thoughthe 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, andthough his trembling may pass away, and he be none the nearer thekingdom, there will never any good be done to him unless he doestremble. So, for all these reasons, all faithful preaching ofChrist's Gospel must include the proclamation of Christ as Judge. But, if I should be unfaithful, if I did not preach this truth, whatshall we call you if you turn away from it? You would not think it awise thing of the engine-driver to shut his eyes if the red lampwere shown, and to go along at full speed and to pay no heed tothat? Do you think it would be right for a Christian minister tolock his lips and never say, 'There is a judgment to come'? And doyou think it is wise of you not to think of that, and to shape yourconduct accordingly? Oh, dear friends! I do not doubt that the centre of all divinerevelation is the love of God, nor do I doubt that incomparably thehighest representation of the power of Christ's Gospel is that itdraws men away from the love and the practice of evil, and makesthem pure and holy. But that is not all. There is not only thepractice and the power of sin to be fought against, but there is thepenalty of sin to be taken into account; and as sure as you areliving, and as sure as there is a God above us, so sure is it thatthere is a Day of Judgment, when 'He will judge the world inrighteousness by the Man whom He hath ordained. ' The believing ofthat is not salvation, but the belief of that seems to me to beindispensable for any vigorous grasp of the delivering love of Godin Jesus Christ our Lord. III. And so the last thing that I have to say is that this is a lawwhich need never touch you, nor you know anything about but by thehearing of the ear. It is told us that we may escape it. When Paul reasoned ofrighteousness, and temperance, and judgment to come, his hearertrembled as he listened, but there was an end. But the true effectof this message is the effect that Paul himself attached to it whenhe said in the hearing of Athenian wisdom, 'God hath commanded allmen everywhere _to repent_, because He hath appointed a day inthe which He will judge the world in righteousness. ' Judgmentfaithfully preached is the preparation for preaching that 'there isno condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. ' If we trust inthat great Saviour, we shall be quickened from the death of sin, andso shall not be food for the vultures of judgment. Can these corpseslive? Can this eating putrescence, which burrows its foul waythrough our souls, be sweetened? Is there any antiseptic for it?Yes, blessed be God, and the hand whose touch healed the leper willheal us, and 'our flesh will come again as the flesh of a littlechild. ' Christ has bared His breast to the divine judgments againstsin, and if by faith we shelter ourselves in Him, we shall neverknow the terrors of that awful day. Be sure that judgment to come is no mere figure dressed up tofrighten children, nor the product of blind superstition, but thatit is the inevitable issue of the righteousness of the All-rulingGod. You and I and all the sons of men have to face it. 'Herein isour love made perfect, that we may have boldness before Him in theDay of Judgment. ' Betake yourselves, as poor sinful creatures whoknow something of the corruption of your own hearts, to that dearChrist who has died on the Cross for you, and all that is obnoxiousto the divine judgments will, by His transforming life breathed intoyou, 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 foryour Saviour, and then, when the vultures of judgment, with theirmighty black pinions, are wheeling and circling in the sky, ready topounce upon their prey, He will gather you 'as a hen gathereth herchickens under her wings, ' and beneath their shadow you will besafe. 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 toBethany, and was stayed by the disciples' question as to the date ofthe destruction of the temple, which He had foretold, and of the'end of the world, ' which they attached to it. They could not fancythe world lasting without the temple! We often make a like mistake. So there, on the hillside, looking across to the city lying in thesad, fading evening light, He spoke the prophecies of this chapter, which begin with the destruction of Jerusalem, and insensibly mergeinto the final coming of the Son of Man, of which that was a preludeand a type. The difficulty of accurately apportioning the details ofthis prophecy to the future events which fulfil them is common to itwith all prophecy, of which it is a characteristic to blend eventswhich, in the fulfilment, are far apart. From the mountain top, theeye travels over great stretches of country, but does not see thegorges, separating points which seem close together, foreshortenedby distance. There are many comings of the Son of Man before His final coming forfinal judgment, and the nearer and smaller ones are themselvesprophecies. So, we do not need to settle the chronology ofunfulfilled prophecy in order to get the full benefit of Christ'steachings here. In its moral and spiritual effect on us, theuncertainty of the time of our going to Christ is nearly identicalwith the uncertainty of the time of His coming to us. I. The command of watchfulness enforced by our ignorance of the timeof His coming (vs. 42-44). The two commands at the beginning and endof the paragraph are not quite the same. 'Be ye ready' is theconsequence of watchfulness. Nor are the two appended reasons thesame; 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 thatye _think_ not, ' that is to say, it not only is uncertain, butunexpected and surprising. There may also be a difference worthnoting in the different designations of Christ as 'your Lord, 'standing in a special relation to you, and as 'the Son of Man, ' ofkindred with all men, and their Judge. What is this 'watchfulness'?It is literally wakefulness. We are beset by perpetual temptationsto sleep, to spiritual drowsiness and torpor. 'An opium sky rainsdown soporifics. ' And without continual effort, our perception ofthe unseen realities and our alertness for service will be lulled tosleep. The religion of multitudes is a sleepy religion. Further, itis a vivid and ever-present conviction of His certain coming, andconsequently a habitual realising of the transience of the existingorder of things, and of the fast-approaching realities of thefuture. Further, it is the keeping of our minds in an attitude ofexpectation and desire, our eyes ever travelling to the dim distanceto mark the far-off shining of His coming. What a miserable contrastto this is the temper of professing Christendom as a whole! It isswallowed up in the present, wide awake to interests and hopesbelonging to this 'bank and shoal of time, ' but sunk in slumber asto that great future, or, if ever the thought of it intrudes, shrinking, rather than desire, accompanies it, and it is soonhustled 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 thatignorance, and no calculations of the chronology of unfulfilledpredictions have pierced the darkness. It was His purpose that fromgeneration to generation His servants should be kept in the attitudeof expectation, as of an event that may come at any time and mustcome at some time. The parallel uncertainty of the time of death, though not what is meant here, serves the same moral end if rightlyused, and the fact of death is exposed to the same danger of beingneglected because of the very uncertainty, which ought to be onechief reason for keeping it ever in view. Any future event, whichcombines these two things, absolute certainty that it will happen, and utter uncertainty when it will happen, ought to have power toinsist on being remembered, at least, till it was prepared for, andwould have it, if men were not such fools. Christ's coming would beoftener contemplated if it were more welcome. But what sort of aservant is he, who has no glow of gladness at the thought of meetinghis lord? True Christians are 'all them that have loved Hisappearing. ' The illustrative example which separates these two commands isremarkable. The householder's ignorance of the time when the thiefwould come is the reason why he does not watch. He cannot keep awakeall night, and every night, to be ready for him; so he has to go tosleep, and is robbed. But our ignorance is a reason for wakefulness, because we can keep awake all the night of life. The householderwatches to prevent, but we to share in, that for which the watch iskept. The figure of the thief is chosen to illustrate the one pointof the unexpected stealthy approach. But is there not deep truth init, to the effect that Christ's coming is like that of a robber tothose who are asleep, depriving them of earthly treasures? The wordrendered 'broken up' means literally 'dug through, ' and points to aclay or mud house, common in the East, which is entered, not bybursting open doors or windows, but by digging through the wall. Death comes to men sunk in spiritual slumber, to strip them of goodwhich they would fain keep, and makes his entrance by a breach inthe earthly house of this tabernacle. So St. Paul, in his earliestEpistle, refers to this saying (a proof of the early diffusion ofthe 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 exhortationto watch is followed by a pair of contrasted parable portraits, primarily applicable to the apostles and to those 'set over Hishousehold. ' But if we remember what Christ taught as the conditionof pre-eminence in His kingdom, we shall not confine theirapplication 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 breadof life intrusted to him to dispense. It is to be observed thatwatchfulness is not mentioned in this portraiture of the faithfulservant. It is presupposed as the basis and motive of his service. So we learn the double lesson that the attitude of continual outlookfor the Lord is needed, if we are to discharge the tasks which Hehas set us, and that the true effect of watchfulness is to harnessus to the car of duty. Many other motives actuate Christianfaithfulness, but all are reinforced by this, and where it is feeblethey are more or less inoperative. We cannot afford to lose itsinfluence. A Church or a soul which has ceased to be looking for Himwill have let all its tasks drop from its drowsy hands, and willfeel the power of other constraining motives of Christian servicebut faintly, as in a half-dream. On the other hand, true waiting for Him is best expressed in thequiet discharge of accustomed and appointed tasks. The right placefor the servant to be found, when the Lord comes, is 'so doing' asHe commands, however secular the task may be. That was a wise judgewho, when sudden darkness came on, and people thought the end of theworld was at hand, said, 'Bring lights, and let us go on with thecase. We cannot be better employed, if the end has come, than indoing our duty. ' Flighty impatience of common tasks is not watchingfor the King, as Paul had to teach the Thessalonians, who were'shaken' in mind by the thought of the day of the Lord; but theproper attitude of the watchers is 'that ye study to be quiet, andto do your own business. ' Observe, further, the interrogative form of the parable. Thequestion is the sharp point which gives penetrating power, andsuggests Christ's high estimate of the worth and difficulty of suchconduct, and sets us to ask for ourselves, 'Lord, is it I?' Theservant is 'faithful' inasmuch as he does his Lord's will, andrightly uses the goods intrusted to him, and 'wise' inasmuch as heis 'faithful. ' For a single-hearted devotion to Christ is the parentof insight into duty, and the best guide to conduct; and whoeverseeks only to be true to his Lord in the use of his gifts andpossessions, will not lack prudence to guide him in giving to eachhis food, and that in due season. The two characteristics areconnected in another way also; for, if the outcome of faithfulnessbe taken into account, its wisdom is plain, and he who has beenfaithful even unto death will be seen to have been wise though hegave up all, when the crown of eternal life sparkles on hisforehead. Such faithfulness and wisdom (which are at bottom but twonames for one course of conduct) find their motive in thatwatchfulness, which works as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye, andas ever keeping in view His coming, and the rendering of account toHim. The reward of the faithful servant is stated in language similar tothat of the parable of the talents. Faithfulness in a narrowersphere leads to a wider. The reward for true work is more work, ofnobler sort and on a grander scale. That is true for earth and forheaven. If we do His will here, we shall one day exchange thesubordinate place of the steward for the authority of the ruler, andthe toil of the servant for the 'joy of the Lord. ' The soul that isjoined to Christ and is one in will with Him has all things for itsservants; and he who uses all things for his own and his brethren'shighest good is lord of them all, while he walks amid the shadows oftime, and will be lifted to loftier dominion over a grander worldwhen he passes hence. III. The picture and doom of the unwatchful servant. This portraitpresupposes that a long period will elapse before Christ comes. Thesecret thought of the evil servant is the thought of a time far downthe ages from the moment of our Lord's speaking. It would takecenturies for such a temper to be developed in the Church. What isthe temper? A secret dismissal of the anticipation of the Lord'sreturn, and that not merely because He has been long in coming, butas thinking that He has broken His word, and has not come when Hesaid that He would. This unspoken dimming over of the expectationand unconfessed doubt of the firmness of the promise, is the naturalproduct of the long time of apparent delay which the Church has hadto encounter. It will cloud and depress the religion of later ages, unless there be constant effort to resist the tendency and to keepawake. The first generations were all aflame with the glad hope'Maranatha'--'The Lord is at hand. ' Their successors gradually lostthat keenness of expectation, and at most cried, 'Will not He comesoon?' Their successors saw the starry hope through thickening mistsof years; and now it scarcely shines for many, or at least is but adim point, when it should blaze as a sun. He was an 'evil' servant who said so in his heart. He was evilbecause he said it, and he said it because he was evil; for theyielding to sin and the withdrawal of love from Jesus dim the desirefor His coming, and make the whisper that He delays, a hope; while, on the other hand, the hope that He delays helps to open thesluices, and let sin flood the life. So an outburst of cruelmasterfulness and of riotous sensuality is the consequence of thedimmed expectation. There would have been no usurpation of authorityover Christ's heritage by priest or pope, or any other, if that hopehad not become faint. If professing Christians lived with the greatwhite throne and the heavens and earth fleeing away before Him thatsits on it, ever burning before their inward eye, how could theywallow amid the mire of animal indulgence? The corruptions of theChurch, especially of its official members, are traced with sad andprescient hand in these foreboding words, which are none the less aprophecy because cast by His forbearing gentleness into the milderform of a supposition. The dreadful doom of the unwatchful servant is couched in terms ofawful severity. The cruel punishment of sawing asunder, which, tradition says, was suffered by Isaiah and was not unfamiliar in oldtimes, is his. What concealed terror of retribution it signifies wedo not know. Perhaps it points to a fate in which a man shall be, asit were, parted into two, each at enmity with the other. Perhaps itimplies a retribution in kind for his sin, which consisted, as thenext clause implies, in hypocrisy, which is the sundering in twainof inward conviction and practice, and is to be avenged by a likebut worse rending apart of conscience and will. At all events, itshadows a fearful retribution, which is not extinction, inasmuch as, in the next clause, we read that his portion--his lot, or thatcondition which belongs to him by virtue of his character--is with'the hypocrites. ' He was one of them, because, while he said 'mylord, ' he had ceased to love and obey, having ceased to desire andexpect; and therefore whatever is their fate shall be his, even tothe 'dividing asunder of soul and spirit, ' and setting eternaldiscord among the thoughts and intents of the heart. That is not thepunishment of unwatchfulness, but of what unwatchfulness leads to, if unawakened. Let these words of the King ring an alarum for usall, and rouse our sleepy souls to watch, as becomes the children ofthe 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 welook on to its close. Our Lord appends to it the refrain of all thiscontext, the exhortation to watch, based upon our ignorance of thetime of His coming. But as in the former little parable of the wiseservant it was his faithful, wise dispensing of his lord's goods, and not his watchfulness, which was the point of the eulogium passedon him, so here it is the readiness of the wise virgins to taketheir places in the wedding march which is commended. That readinessconsists 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 intothe festal chamber of the bridegroom, which had just been set forthas consisting in faithful stewardship. Here it is presented as beingthe possession of lamp and oil. I. The first consideration, then, must be, What is the meaning ofthese emblems? A great deal of fine-spun ingenuity has been expendedon subordinate points in the parable, such as the significance ofthe number of maidens, the conclusions from the equal division intowise and foolish, the place from which they came to meet thebridegroom, the point in the marriage procession where they aresupposed to join it, whether it was at going to fetch the bride, orat coming back with her; whether the feast is held in her house, orin his, and so on. But all these are unimportant questions, and asChrist has left them in the background, we only destroy theperspective by dragging them into the front. In no parable is itmore important than in this to restrain the temptation to run outanalogies into their last results. The remembrance that the virgins, as the emblem of the whole body of the visible Church, are the sameas the bride, who does not appear in the parable, might warn againstsuch an error. They were ten, as being the usual number for such acompany, or as being the round number naturally employed whendefiniteness was not sought. They were divided equally, not becauseour Lord desired to tell, but because He wished to leave unnoticed, the numerical proportion of the two classes. One set are 'wise' andthe other 'foolish, ' because He wishes to show not only the sin, butthe absurdity, of unreadiness, and to teach us that true wisdom isnot of the head only, but far more of the heart. The conduct of thetwo groups of maidens is looked at from the prudent and common-sensestandpoint, and the provident action of the one sets in relief thereckless stupidity of the other. There have been many opinions as to the meaning of the lamps and theoil, which it is needless to repeat. Surely the analogy ofscriptural symbolism is our best guide. If we follow it, we get ameaning which perfectly suits the emblems and the whole parable. Inthe 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 seeyour good works. ' II. Note the sleep of all the virgins. No blame is hinted on accountof it. It is not inconsistent with the wisdom of the wise, nor doesit interfere with their readiness to meet the bridegroom. It is, then, such a sleep as is compatible with watching. Our Lord'sintroduction of this point is an example of His merciful allowancefor our weakness. There must be a certain slackening of the tensionof expectation when the bridegroom tarries. Centuries of delaycannot but modify the attitude of the waiting Church, and Jesus hereimplies that there will be a long stretch of time before His advent, during which all His people will feel the natural effect of thedeferring of hope. But the sleep which He permits, unblamed, islight, 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 torefuse the teaching of experience; but counts that we have watchedaright, 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. Thehour, 'of night's black arch the keystone, ' suggests the unexpectednessof His coming; the loudness of the cry, its all-awaking effect; thebroken words of the true reading, 'Behold the bridegroom!' thecloseness on the heels of the heralds with which the processionflashes through the darkness. The virgins had 'gone forth to meet him'at the beginning of the parable, but the going forth to which they arenow summoned is not the same. The Christian soul goes forth once when, at the beginning of its Christian life, it forsakes the world to waitfor and on Christ, and again, when it leaves the world to pass withHim into the banquet. Life is the slumber from which some are awakedby the voice of death, and some who 'remain' shall be awaked by thetrumpet of judgment. There is no interval between the cry and theappearance of the bridegroom; only a moment to rouse themselves, tolook to their lamps, and to speak the hurried words of the foolishand the answer of the wise, and then the procession is upon them. Itis all done as in a flash, 'in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. 'This impression of swiftness, which leaves no time for delayedpreparation, is the uniform impression conveyed by all the Scripturereferences to the coming of the Lord. The swoop of the eagle, thefierce blaze of lightning from one side of the sky to the other, thebursting of the flood, that morning's work at Sodom, not begun tilldawn and finished before the 'sun was risen on the earth, ' are itstypes. Foolish indeed to postpone preparation till that moment whencry and coming are simultaneous, like lightning and thunder rightoverhead! The foolish virgins' imploring request and its answer are not to bepressed, as if they meant more than to set forth the hopelessness ofthen attempting to procure the wanting oil, and especially thehopelessness of attempting to get it from one's fellows. There is aworld of suppressed terror and surprise in that cry, 'Our lamps aregoing out. ' Note that they burned till the bridegroom came, andthen, like the magic lamps in old legends, at his approach shiveredinto darkness. Is not that true of the formal, outward religion, which survives everything but contact with His all-seeing eye andperfect judgment? These foolish maidens were as much astonished asalarmed at seeing their lights flicker down to extinction; and it ispossible for professing Christians to live a lifetime, and never tobe found out either by themselves or by anybody else. But if therehas been no oil in the lamp, it will be quenched when He appears. The atmosphere that surrounds His throne acts like oxygen on theoil-fed flame, and like carbonic acid gas on the other. The answer of the wise is not selfishness. It is not from ourfellows, however bright their lamps, that we can ever get thatinward 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 termsas the pearl of great price was bought, 'without money'; but themarket is closed, as on a holiday, on the day of the king's son'smarriage. That is not touched upon here, except in so far as it ishinted at in the absence of the foolish when he enters thebanqueting chamber, and in their fruitless prayer. They had no timeto get the oil before he came, and they had not got it when theyreturned. The lesson is plain. We can only get the new life of theSpirit, which will make our lives a light, from God; and we can getit now, not then. IV. We see the wise virgins within and the foolish without. Theyare, indeed, no longer designated by these adjectives, but as'ready' and 'the others'; for preparedness is fitness, and they whoare found of Him in possession of the outward righteousness and ofits inward source, His own divine life in them, are prepared. Tosuch the gates of the festal chamber fly open. In that day, place isthe 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 atthe mid hour of night, ' they who have 'filled their odorous lampswith deeds of light' have surely 'gained their entrance. ' There issilence as to the unspeakable joys of the wedding feast. Some faintsounds of music and dancing, some gleams from the lighted windows, find their way out; but the closed door keeps its secret, and onlythe guests know the gladness. That closed door means security, perpetuity, untold blessedness, butit means exclusion too. The piteous reiterated call of the shut-outmaidens, roused too late, and so suddenly, from songs and laughterto vain cries, evokes a stern answer, through which shines the awfulreality veiled in the parable. We do not need to regard the prayerfor entrance, and its refusal, as conveying more than thefruitlessness of wishes for entrance then, when unaccompanied withfitness to enter. Such desire as is expressed in this passionatebeating at the closed door, with hoarse entreaties, is not fitness. If it were, the door would open; and the reason why it does not liesin the bridegroom's awful answer, 'I know you not. ' The absence ofthe qualification prevents his recognising them as his. Surely theunalleviated darkness of a hopeless exclusion settles down on thesesad five, standing, huddled together, at the door, with theextinguished lamps hanging in their despairing hands. 'Too late, toolate, ye cannot enter now. ' The wedding bell has become a funeralknell. They were not the enemies of the bridegroom, they thoughtthemselves his friends. They let life ebb without securing the onething needful, and the neglect was irremediable. There is a tragedyunderlying many a life of outward religiousness and inwardemptiness, and a dreadful discovery will flare in upon such, whenthey 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, byaccuracy of rendering the tense of a verb, gives a much morestriking as well as correct reproduction of the original than theAuthorised 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 onlybecause it more correctly represents the Greek, but because it setsbefore us a more solemn and impressive picture of the precise timeat which the terrible discovery was made by the foolish five. Theywoke from their sleep, and hastily trimmed their lamps. These burnedbrightly for a moment, and then began to flicker and die down. Theextinction of their light was not the act of a moment, but was agradual process, which had advanced in some degree before itattracted the attention of the bearers of the lamps. At last itroused the half-sleeping five into startled, wide-awakeconsciousness. There is a tone of alarm and fear in their suddenexclamation, 'Our lamps are going out. ' They see now the catastrophethat threatens, and understand that the only means of averting it isto replenish the empty oil-vessels before the flame has quiteexpired. But their knowledge and their dread were alike too late, and, as they went on their hopeless search for some one to give themwhat they once might have had in abundance, the last faint flickerceased, and they had to grope their way in the dark, with theirlightless lamps hanging useless in their slack hands, while far offthe torches of the bridal procession, in which they might have had apart, flashed through the night. We have nothing to do with thetragical issue of the process of extinction; but solemn lessons ofuniversal application gather round the picture of that process, asrepresented 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 significanceof the oil. Throughout it, oil symbolises the divine influences thatcome down on men appointed by God to their several functions, andwhich are there traced to the Spirit of the Lord. So the priestswere set apart by unction with the holy oil; so Samuel poured oil onthe black locks of Saul. So, too, the very name Messiah means'anointed, ' and the great prophecy, which Jesus claimed for His ownin His first sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, put into theMessiah's lips the declaration, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me. ' But there are Old Testament symbolswhich bear still more closely on the emblems of our text. Zechariahsaw in vision a golden lamp-stand with seven lamps, and on eitherside of it an olive tree, from which oil flowed through golden pipesto feed the flame. The interpretation of the vision was given by the'angel that talked with' the prophet as being, 'not by might nor bypower, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord. ' So, then, we follow the plainly marked road and Scripture use of asymbol when we take the oil in this parable to be that which everylistener to Jesus, who was instructed in the old things which he wasbringing forth with new emphasis from the ancient treasure-house ofthe word of God, would take it to be--namely, the sum of theinfluences from Heaven which were bestowed through the Spirit of theLord. Such being the meaning of the oil, what was meant by the lamp? Wehave no intention of discussing here the many varying interpretationswhich have been given to the symbol. To do so would lead us too farafield. We can only say that the interpretation of the oil as theinfluence of the Holy Spirit necessarily involves the explanation ofthe lamp which is fed by it, as being the spiritual life of theindividual, which is nourished and made visible to the world as light, by the continual communication from God of these hallowing influences. Turning again to the Old Testament, I need only remind you of thegreat seven-branched lamp which stood in the Tabernacle, and afterwardsin the Temple. It was the symbol of the collective Israel, as recipientof divine influences, and thereby made the light of a dark world. Itsrays streamed out over the desert first, and afterwards shone fromthe mountain of the Lord's house, beaming illumination and invitationto those who sat in darkness to behold the great light, and to walkin the light of the Lord. Zechariah's emblem was based on the Templelamp. In accordance with the greater prominence given by the OldTestament to national than to individual religion, both of theserepresented the people as a whole. In accordance with the moreadvanced individualism of the New Testament, our text so far variesthe application of the emblem, that each of the ten virgins who, asa whole, stand for the collective professing Church, has her ownlamp. But that is the only difference between the Old and the NewTestament uses of the symbol. I need not remind you how the same metaphor recurs frequently in theteachings of our Lord and of the Apostles. Sometimes the OldTestament collective point of view is maintained, as in our Lord'ssaying in the Sermon on the Mount, 'Ye are the light of the world, 'but more frequently, the characteristic individualising of thefigure prevails, and we read of Christians shining 'as lights in theworld, ' and each holding forth, as a lamp does its light, 'the wordof life. ' Nor must we forget the climax of the uses of this emblem, in the vision of the Apocalypse, where John once more saw the Lord, on whose bosom his head had so often peacefully lain, 'walking inthe midst of the seven golden candlesticks. ' There, again, thecollective rather than the individual bearing of the figure isprominent, but with significant differences from the older use ofit. In Judaism there was a formal, outward unity, represented by theone lamp with its manifold lights, all welded together on the goldenstem; but the churches of Asia Minor were distinct organisations, and their oneness came, not from outward union of a mechanical kind, but from the presence in their midst of the Son of God. The sum of all this course of thought is that the lamp is theChristian life of the individual sustained by the communication ofthe influences of God's Holy Spirit. II. We note next the gradual dying out of the light. 'Our lamps aregoing out. ' All spiritual emotions and vitality, like every other kind ofemotion and vitality, die unless nourished. Let no theologicaldifficulties about 'the final perseverance of the saints, ' or 'theindefeasibleness of grace, ' and the impossibility of slaying thedivine life that has once been given to a man, come in the way ofletting this parable have its full, solemn weight. These foolishvirgins had oil and had light, the oil failed by their fault, and sothe light went out, and they were startled, when they awoke fromtheir slumber, to see how, instead of brilliant flame, there wassmoking wick. Dear brethren, let us take the lesson. There is nothing in ourreligious emotions which has any guarantee of perpetuity in it, except upon certain conditions. We may live, and our life may ebb. Wemay trust, and our trust may tremble into unbelief. We may obey, andour obedience may be broken by the mutinous risings of self-will. Wemay walk in the 'paths of righteousness, ' and our feet may falterand turn aside. There is certainty of the dying out of all communicatedlife, unless the channel of communication with the life from which itwas first kindled, be kept constantly clear. The lamp may be 'a burningand a shining light, ' or, more accurately translating the phrase ofour Lord, 'a light kindled and' (therefore) 'shining, ' but it will belight 'for a season' only, unless it is fed from that from which itwas first set alight; and that is from God Himself. 'Our lamps are going out, '--a slow process that! The flame does notall die into darkness in a minute. There are stages in its death. The white portion of the flame becomes smaller and the blue partextends; then the flame flickers, and finally shudders itself, as itwere, off the wick; then nothing remains but a charred red linealong the top; then that line breaks up into little points, and oneafter another these twinkle out, and then all is black, and the lampis gone out. And so, slowly, like the ebbing away of the tide, likethe reluctant, long-protracted dying of summer days, like thedropping of the blood from some fatal wound, by degrees the processof extinction creeps, creeps, creeps on, and the lamp that was goingis finally gone out. III. Again, we note that extinction is brought about simply by doingnothing. These five foolish virgins did not stray away into any forbiddenpaths. No positive sin is alleged against them. They were simplyasleep. The other five were asleep too. I do not need to enter, hereand now, into the whole interpretation of the parable, or theremight be much to say about the difference between these two kinds ofsleep. But what I wish to notice is that it was nothing exceptnegligence darkening into drowsiness, which caused the dying out ofthe light. It was not of set purpose that the foolish five took no oil withthem. They merely neglected to do so, not having the wit to lookahead and provide against the contingency of a long time of waitingfor the bridegroom. Their negligence was the result, not ofdeliberate wish to let their lights go out, but of theirheedlessness; and because of that negligence they earned the name of'foolish. ' If we do not look forward, and prepare for possibledrains on our powers, we shall deserve the same adjective. If we donot lay in stores for future use, we may be sent to school to theharvesting ant and the bee. That lesson applies to all departmentsof life; but it is eminently applicable to the spiritual life, whichis sustained only by communications from the Spirit of God. Forthese communications will be imperceptibly lessened, and may bealtogether intercepted, unless diligent attention is given to keepopen the channels by which they enter the spirit. If the pipes arenot looked to, they will be choked by masses of matted trifles, through which the 'rivers of living water, ' which Christ took as asymbol of the Spirit's influences, cannot force a way. The thing that makes shipwreck of the faith of most professingChristians that do come to grief is no positive wickedness, noconduct which would be branded as sin by the Christian conscience oreven by ordinary people, but simply torpor. If the water in a pondis never stirred, it is sure to stagnate, and green scum to spreadover it, and a foul smell to rise from it. A Christian man has onlyto do what I am afraid a good many of us are in great danger ofdoing--that is, nothing--in order to ensure that his lamp shall goout. Do you try to keep yours alight? There is only one way to do it--thatis to go to Christ and get Him to pour His sweetness and His powerinto our open hearts. When one of the old patriarchs had committed agreat sin, and had unbelievingly twitched his hand out of God's hand, and gone away down into Egypt to help himself instead of trusting toGod, he was commanded, on his return to Palestine, to go to the placewhere he dwelt at the first, and begin again, at the point where hebegan when he first entered the land. Which being translated is justthis--the only way to keep our spirits vital and quick is by havingrecourse, again and again, to the same power which first impartedlife to them, and this is done by the first means, the means of simple reliance upon Christ in the consciousness of our own deep need, andof believingly waiting upon Him for the repeated communication of thegifts which we, alas! have so often misimproved. Negligence is enoughto slay. Doing nothing is the sure way to quench the Holy Spirit. And, on the other hand, keeping close to Him is the sure way tosecure that He will never leave us. You can choke a lamp with oil, but you cannot have in your hearts too much of that divine grace. And you receive all that you need if you choose to go and ask itfrom Him. Remember the old story about Elisha and the poor woman. The cruse of oil began to run. She brought all the vessels that shecould rake together, big and little, pots and cups, of all shapesand sizes, and set them, one after the other, under the jet of oil. They were all filled; and when she brought no more vessels the oilstayed. If you do not take your empty hearts to God, and say, 'Here, Lord, fill this cup too; poor as it is, fill it with Thine owngracious influences, ' be very sure that no such influences will cometo you. But if you do go, be as sure of this, that so long as youhold out your emptiness to Him, He will flood it with His fulness, and the light that seemed to be sputtering to its death will flameup again. He will not quench the smoking wick, if only we carry itto Him; but as the priests in the Temple walked all through thenight to trim the golden lamps, so He who walks amidst the sevencandlesticks will see to each. IV. And now one last word. That process of gradual extinction may begoing on, and may have been going on for a long while, and thevirgin that carries the lamp be quite unaware of it. How could a sleeping woman know whether her lamp was burning or not?How can a drowsy Christian tell whether his spiritual life is brightor not? To be unconscious of our approximation to this condition is, I am afraid, one of the surest signs that we are in it. I supposethat a paralysed limb is quite comfortable. At any rate, paralysisof the spirit may be going on without our knowing anything about it. So, dear friends, do not put these poor words of mine away from youand say, 'Oh! they do not apply to me. ' I am quite sure that the people to whom they do apply will be thelast people to take them to themselves. And while I quite believe, thank God! that there are many of us who may feel and know that ourlamps are not going out, sure I am that there are some of us whomeverybody but themselves knows to be carrying a lamp that is so fargone out that it is smoking and stinking in the eyes and noses ofthe people that stand by. Be sure that nobody was more surprisedthan were the five foolish women when they opened their witless, sleepy eyes, and saw the state of things. So, dear friends, 'letyour loins be girt about, and your lamps burning; and ye yourselveslike unto men that wait for their Lord. ' 'THEY THAT WERE READY' 'They that were ready went in with him to the marriage. ' --MATT. Xxv. 10. It is interesting to notice the variety of aspects in which, in thislong discourse, Jesus sets forth His Second Coming. It is like theflood that swept away a world. It is like a thief stealing throughthe dark, and breaking up a house. It is like a master reckoningwith his servants. These three metaphors suggest solemn, one mightalmost say alarming, images. But then this parable comes in andtells how that coming is like that of a bridegroom to the bride'shouse, with joy and music. I am afraid that the average Christian, when he thinks at all of Christ's coming, takes these three firstaspects rather than the last one, and so loses what is meant to be abright hope and a great stimulus. It is not in human nature to thinkmuch about a terrible future. It is not in human nature to avoidthinking a great deal about a blessed future. And although one doesnot wish to preach carelessness, or the ignoring of the solemn sideof that coming, sure I am that our Christian lives would be strongerand purer, brighter and better able to front the solemn side, if theblessed side of it were more often the object of our contemplation. Turning to the words of my text, which seem to me to be the verycentre and heart of this parable, I ask:-- I. What makes readiness? There have been many answers given to that question. One has beenthat to be ready means to be perpetually having before us thethought of the coming of the Lord, and that has been taken to be themeaning of the watchfulness which is enjoined in the context. Butthe parable itself points in an altogether different direction. Who, according to it, were ready? The five who had lamps and oil. To havethese was readiness. It is beautiful to notice how these five who _were_ ready whenthe Master came had 'slumbered and slept' like the other five. Ah!that touch in the picture shows that 'He knoweth our frame; Heremembereth that we are dust. ' It is not in human nature to keep uppermanently a tension of expectation for a far-off good; and inprofound knowledge of the weakness of humanity, our Lord, in thisparable, says: 'While the Bridegroom tarried they _all_ slumbered'--andyet the five were ready when the Bridegroom came. In like manner, Christian men and women who have no expectation at all that theSecond Coming of the Lord will occur during their lifetimes, maynevertheless be ready, if they have the burning lamps and the storeof oil. The question then comes to be, What is meant by these? Perhaps harm has been done by insisting upon too minute and specificinterpretation. But, at the same time, we must not forget that, fromthe very beginning of the Jewish Revelation, from the time when theseven-branched candlestick was appointed for the Tabernacle, rightdown to the day when the Apocalyptic Seer saw in Patmos the Son ofMan walking in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks, themetaphor has had one meaning. The aggregate of God's people areintended to be, as Jesus told us immediately after He had drawn thecharacter of a true disciple, in the wonderful outlines of theBeatitudes, 'the light of the world, ' and they will be so in themeasure in which the gentle radiance of that character shinesthrough their lives, as the light of a lamp through frosted glass. But the aggregate is made up of units, and individual Christians areto shine 'as lights in the world, ' and their separate brightnessesare to coalesce in the clustered light of the whole Church. Whatmakes an individual Christian a light is a Christ-like life, derivedfrom that Life which was 'the Light of men. ' The lamp which the fivewise virgins bear is the same as the light which the consistentChristian is. The inner self illuminated from Christ, the source ofall our illumination, lights up the outward life, which each of usmay be conceived as carrying in our hands. It is not ourselves, andyet it is ourselves made visible. It is not ourselves, but Christ inus; and so we shine as lights in the world, only by 'holding forththe word of life. ' That modification of the figure by Paul is profoundly true andimportant, for after all we are not so much lights as candelabra, and only as we bear aloft the flashing light of Christ shall weshine 'in a naughty world. ' Our lamps, then, are Christ-likecharacters derived from Christ, and to have and bear these is thefirst element in being ready for the Bridegroom. Dear friends, remember that this whole parable is spoken toprofessing Christians and real members of Christ's Church; and thatthere is no meaning in it unless it is possible to quench the lightof the lamp. Remember that our Lord said once, 'Let your loins begirt, ' and put that as the necessary condition of lamps burning. 'Let your loins be girt' with resolved effort of faith anddependence, and make sure that you have the provision for thecontinuance of the light. So, and only so, shall any man be of thehappy company of them that were ready. II. Note that this readiness is the condition of entrance. 'They that were ready went in with Him to the marriage. ' Now faithalone unites a man to Jesus Christ, and makes him an heir ofsalvation. But faith alone, if that were possible, would not admit aman to the marriage-feast. Of course the supposed case is animpossible case, for as James has taught us in his plain moral way, faith which is alone dies, or perhaps never lived. But what our Lordtells us here is that moral character, which is of such a sort as toshine in the world's darkness, is the condition of entrance. Peoplesay that salvation is by faith. Yes, that is true; but salvation isby works also, only that the works are made possible through faith. In the very necessity and nature of things nothing but the readinesswhich consists in continued Christ-like character will ever allow aman to pass the threshold. Now do you believe that? Or are yousaying, 'I trust to Jesus Christ, and so I am sure I shall go toHeaven. ' No, you will not, unless your faith is making you heavenly, in your temper and conduct. For to talk about the next world as aplace of retribution is but an imperfect statement of the case. Itis not a place of retribution so much as of outcome, and the apostlegives a completer view when he says, 'Whatsoever a man soweth, thatshall he also reap. ' That future life is not the reward of goodnessso much as the necessary consequence of holiness. Holiness andblessedness are, in some measure, separated here; there they are twonames for the one condition. 'No man shall see the Lord, ' withoutthat holiness. 'They that were ready went in. ' Of course they did. Am I ready? That question means, Am I, by my faith in Jesus Christ, receiving into my heart the anointing which that great anointed Onegives us? Am I living a life that is a light in the world? If so, and not else, my entrance is sure. We have seen what this readiness consists in, and how it is thecondition of entrance. There is one last thought-- III. To delay preparation is madness. There is nothing in all Christ's parables more tragical, morepathetic, than this picture of the hapless five when they woke upto find their lamps going out. They heard the procession coming, the sound of feet drawing nearer, and the music borne every momentmore loudly on the midnight air. And there were they, with dyinglamps and empty oil-cans. Their shock, their alarm, theirbewilderment, are all expressed in that preposterous request oftheirs, Give us of your oil. ' The answer of the wise virgins has been said to be cold andunfeeling. It is not that; it is simply a plain statement of facts. The oil that belongs to me cannot be given to you. That is the firstlesson taught us by the request of the foolish and the answer of thewise. 'If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself; and if thouscornest, thou alone shalt bear it. ' 'Every man shall bear his ownburden. ' There is no possible transference of moral character orspiritual gifts in that fashion. The awful individuality of eachsoul, and its unshareable personal responsibility, come solemnly toview in the words which superficial readers pass by: 'Not so, lestthere be not enough for us and you. ' You cannot share your brother'soil. You may share many of his possessions; not this. 'Go to them that sell, and buy for yourselves. ' The question ofwhether there was time to buy was not for the five wise to answer. There was not much chance that the would-be buyers would find a shopopen and anybody waiting to sell them oil at twelve o'clock atnight. But they risked it; and when they came back they were toolate. Now, dear friends, all the lessons of this parable may be taken byus, though we do not believe, and think we have good reason for notbelieving, that the literal return of Jesus Christ is to take placein our time. It does not matter very much, in so far as the teachingof this parable is concerned, whether the Bridegroom comes to us, orwhether we go to the Bridegroom. I do not for a moment say thatthere is no such thing as coming to Jesus Christ in the last hoursof life, and becoming ready to enter even then, but I do say that itis a very rare case, and that there is a terrible risk in delayingtill then. But I pray you to remember that our parable is addressedto, and contemplates the case of, not people who are away from JesusChrist, but Christians, and that it is to them that its message ischiefly brought. It is they whom it warns not to put off making surethat they have provision for the continuance of the Christ-life. Wehave, day by day, to go to Him that sells and 'buy for ourselves. 'And we know, what it did not fall within our Lord's purpose to sayin this parable, that the price of the oil is the surrender ofourselves, and the opening of our hearts to the entrance of thatdivine Spirit. Then there will be no fear but that the lamp willhold out to burn, and no fear but that 'when the Bridegroom, withHis feastful friends, passes to bliss, at the mid-hour of night, ' weshall gain our entrance. TRADERS FOR THE MASTER 'For the kingdom of heaven la as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his goods. 15. And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey. 16. Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with the same, and made them other five talents. 17. And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two. 18. But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and hid his lord's money. 19. After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and reckoneth with them. 20. And so he that had received five talents came and brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents: behold, I have gained beside them five talents more. 21. His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. 22. He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other talents beside them. 23. His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord. 24. Then to which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: 25. And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. 26. His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed: 27. Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury. 28. Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which hath ten talents. 29. For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. 30. And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. ' --MATT. Xxv. 14-30. The parable of the Ten Virgins said nothing about their workingwhilst they waited. This one sets forth that side of the duties ofthe servants in their master's absence, and so completes the former. It is clearly in its true historical connection here, and is closelyknit to both the preceding and following context. It is a strangeinstance of superficial reading that it should ever have beensupposed to be but another version of Luke's parable of the pounds. The very resemblances of the two are meant to give force to theirdifferences, which are fundamental. They are the converse of eachother. That of the pounds teaches that men who have the same giftsintrusted to them may make a widely different use of these, and willbe rewarded differently, in strictly graduated proportion to theirunlike diligence. The lesson of the parable before us, on the otherhand, is that men with dissimilar gifts may employ them with equaldiligence; and that, if they do, their reward shall be the same, however great the endowments of one, and slender those of another. Areader who has missed that distinction must be very shortsighted, orsworn to make out a case against the Gospels. I. We may consider the lent capital and the business done with it. Masters nowadays do not give servants their money to trade with, when they leave home; but the incident is true to the old-worldrelations of master and slave. Our Lord's consciousness of His neardeparture, which throbs in all this context, comes out emphaticallyhere. He is preparing His disciples for the time when they will haveto work without Him, like the managers of some branch house ofbusiness whose principal has gone abroad. What are the 'talents'with which He will start them on their own account? We have takenthe word into common language, however little we remember theteaching of the parable as to the hand that gives 'men of talent'their endowments. But the natural powers usually called by the nameare not what Christ means here, though the principles of the parablemay be extended to include them. For these powers are the 'ability'according to which the talents are given. But the talents themselvesare the spiritual knowledge and endowments which are properly thegifts of the ascended Lord to His Church. Two important lessons asto these are conveyed. First, that they are distributed in varyingmeasure, and that not arbitrarily, by the mere will of the giver, but according to his discernment of what each servant can profitablyadminister. The 'ability' which settles their amount is not moreclosely defined. It may include natural faculty, for Christ's giftsusually follow the line of that; and the larger the nature, the moreof Him it can contain. But it also includes spiritual receptivenessand faithfulness, which increase the absorbing power. The capacityto receive will also be the capacity to administer, and it will befully filled. The second lesson taught is that spiritual gifts are given fortrading with. In other words, they are here considered not so muchas blessings to the possessor as his stock-in-trade, which he canemploy for the Master's enrichment. We are all tempted to think ofthem mostly as given us for our own blessing and joy; and thereminder is never unseasonable that a Christian receives nothing forhimself alone. God hath shined into our hearts, that we may give toothers the light of the knowledge which has flashed glad day intoour darkness. The Master intrusts us with a portion of His wealth, not for expending on ourselves, but for trading with. A third principle here is that the right use of His gifts increasesthem in our hands. 'Money makes money. ' The five talents grow toten, the two to four. The surest way to increase our possession ofChrist's grace is to try to impart it. There is no better way ofstrengthening our own faith than to seek to make others share in it. Christian convictions, spoken, are confirmed, but muffled in silenceare weakened. 'There is that scattereth and yet increaseth. ' Seedheaped and locked up in a granary breeds weevils and moths; flungbroadcast over the furrows, it multiplies into seed that can be sownagain, and bread that feeds the sower. So we have in this part ofthe parable almost the complete summary of the principles on which, the purposes for which, and the results to faithful use with which, Christ gives His gifts. The conduct of the slenderly endowed servant who hides his talentwill be considered farther on. II. We note the faithful servants' balance-sheet and reward. Our Lord again sounds the note of delay--'After a long time'--anindefinite phrase which we know carries centuries in its folds, howmany more we know not nor are intended to know. The two faithfulservants present their balance-sheet in identical words, and receivethe same commendation and reward. Their speech is in sharp contrastwith the idle one's excuse, inasmuch as it puts a glad acknowledgmentof the lord's giving in the forefront, as if to teach that thethankful recognition of his liberality underlies all joyful andsuccessful service, and deepens while it makes glad the sense ofresponsibility. The cords of love are silken; and he who begins withsetting before himself the largeness of Christ's gifts to him, willnot fail in using these so as to increase them. In the light of thatday, the servant sees more clearly than when he was at work theresults of his work. We do not know what the year's profits havebeen till stock-taking and balancing-time comes. Here we often say, 'I have laboured in vain. ' There we shall say, 'I have gained fivetalents. ' The verbatim repetition of the same words to both servants teachesthe great lesson of this parable as contrasted with that of thepounds, that where there has been the same faithful work, withdifferent amounts of capital, there will be the same reward. OurMaster does not care about quantity, but about quality and motive. The slave with a few shillings, enough to stock meagrely a littlestall, may show as much business capacity, diligence, and fidelity, as if he had millions to work with. Christ rewards not actions, butthe graces which are made visible in actions; and these can be aswell seen in the tiniest as in the largest deeds. The light thatstreams through a pin-prick is the same that pours through thewidest window. The crystals of a salt present the same facets, flashing back the sun at the same angles, whether they be large ormicroscopically small. Therefore the judgment of Christ, which issimply the utterance of fact, takes no heed of the extent but onlyof the kind of service, and puts on the same level of recompense allwho, with however widely varying powers, were one in spirit, indiligence, and devotion. The eulogium on the servants is not'successful' or 'brilliant, ' but 'faithful, ' and both alike get it. The words of the lord fall into three parts. First comes hisgenerous and hearty praise, --the brief and emphatic monosyllable'Well, ' and the characterisation of the servants as 'good andfaithful. ' Praise from Christ's lips is praise indeed; and here Hepours it out in no grudging or scanty measure, but with warmth andevident delight. His heart glows with pleasure, and His commendationis musical with the utterance of His own joy in His servants. He'rejoices over them with singing'; and more gladly than a fondmother speaks honeyed words of approval to her darling, of whosegoodness she is proud, does He praise these two. When we are temptedto disparage our slender powers as compared with those of His moreconspicuous servants, and to suppose that all which we do is nought, let us think of this merciful and loving estimate of our poorservice. For such words from such lips, life itself were wiselyflung away; but such words from such lips will be spoken inrecognition of many a piece of service less high and heroic than amartyr's. 'Good and faithful' refers not to the more general notionof goodness, but to the special excellence of a servant, and thelatter word seems to define the former. Fidelity is the grace whichHe praises, --manifested in the recognition that the capital was aloan, given to be traded with for Him, and to be brought backincreased to Him. He is faithful who ever keeps in view, and actson, the conditions on which, and the purposes for which, he hasreceived his spiritual wealth; and 'he who is faithful in that whichis least, is faithful also in much. ' The second part of the lord's words is the appointment to higheroffice, as the reward of faithfulness. Here on earth, the toolscome, in the long run, to the hands that can use them, and the bestreward of faithfulness in a narrower sphere is to be lifted to awider. Promotion means more to do; and if the world were rightlyorganised, the road to advancement would be diligence; and thehigher a man climbed, the wider would be the horizon of his labour. It is so in Christ's kingdom, and should be so in His visibleChurch. It will be so in heaven. Clearly this saying implies theactive theory of the future life, and the continuance in someministry of love, unknown to us, of the energies which were trainedin the small transactions of earth. 'If five talents are "a fewthings, " how great the "many things" will be!' In the parable of thepounds, the servant is made a ruler; here being 'set over' seemsrather still to point to the place of a steward or servant. Thesphere is enlarged, but the office is unaltered. The manager whoconducted a small trade rightly will be advanced to thesuperintendence of a larger business. 'We doubt not that for one so true There must be other, nobler work to do, ' and that in that work the same law will continue to operate, andfaithfulness be crowned with ever-growing capacities and tasksthrough a dateless eternity. The last words of the lord pass beyond our poor attempts atcommenting. No eye can look undazzled at the sun. When Christ wasnear the Cross, He left His disciples a strange bequest at such amoment, --His joy; and that is their brightest portion here, eventhough it be shaded with many sorrows. The enthroned Christ welcomesall who have known 'the fellowship of His sufferings' into thefulness of His heavenly joy, unshaded, unbroken, unspeakable; andthey pass into it as into an encompassing atmosphere, or some broadland of peace and abundance. Sympathy with His purposes leads tosuch oneness with Him that His joy is ours, both in its occasionsand in its rapture. 'Thou makest them drink of the river of Thypleasures, ' and the lord and the servant drink from the same cup. III. The excuse and punishment of the indolent servant. His excuse is his reason. He did think hardly of his lord, and, eventhough he had His gift in his hand to confute him, he slandered Himin his heart as harsh and exacting. To many men the requirements ofreligion are more prominent than its gifts, and God is thought of asdemanding rather than as 'the giving God. ' Such thoughts paralyseaction. Fear is barren, love is fruitful. Nothing grows on themountain of curses, which frowns black over against the sunny slopesof the mountain of blessing with its blushing grapes. The indolencewas illogical, for, if the master was such as was thought, the morereason for diligence; but fear is a bad reasoner, and the absurd gapbetween the premises and the conclusion is matched by one of thevery same width in every life that thinks of God as rigidlyrequiring obedience, which, therefore, it does _not_ give!Still another error is in the indolent servant's words. He flingsdown the hoarded talent with 'Lo, thou hast thine own. ' He wasmistaken. Talents hid are not, when dug up, as heavy as they werewhen buried. This gold does rust, and a life not devoted to God isnever carried back to Him unspoiled. The lord's answer again falls into three parts, corresponding tothat to the faithful servants. First comes the stern characterisationof the man. As with the others' goodness, his badness is definedby the second epithet. It is slothfulness. Is that all? Yes; it doesnot need active opposition to pull down destruction on one's head. Simple indolence is enough, the negative sin of not doing or beingwhat we ought. Ungirt loins, unlit lamps, unused talents, sink a manlike lead. Doing nothing is enough for ruin. The remarkable answer to the servant's charge seems to teach us thattimid souls, conscious of slender endowments, and pressed by theheavy sense of responsibility, and shrinking from Christianenterprises, for fear of incurring heavier condemnation, may yetfind means of using their little capital. The bankers, who investthe collective contributions of small capitalists to advantage, may, or may not, be intended to be translated into the Church; but, atany rate, the principle of united service is here recommended tothose who feel too weak for independent action. Slim houses in a rowhold each other up; and, if we cannot strike out a path forourselves, let us seek strength and safety in numbers. The fate of the indolent servant has a double horror. It is loss andsuffering. The talent is taken from the slack hands and coward heartthat would not use it, and given to the man who had shown he couldand would. Gifts unemployed for Christ are stripped off a soulyonder. How much will go from many a richly endowed spirit, whichhere flashed with unconsecrated genius and force! We do not need towait for eternity to see that true possession, which is use, increases powers, and that disuse, which is equivalent to notpossessing, robs of them. The blacksmith's arm, the scout's eye, thecraftsman's delicate finger, the student's intellect, thesensualist's passions, all illustrate the law on its one side; andthe dying out of faculties and tastes, and even of intuitions andconscience, by reason of simple disuse, are melancholy instances ofit on the other. But the solemn words of this condemnation seem topoint to a far more awful energy in its working in the future, wheneverything that has not been consecrated by employment for Jesusshall be taken away, and the soul, stripped of its garb, shall 'befound naked. ' How far that process of divesting may affectfaculties, without touching the life, who can tell? Enough to seewith awe that a spirit may be cut, as it were, to the quick, andstill exist. But loss is not all the indolent servant's doom. Once more, like theslow toll of a funeral bell, we hear the dread sentence of ejectionto the 'mirk midnight' without, where are tears undried and passionunavailing. There is something very awful in the monotonousrepetition of that sentence so often in these last discourses ofChrist's. The most loving lips that ever spoke, in love, shaped thisform of words, so heart-touching in its wailing, but decisive, proclamation of blackness, homelessness, and sorrow, and cannot buttoll them over and over again into our ears, in sad knowledge of ourforgetfulness and unbelief, --if perchance we may listen and bewarned, and, having heard the sound thereof, may never know thereality of that death in life which is the sure end of the indolentwho were blind to His gifts, and therefore would not listen to Hisrequirements. WHY THE TALENT WAS BURIED 'Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: 25. And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth. '-MATT. Xxv. 24, 25. That was a strangely insolent excuse for indolence. To charge anangry master to his face with grasping greed and injustice wascertainly not the way to conciliate him. Such language is quiteunnatural and incongruous until we remember the reality which theparable was meant to shadow--viz. , the answers for their deeds whichmen will give at Christ's judgment bar. Then we can understand how, by some irresistible necessity, this man was compelled, even at therisk of increasing the indignation of the master, to turn himselfinside out, and to put into harsh, ugly words the half-consciousthoughts which had guided his life and caused his unfaithfulness. 'Every one of us shall give account of himself to God. ' Theunabashed impudence of such an excuse for idleness as this is butputting into vivid and impressive form this truth, that then a man'sactions in their true character, and the ugly motives that underliethem, and which he did not always honestly confess to himself, willbe clear before him. It will be as much of a surprise to the menthemselves, in many cases, as it could be to listeners. Thus itbecomes us to look well to the under side of our lives, the unspokenconvictions and the unformulated motives which work all the moremightily upon us because, for the most part, they work in the dark. This is Christ's explanation of one very operative and fruitfulcause of the refusal to serve Him. I. I ask you, then, to consider, first, the slander here and thetruth that contradicts it. 'I knew thee that thou art an hard man, ' says he, 'reaping wherethem hast not sown' (and he was standing with the unused talent inhis hand all the while), 'and gathering where thou hast notstrawed. ' That is to say, deep down in many a heart that has neversaid as much to itself, there lies this black drop of gall--aconception of the divine character rather as demanding than asgiving, a thought of Him as exacting. What He requires is moreconsidered than what He bestows. So religion is thought to be mainlya matter of doing certain things and rendering up certainsacrifices, instead of being regarded, as it really is, as mainly amatter of receiving from God. Christ's authority makes me bold tosay that this error underlies the lives of an immense number ofnominal Christians, of people who think themselves very good andreligious, as well as the lives of thousands who stand apart fromreligion altogether. And I want, not to drag down any curtain by myown hand, but to ask you to lift away the veil which hides the uglything in your hearts, and to put your own consciousness to the barof your own conscience, and say whether it is not true that theuppermost thought about God, when you think about Him at all, is, 'Thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown. ' It is not difficult to understand why such a thought of God shouldrise in a heart which has no delight in Him nor in His service. There is a side of the truth as to God's relations to man whichgives a colour of plausibility to the slander. Grave and stringentrequirements are made by the divine law upon each of us; and ourconsciences tell us that they have not been kept. Therefore we seekto persuade ourselves that they are too severe. Then, further, weare, by reason of our own selfishness, almost incapable of rising tothe conception of God's pure, perfect, disinterested love; and weare far too blind to the benefits that He pours upon us all everyday of our lives. And so from all these reasons taken together, andsome more besides, it comes about that, for some of us, the blessedsun in the heavens, the God of all mercy and love, has been darkenedinto a lurid orb shorn of all its beneficent beams, and hangsthreatening there in our misty sky. 'I knew Thee that Thou art anhard man. ' Ah! I am sure that if we would go down into the deepplaces of our own hearts, and ask ourselves what our real thought ofGod is, many of us would acknowledge that it is something like that. Now turn to the other side. What is the truth that smites thisslander to death? That God is perfect, pure, unmingled, infinitelove. And what is love? The infinite desire to impart itself. His'nature and property' is to be merciful, and you can no more stopGod from giving than you can shut up the rays of the sun withinitself. To be and to bestow are for Him one and the same thing. Hislove is an infinite longing to give, which passes over intoperpetual acts of beneficence. He never reaps where He has not sown. Is there any place where He has not sown? Is there any heart onwhich there have been no seeds of goodness scattered from His richhand? The calumniator in the text was speaking his slanders withthat in his hand which should have stopped his mouth. He whocomplained that the hard master was asking for fruit of what He hadnot given would have had nothing at all, if he had not obtained theone talent from His hand. And there is no place in the whole wideuniverse of God where His love has not scattered its beneficentgifts. There are no fallow fields out of cultivation and unsown, inHis great farm. He never asks where He has not given. He never asks until after He has given. He begins with bestowing, and it is only after the vineyard has been planted on the veryfruitful hill, and the hedge built round about it, and the winepressdigged, and the tower erected, and miracles of long-suffering mercyand skilful patience have been lavished upon it, that then He looksthat it should bring forth grapes. God's gifts precede Hisrequirements. He ever sows before He reaps. More than that, He gives_what_ He asks, helping us to render to Him the hearts that Hedesires. He, by His own merciful communications, makes it possiblethat we should lay at His feet the tribute of loving thanks. Just asa parent will give a child some money in order that the child may goand buy the giver a birthday present, so God gives to us hearts, andenriches them with many bestowments. He scatters round about us goodfrom His hand, like drops of a fragrant perfume from a blazingtorch, in order that we may catch them up and have some portion ofthe joy which is especially His own--the joy of giving. It would bea poor affair if our sole relation to God were that of receiving. Itwould be a tyrannous affair if our sole relation to God were that ofrendering up. But both relations are united, and if it be 'moreblessed to give than to receive, ' the Giver of all good does notleave us without the opportunity of entering in even to thatsuperlative blessing. We have to come to Him and say, when we laythe gifts, either of our faculties or of our trust, of our riches orof our virtues, at His feet, 'All things come of Thee, and of Thineown have we given Thee. ' He asks for our sakes, and not for His own. 'If I were hungry Iwould not tell thee, for the cattle upon a thousand hills are Mine. Offer unto God praise, and pay thy vows unto the Most High. ' It isblessed to us to render. He is none the richer for all our giving, as He is none the poorer for all His. Yet His giving to us is real, and our giving is real and a joy to Him. That is the truth lifted upagainst the slander of the natural heart. God is love, pure giving, unlimited and perpetual disposition to bestow. He gives all thingsbefore He asks for anything, and when He asks for anything it isthat we may be blessed. But you say, 'That is all very well--where do you learn all that aboutGod?' My answer is a very simple one. I learn it, and I believe thereis no other place to learn it, at the Cross of Jesus Christ. If thatbe the very apex of the divine love and self-revelation; if, lookingupon it, we understand God better than by any other means, then therecan be no question but that instead of gathering where He has notstrawed, and reaping where He has not sown, God is only, and always, and utterly, and to every man, infinite love that bestows itself. Myheart says to me many a time, 'God's laws are hard, God's judgment isstrict. God requires what you cannot give. Crouch before Him, and beafraid. ' And my faith says, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' 'He thatspared not His own Son, . .. How shall He not with Him also freely giveus all things?' The Cross of Christ is the answer to the slander, andthe revelation of the giving God. II. Secondly, mark here the fear that dogs such a thought, and thelove that casts out the fear. 'I was afraid. ' Yes, of course. If a man is not a fool, his emotionsfollow his thoughts, and his thoughts ought to shape his emotions. And wherever there is the twilight of uncertainty upon the greatlesson that the Cross of Jesus Christ has taught us, _there_there will be, however masked and however modified by otherthoughts, deep in the human heart, a perhaps unspoken, but nottherefore ineffectual, dread of God. Just as the misconception ofthe divine character does influence many a life in which it hasnever been spoken articulately, and needs some steady observation ofourselves to be detected, so is it with this dread of Him. Carry thetask of self-examination a little further, and ask yourselveswhether there does not lie coiled in many of your hearts this dreadof God, like a sleeping snake which only needs a little warmth to beawakened to sting. There are all the signs of it. There are many ofyou who have a distinct indisposition to be brought close up to thethought of Him. There are many of you who have a distinct sense ofdiscomfort when you are pressed against the realities of theChristian religion. There are many of you who, though you cover itover with a shallow confidence, or endeavour to persuade yourselvesinto speculative doubts about the divine nature, or hide it fromyourselves by indifference, yet know that all that is very thin ice, and that there is a great black pool down below---a dread at theheart, of a righteous Judge somewhere, with whom you have somewhatto do, that you cannot shake off. I do not want to appeal to fear, but it goes to one's heart to see the hundreds and thousands ofpeople round about us who, just because they are afraid of God, willnot think about Him, put away angrily and impatiently solemn wordslike these that I am trying to speak, and seek to surroundthemselves with some kind of a fool's paradise of indifference, andto shut their eyes to facts and realities. You do not confess it toyourselves. What kind of a thought must that be about your relationto God which you are afraid to speak? Some of you remember the awfulwords in one of Shakespeare's plays: 'Now I, to comfort him, bid himhe should not think of God. I hoped there was no need to troublehimself with any such thoughts yet. ' What does that teach us? 'Iknew Thee that Thou art an hard man; and I was afraid. ' Dear friend, there are two religions in this world: there is thereligion of fear, and there is the religion of love; and if you havenot the one, you must have the other, if you have any at all. Theonly way to get perfect love that casts out fear is to be quite sureof the Father-love in heaven that begets it. And the only way to besure of the infinite love in the heavens that kindles some littlespark of love in our hearts here, is to go to Christ and learn thelesson that He reveals to us at His Cross. Love will annihilate thefear; or rather, if I may take such a figure, will set a light tothe wreathing smoke that rises, and flash it all up into a ruddyflame. For the perfect love that casts out fear sublimes it intoreverence and changes it into trust. Have you got that love, and didyou get it at Christ's Cross? III. Lastly, mark the torpor of fear and the activity of love. 'Iwas afraid, and I went and hid thy talent in the earth. ' Fear paralyses service, cuts the nerve of activity, makes a manrefuse obedience to God. It was a very illogical thing of thatindolent servant to say, 'I knew that you were so hard in exactingwhat was due to you that therefore I determined _not_ to giveit to you. ' Is it more illogical and more absurd than what hundredsof men and women round about us do to-day, when they say, 'God'srequirements are so great that I do _not_ attempt to fulfilthem'? One would have thought that he would have reasoned the otherway, and said, 'Because I knew that Thy requirements were so greatand severe, therefore I put myself with all my powers to my work. 'Not so. Logical or illogical, the result remains, that that thoughtof God, that black drop of gall, in many a heart, stops the actionof the hand. Fear is barren, or if it produces anything it isnothing to the purpose, and it brings gifts that not even God's lovecan accept, for there is no love in them. Fear is barren; Love isfruitful--like the two mountains of Samaria, from one of which therolling burden of the curses of the Law was thundered, and from theother of which the sweet words of promise and of blessing werechanted in musical response. On the one side are black rocks, without a blade of grass on them, the Mount of Cursing; on the otherside are blushing grapes and vineyards, the Mount of Blessing. Lovemoves to action, fear paralyses into indolence. And the reason whysuch hosts of you do nothing for God is because your hearts havenever been touched with the thorough conviction that He has doneeverything for you, and asks you but to love Him back again, andbring Him your hearts. These dark thoughts are like the frost whichbinds the ground in iron fetters, making all the little flowers thatwere beginning to push their heads into the light shrink back again. And love, when it comes, will come like the west wind and thesunshine of the Spring; and before its emancipating fingers theearth's fetters will be cast aside, and the white snowdrops and theyellow crocuses will show themselves above the ground. If you wantyour hearts to bear any fruit of noble living, and holyconsecration, and pure deeds, then here is the process--Begin withthe knowledge and belief of 'the love which God hath to us'; learnthat at the Cross, and let it silence your doubts, and send themback to their kennels, silenced. Then take the next step, and loveHim back again. 'We love Him because He first loved us. ' That lovewill be the productive principle of all glad obedience, and you willkeep His commandments, and here upon earth find, as the faithfulservant found, that talents used increase; and yonder will receivethe eulogium from His lips whom to please is blessedness, by whom tobe praised is heaven's glory, 'Well done! good and faithfulservant. ' THE KING ON HIS JUDGMENT THRONE 'When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the throne of His glory: 32. And before Him shall be gathered all nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: 33. And He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left. 34. Then shall the King say unto them on His right hand, Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35. For I was an hungred, and ye gave Me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took Me in: 36. Naked, and ye clothed Me: I was sick, and ye visited Me: I was in prison, and ye came unto Me. 37. Then shall the righteous answer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we Thee an hungred, and fed Thee? or thirsty, and gave Thee drink? 38. When saw we Thee a stranger, and took Thee in! or naked, and clothed Thee! 39. Or when saw we Thee sick, or in prison, and came unto Thee? 10. And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me. 41. Then shall He say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: 42. For I was an hungred, and ye gave Me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no drink: 43. I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in: naked, and ye clothed Me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited Me not. 44. Then shall they also answer Him, saying, Lord, when saw we Thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto Thee? 45. Then shall He answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me. 46. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal. '--MATT. Xxv. 31-46. The teachings of that wonderful last day of Christ's ministry, whichhave occupied so many of our pages, are closed with this tremendouspicture of universal judgment. It is one to be gazed upon withsilent awe, rather than to be commented on. There is fear lest, inoccupying the mind in the study of the details, and trying to piercethe mystery it partly unfolds, we should forget our own individualshare in it. Better to burn in on our hearts the thought, 'I shallbe there, ' than to lose the solemn impression in efforts to unravelthe difficulties of the passage. Difficulties there are, as is to beexpected in even Christ's revelation of so unparalleled a scene. Many questions are raised by it which will never be solved till westand there. Who can tell how much of the parabolic element entersinto the description? We, at all events, do not venture to say ofone part, 'This is merely drapery, the sensuous representation ofspiritual reality, ' and of another, 'That is essential truth. ' Thecurtain is the picture, and before we can separate the elements ofit in that fashion, we must have lived through it. Let us try tograsp the main lessons, and not lose the spirit in studying theletter. I. The first broad teaching is that Christ is the Judge of all theearth. Sitting there, a wearied man on the Mount of Olives, with thevalley of Jehoshaphat at His feet, which the Jew regarded as thescene of the final judgment, Jesus declared Himself to be the Judgeof the world, in language so unlimited in its claims that thespeaker must be either a madman or a god. Calvary was less thanthree days off, when He spoke thus. The contrast between the visionof the future and the reality of the present is overwhelming. TheSon of Man has come in weakness and shame; He will come in Hisglory, that flashing light of the self-revealing God, of which thesymbol was the 'glory' which shone between the cherubim, and whichJesus Christ here asserts to belong to Him as '_His_ glory. 'Then, heaven will be emptied of its angels, who shall gather roundthe enthroned Judge as His handful of sorrowing followers wereclustered round Him as He spoke, or as the peasants had surroundedthe meek state of His entry yesterday. Then, He will take the placeof Judge, and 'sit, ' in token of repose, supremacy, and judgment, 'on the throne of His glory, ' as He now sat on the rocks of Olivet. Then, mankind shall be massed at His feet, and His glance shall partthe infinite multitudes, and discern the character of each item inthe crowd as easily and swiftly as the shepherd's eye picks out theblack goats from among the white sheep. Observe the difference inthe representation from those in the previous parables. There, theparting of kinds was either self-acting, as in the case of thefoolish maidens; or men gave account of _themselves_, as in thecase of the servants with the talents. Here, the separation is thework of the Judge, and is completed before a word is spoken. Allthese representations must be included in the complete truth as tothe final judgment. It is the effect of men's actions; it is theresult of their compelled disclosing of the deepest motives of theirlives; it is the act of the perfect discernment of the Judge. Theirdeeds will judge them; they will judge themselves; Christ willjudge. Singularly enough, every possible interpretation of the extent ofthe expression 'all nations' has found advocates. It has been takenin its widest and plainest meaning, as equivalent to the whole race;it has been confined to mankind exclusive of Christians, and it hasbeen confined to Christians exclusive of heathens. There aredifficulties in all these explanations, but probably the least arefound in the first. It is most natural to suppose that 'all nations'means all nations, unless that meaning be impossible. The absence ofthe limitation to the 'kingdom of heaven, ' which distinguishes thissection from the preceding ones having reference to judgment, andthe position of the present section as the solemn close of Christ'steachings, which would naturally widen out into the declaration ofthe universal judgment, which forms the only appropriate climax andend to the foregoing teachings, seem to point to the widest meaningof the phrase. His office of universal Judge is unmistakably taughtthroughout the New Testament, and it seems in the highest degreeunnatural to suppose that He did not speak of it in these finalwords of prophetic warning. We may therefore, with some confidence, see in the magnificent and awful picture here drawn the vision ofuniversal judgment. Parabolic elements there no doubt are in thepicture; but we have no governing revelation, free from these, bywhich we can check them, and be sure of how much is form and howmuch substance. This is clear, 'that we must all appear before thejudgment-seat of Christ'; and this is clear, that Jesus Christ putforth, when at the very lowest point of His earthly humiliation, these tremendous claims, and asserted His authority as Judge overevery soul of man. We are apt to lose ourselves in the crowd. Let uspause and think that 'all' includes 'me. ' II. Note the principles of Christ's universal judgment. It isimportant to remember that this section closes a series ofdescriptions of the judgment, and must not be taken as if, whenisolated, it set forth all the truth. It is often harped upon bypersons who are unfriendly to evangelical teaching, as if it wereChrist's only word about judgment, and interpreted as if it meantthat, no matter what else a man was, if only he is charitable andbenevolent, he will find mercy. But this is to forget all the restof our Lord's teaching in the context, and to fly in the face of thewhole tenor of New Testament doctrine. We have here to do with theprinciples of judgment which apply equally to those who have, and tothose who have not, heard the gospel. The subjects of the kingdomare shown the principles more immediately applicable to them, in theprevious parables, and here they are reminded that there is astandard of judgment absolutely universal. All men, whetherChristians or not, are judged by 'the things done in the body, whether they be good or bad. ' So Christ teaches in His closing wordsof the Sermon on the Mount, and in many another place. 'Every treethat bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into thefire. ' The productive source of good works is not in question here;stress is laid on the fruits, rather than on the root. The gospel isas imperative in its requirements of righteousness as the law is, and its conception of the righteousness which it requires is fardeeper and wider. The subjects of the kingdom ever need to bereminded of the solemn truth that they have not only, like the wisemaidens, to have their lights burning and their oil vessels filled, nor only, like the wise servants, to be using the gifts of thekingdom for their lord, but, as members of the great family of man, have to cultivate the common moralities which all men, heathen andChristian, recognise as binding on all, without which no man shallsee the Lord. The special form of righteousness which is selected asthe test is charity. Obviously it is chosen as representative of allthe virtues of the second table of the law. Taken in its bareliterality, this would mean that men's relations to God had noeffect in the judgment, mid that no other virtues but this ofcharity came into the account. Such a conclusion is so plainlyrepugnant to all Christ's teaching, that we must suppose that loveto one's neighbour is here singled out, just as it is in His summaryof 'the law and the prophets, ' as the crown and flower of allrelative duties, and as, in a very real sense, being 'the fulfillingof the law. ' The omission of any reference to the love of Godsufficiently shows that the view here is rigidly limited to acts, and that all the grounds of judgment are not meant to be set forth. But the benevolence here spoken of is not the mere naturalsentiment, which often exists in great energy in men whose moralnature is, in other respects, so utterly un-Christlike that theirentrance into the kingdom prepared for the righteous isinconceivable. Many a man has a hundred vices and yet a soft heart. It is very much a matter of temperament. Does Christ so contradictall the rest of His teaching as to say that such a man is of 'thesheep, ' and 'blessed of the Father'? Surely not. Is every piece ofkindliness to the distressed, from whatever motive, and bywhatsoever kind of person done, regarded by Him as done to Himself?To say so, would be to confound moral distinctions, and to dissolveall righteousness into a sentimental syrup. The deeds which Heregards as done to Himself, are done to His 'brethren. ' Thatexpression carries us into the region of motive, and runs parallelwith His other words about 'receiving a prophet, ' and 'giving a cupof cold water to one of these little ones, ' because they are His. Seeing that all nations are at the bar, the expression, 'Mybrethren, ' cannot be confined to the disciples, for many of thosewho are being judged have never come in contact with Christians, norcan it be reasonably supposed to include all men, for, however trueit is that Christ is every man's brother, the recognition of kindredhere must surely be confined to those at the right hand. Whatever beincluded under the 'righteous, ' that is included under the'brethren. ' We seem, then, led to recognise in the expression areference to the motive of the beneficence, and to be brought to theconclusion that what the Judge accepts as done to Himself is suchkindly help and sympathy as is extended to these His kindred, withsome recognition of their character, and desire after it. To'receive a prophet' implies that there is some spiritual affinitywith him in the receiver. To give help to His brethren, because theyare so, implies some affinity with Him or feeling after likeness toHim and them. Now, if we hold fast by the universality of thejudgment here depicted, we shall see that this recognition mustnecessarily have different degrees in those who have heard of Christand in those who have not. In the former, it will be equivalent tothat faith which is the root of all goodness, and grasps the Christrevealed in the gospel. In the latter, it can be no more than afeeling after Him who is the 'light that lighteneth every man thatcometh into the world. ' Surely there are souls amid the darkness ofheathenism yearning toward the light, like plants grown in the dark. By ways of His own, Christ can reach such hearts, as the river ofthe water of life may percolate through underground channels to manya tree which grows far from its banks. III. Note the surprises of the judgment. The astonishment of therighteous is not modesty disclaiming praise, but real wonder at theundreamed-of significance of their deeds. In the parable of thetalents, the servants unveiled their inmost hearts, and accuratelydescribed their lives. Here, the other side of the truth is broughtinto prominence, that, at that day, we shall be surprised when wehear from His lips what we have really done. True Christianbeneficence has consciously for its motive the pleasing of Christ;but still he who most earnestly strove, while here, to do all asunto Jesus, will be full of thankful wonder at the grace whichaccepts his poor service, and will learn, with fresh marvelling, howclosely He associates Himself with His humblest servant. There is anelement of mystery hidden from ourselves in all our deeds. Our loveto Christ's followers never goes out so plainly to Him that, whilehere, we can venture to be sure that He takes it as done for Him. Wecannot here follow the flight of the arrow, nor know what meaning Hewill attach to, or what large issues He will evolve from, our poordoings. So heaven will be full of blessed surprises, as we reap thefruit growing 'in power' of what we sowed 'in weakness, ' and asdoleful will be the astonishment which will seize those who see, forthe first time, in the lurid light of that day, the true characterof their lives, as one long neglect of plain duties, which was all adefrauding the Saviour of His due. Mere doing nothing is enough tocondemn, and its victims will be shudderingly amazed at the fatalwound it has inflicted on them. IV. The irrevocableness of the judgment. That is an awful contrastbetween the 'Come! ye blessed, ' and 'Depart! ye cursed. ' That is amore awful parallel between 'eternal punishment' and 'eternal life. 'It is futile to attempt to alleviate the awfulness by emptying theword 'eternal' of reference to duration. It no doubt connotesquality, but its first meaning is ever-during. There is nothing hereto suggest that the one condition is more terminable than the other. Rather, the emphatic repetition of the word brings the unendingcontinuance of each into prominence, as the point in which these twostates, so wofully unlike, are the same. In whatever other passagesthe doctrine of universal restoration may seem to find a foothold, there is not an inch of standing-room for it here. Reverentlyaccepting Christ's words as those of perfect and infallible love, the present writer feels so strongly the difficulty of bringing allthe New Testament declarations on this dread question into aharmonious whole, that he abjures for himself dogmatic certainty, and dreads lest, in the eagerness of discussing the duration (whichwill never be beyond the reach of discussion), the solemn reality ofthe fact of future retribution should be dimmed, and men shouldargue about 'the terror of the Lord' till they cease to feel it. THE DEFENCE OF UNCALCULATING LOVE 'Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, 7. There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on His head, as He sat at meat. 8. But when His disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste? 9. For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. 10. When Jesus understood it, He said unto them, Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon Me. 11. For ye have the poor always with you; but Me ye have not always. 12. For in that she hath poured this ointment on My body, she did it for My burial. 13. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her. 14. Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests, 15. And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver Him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver. 16. And from that time he sought opportunity to betray Him. '--MATT. Xxvi. 6-16. John tells us that the 'woman' was Mary, and the objector Judas. Both the deed and the cavil are better understood by knowing whencethey came. Lazarus was a guest, and as his sister saw him sittingthere by Jesus her heart overflowed, and she could not but catch upher most precious possession, and lavish it on His head and feet. Love's impulses appear absurd to selfishness. How could Judasunderstand Mary? Detracting comments find ready ears. One sneer willcool down to contempt and blame the feelings of a company. Peopleare always eager to pick holes in conduct which they uneasily feelto be above their own reach. Poor Mary! she had but yielded to theuncalculating impulse of her great love, and she finds herselfcharged with imprudence, waste, and unfeeling neglect of the poor. No wonder that her gentle heart was 'troubled. ' But Jesus threw theshield of His approval over her, and that was enough. Never mind howJudas and better men than he may find fault, if Jesus smilesacceptance. His great words set forth, first, the vindication of the act, because of its motive. Anything done with no regard to any end butHimself is, in His eyes, 'good. ' The perfection of conduct is thatit shall all be referred to Jesus. That 'altar' sanctifies gift andgiver. Conversely, whatever has no reference to Him lacks thehighest beauty of goodness. A pebble in the bed of a sunlit streamhas its veins of colour brought out; lift it out, and, as it dries, it dulls. So our deeds plunged into that great river are heightenedin loveliness. Everything which has 'For Christ's sake' stamped onit is thereby hallowed. That is the unfailing recipe for making alife fair. Mary was thinking only of Jesus and of her love to Him, therefore what she did was sweet to Him. The greater part of a deedis its motive, and the perfect motive is love to Jesus. But, further, Christ defends the side of Mary's deed which thecritics fastened on. They posed as being more practical andbenevolent than she was. They were utilitarians, she was wasteful. Their objection sounds sensible, but it belongs to the low levels oflife. One flash of lofty love would have killed it. Christ's replyto it draws a contrast between constant duties and special, transient moments. It is coloured, too, by His consciousness of Hisnear end, and has an undertone of sadness in that 'Me ye have notalways. ' There are high tides of Christian emotion, when thequestion of what good this thing will do is submerged, and the onlyquestion is, 'What best thing shall I render to the Lord?' Thecritics were not more beneficent, but less inflamed with love toJesus, and the leader of them only wished that the proceeds of theointment had come into his hands, where some of it would have stuck. We hear the same sort of taunt today, --What is the sense of all thismoney being spent on missions and religious objects? How much moreuseful it would be if expended on better dwellings for the poor orhospitals or technical schools! But there is a place in Christ'streasury for useless deeds, if they are the pure expression of loveto Him, and Mary's alabaster box, which did no good at all, liesbeside the cups that held cold water which slaked some thirsty lips. Uncalculating impulse, which only knows that it would fain give allto the Lover of souls, is not merely excused, but praised, by Jesus. Lovers on earth do not concern themselves about the usefulness oftheir gifts, and the divine Lover rejoices over what cold-bloodedspectators, who do not in the least understand the ways of lovinghearts, find useless 'waste. ' The world would put all the emotionsof Christian hearts, and all the heroisms of Christian martyrs, andall the sacrifices of Christian workers, into the same class. Jesusaccepts them all. Again, He breathes a meaning into the gift beyond what the givermeant. Mary did not regard her anointing as preparatory to Hisburial, but He had His thoughts fixed on it, and He sought toprepare the disciples for the coming storm. How far away from thesimple festivities in Simon's house were His thoughts! What a gulfbetween the other guests and Him! But Jesus always puts significanceinto the service which He accepts, and surprises the givers by thefar-reaching issues of their gifts. We know not what He may make ourpoor deeds mean. Results are beyond our vision. Therefore let usmake sure of what is within our horizon--namely, motives. If we doanything for His sake, He will take care of what it comes to. Thatis true even on earth, and still more true in heaven. 'Lord, whensaw we Thee an hungred, and fed Thee?' What surprises will waitChrist's humble servants in heaven, when they see what was the truenature and the widespread consequences of their humble deeds! 'Thousowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, . .. But Godgiveth it a body as it hath pleased Him. ' Again, Mark gives an additional clause in Christ's words, whichbrings out the principle that the measure of acceptable service isability. 'She hath done what she could' is an apology, or rather avindication, for the shape of the gift. Mary was not practical, andcould not 'serve' like Martha; she probably had no other preciousthing that she could give, but she could love, and she could bestowher best on Jesus. But the saying implies a stringent demand, aswell as a gracious defence. Nothing less than the full measure ofability is the measure of Christian obligation. Power to its lastparticle is duty. Jesus does not ask how much His servants do orgive, but He does ask that they should do and give all that theycan. He wishes us to be ourselves in serving Him, and to shape ourmethods according to character and capabilities, but He also wishesus to give Him our whole selves. If anything is kept back, all thatis given is marred. Jesus' last word gives perpetuity to the service which He accepts. Mary is promised immortality for her deed, and the promise has beenfulfilled, and here are we, all these centuries after, looking ather as she breaks the box and pours it on His head. Jesus is notunrighteous to forget any work of love done for Him. The fragranceof the ointment soon passed away, and the shreds of the broken crusewere swept into the dust-bin, with the other relics of the feast;but all the world knows of that act of all-surrendering love, and itsmells sweet and blossoms for evermore. THE NEW PASSOVER 'Now the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto Him, Where wilt Thou that we prepare for Thee to eat the passover? 18. And He said, Go into the city to such a man, and say unto him, The Master saith, My time is at hand; I will keep the passover at thy house with My disciples. 19. And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the passover. 20. Now when the even was come, He sat down with the twelve. 21. And as they did eat, He said, Verily I say unto you, That one of you shall betray Me. 22. And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto Him, Lord, is it I? 23. And He answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with Me in the dish, the same shall betray Me. 21. The Son of Man goeth as it is written of Him; but woe unto that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born. 25. Then Judas, which betrayed Him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said 26. And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is My body. 27. And He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; 28. For this is My blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. 29. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in My Father's kingdom. 30. And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the Mount of Olives. '--MATT. Xxvi. 17-30. The Tuesday of Passion Week was occupied by the wonderful discourseswhich have furnished so many of our meditations. At its close Jesussought retirement in Bethany, not only to soothe and prepare Hisspirit but to 'hide Himself' from the Sanhedrin. There He spent theWednesday. Who can imagine His thoughts? While He was calmlyreposing in Mary's quiet home, the rulers determined on His arrest, but were at a loss how to effect it without a riot. Judas comes tothem opportunely, and they leave it to him to give the signal. Possibly we may account for the peculiar secrecy observed as to theplace for the last supper, by our Lord's knowledge that His stepswere watched, and by His earnest wish to eat the Passover with thedisciples before He suffered. The change between the courting ofpublicity and almost inviting of arrest at the beginning of theweek, and the evident desire to postpone the crisis till the fittingmoment which marks the close of it, is remarkable, and mostnaturally explained by the supposition that He wished the time ofHis death to be that very hour when, according to law, the paschallamb was slain. On the Thursday, then, he sent Peter and John intothe city to prepare the Passover; the others being in ignorance ofthe place till they were there, and Judas being thus prevented fromcarrying out his purpose till after the celebration. The precautions taken to ensure this have left their mark onMatthew's narrative, in the peculiar designation of the host, --'Sucha man!' It is a kind of echo of the mystery which he so wellremembered as round the errand of the two. He does not seem to haveheard of the token by which they knew the house, viz. , the man withthe pitcher whom they were to meet. But he does know that Peter andJohn got secret instructions, and that he and the others wonderedwhere they were to go. Had there been a previous arrangement withthis unnamed 'such an one, ' or were the token and the message alikeinstances of Christ's supernatural knowledge and authority? It isdifficult to say. I incline to the former supposition, which wouldbe in accordance with the distinct effort after secrecy which marksthese days; but the narratives do not decide the question. At allevents, the host was a disciple, as appears from the authoritative'the Master saith'; and, whether he had known beforehand that 'thisday' incarnate 'salvation would come to his house' or no, he eagerlyaccepts the peril and the honour. His message is royal in its tone. The Lord does not ask permission, but issues His commands. But He isa pauper King, not having where to lay His head, and needing anotherman's house in which to gather His own household together for thefamily feast of the Passover. What profound truths are wrapped up inthat 'My time is come'! It speaks of the voluntariness of Hissurrender, the consciousness that His Cross was the centre point ofHis work, His superiority to all external influences as determiningthe hour of His death, and His submission to the supreme appointmentof the Father. Obedience and freedom, choice and necessity, arewonderfully blended in it. So, late on that Thursday evening, the little band left Bethany forthe last time, in a fashion very unlike the joyous stir of thetriumphal entry. As the evening is falling, they thread their waythrough the noisy streets, all astir with the festal crowds, andreach the upper room, Judas vainly watching for an opportunity toslip away on his black errand. The chamber, prepared by unknownhands, has vanished, and the hands are dust; but both are immortal. How many of the living acts of His servants in like manner seem toperish, and the doers of them to be forgotten or unknown! But Heknows the name of 'such an one, ' and does not forget that he openedhis door for Him to enter in and sup. The fact that Jesus put aside the Passover and founded the Lord'sSupper in its place, tells much both about _His_ authority and_its_ meaning. What must He have conceived of Himself, who badeJew and Gentile turn away from that God-appointed festival, andthink not of Moses, but of Him? What did He mean by setting theLord's Supper in the place of the Passover, if He did not mean thatHe was the true Paschal Lamb, that His death was a true sacrifice, that in His sprinkled blood was safety, that His death inauguratedthe better deliverance of the true Israel from a darker prison-houseand a sorer bondage, that His followers were a family, and that 'thechildren's bread' was the sacrifice which He had made? There aremany reasons for the doubling of the commemorative emblem, but thisis obviously one of the chief--that, by the separation of the two inthe rite, we are carried back to the separation in fact; that is tosay, to the violent death of Christ. Not His flesh alone, in thesense of Incarnation, but His body broken and His blood shed, arewhat He wills should be for ever remembered. His own estimate of thecentre point of His work is unmistakably pronounced in Hisinstitution of this rite. But we may consider the force of each emblem separately. In manyimportant points they mean the same things, but they have each theirown significance as well. Matthew's condensed version of the wordsof institution omits all reference to the breaking of the body andto the memorial character of the observance, but both are implied. He emphasises the reception, the participation, and the significanceof the bread. As to the latter, 'This is My body' is to beunderstood in the same way as 'the field is the world, ' and manyother sayings. To speak in the language of grammarians, the copulais that of symbolic relationship, not that of existence; or, tospeak in the language of the street, 'is' here means, as it oftendoes, 'represents. ' How could it mean anything else, when Christ satthere in His body, and His blood was in His veins? What, then, isthe teaching of this symbol? It is not merely that He in Hishumanity is the bread of life, but that He in His death is thenourishment of our true life. In that great discourse in John'sGospel, which embodies in words the lessons which the Lord's Supperteaches by symbols, He advances from the general statement, 'I amthe Bread of Life, ' to the yet more mysterious and profound teachingthat His flesh, which at some then future point He will 'give forthe life of the world, ' is the bread; thus distinctly foreshadowingHis death, and asserting that by that death we live, and bypartaking of it are nourished. The participation in the benefits ofChrist's death, which is symbolised by 'Take, eat, ' is effected byliving faith. We feed on Christ when our minds are occupied with Histruth, and our hearts nourished by His love, when it is the 'meat'of our wills to do His will, and when our whole inward man fastenson Him as its true object, and draws from Him its best being. Butthe act of reception teaches the great lesson that Christ must be inus, if He is to do us any good. He is not 'for us' in any realsense, unless He be 'in us. ' The word rendered in John's Gospel'eateth' is that used for the ruminating of cattle, and wonderfullyindicates the calm, continual, patient meditation by which alone wecan receive Christ into our hearts, and nourish our lives on Him. Bread eaten is assimilated to the body, but this bread eatenassimilates the eater to itself, and he who feeds on Christ becomesChrist-like, as the silk-worm takes the hue of the leaves on whichit browses. Bread eaten to-day will not nourish us to-morrow, neither will past experiences of Christ's sweetness sustain thesoul. He must be 'our daily bread' if we are not to pine withhunger. The wine carries its own special teaching, which clearly appears inMatthew's version of the words of institution. It is 'My blood, ' andby its being presented in a form separate from the bread which isHis body suggests a violent death. It is 'covenant blood, ' the sealof that 'better covenant' than the old, which God makes now with allmankind, wherein are given renewed hearts which carry the divine lawwithin themselves; the reciprocal and mutually blessed possession ofGod by men and of men by God, the universally diffused knowledge ofGod, which is more than head knowledge, being the consciousness ofpossessing Him; and, finally, the oblivion of all sins. Thesepromises are fulfilled, and the covenant made sure, by the shedblood of Christ. So, finally, it is 'shed for many, for theremission of sins. ' The end of Christ's death is pardon which canonly be extended on the ground of His death. We are told that Christdid not teach the doctrine of atonement. Did He establish the Lord'sSupper? If He did (and nobody denies that), what did He mean by it, if He did not mean the setting forth by symbol of the very sametruth which, stated in words, is the doctrine of His atoning death?This rite does not, indeed, explain the _rationale_ of thedoctrine; but it is a piece of unmeaning mummery, unless it preachesplainly the fact that Christ's death is the ground of ourforgiveness. Bread is the 'staff of life, ' but blood is the life. So 'this cup'teaches that 'the life' of Jesus Christ must pass into His people'sveins, and that the secret of the Christian life is 'I live; yet notI, but Christ liveth in me. ' Wine is joy, and the Christian life isnot only to be a feeding of the soul on Christ as its nourishment, but a glad partaking, as at a feast, of His life and therein of Hisjoy. Gladness of heart is a Christian duty, 'the joy of the Lord isyour strength' and should be _our_ joy; and though here we eatwith loins girt, and go out, some of us to deny, some of us to flee, all of us to toil and suffer, yet we may have His joy fulfilled inourselves, even whilst we sorrow. The Lord's Supper is predominantly a memorial, but it is also aprophecy, and is marked as such by the mysterious last words ofJesus, about drinking the new wine in the Father's kingdom. Theypoint the thoughts of the saddened eleven, on whom the dark shadowof parting lay heavily, to an eternal reunion, in a land where 'allthings are become new, ' and where the festal cup shall be filledwith a draught that has power to gladden and to inspire beyond anyexperience here. The joys of heaven will be so far analogous to theChristian joys of earth that the same name may be applied to both;but they will be so unlike that the old name will need a newmeaning, and communion with Christ at His table in His kingdom, andour exuberance of joy in the full drinking in of His immortal life, will transcend the selectest hours of communion here. Compared withthat fulness of joy they will be 'as water unto wine, '--the new wineof the kingdom. 'IS IT I?' 'And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto Him, Lord, is it I? 25. Then Judas, which betrayed Him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said. '-MATT. Xxvi. 22, 25. 'He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto Him, Lord, who is it?'--JOHN xiii. 25. The genius of many great painters has portrayed the Lord's Supper, but the reality of it was very different from their imaginings. Wehave to picture to ourselves some low table, probably a mere trayspread upon the ground, round which our Lord and the twelvereclined, in such a fashion as that the head of each guest cameagainst the bosom of him that reclined above him; the place ofhonour being at the Lord's left hand, or higher up the table thanHimself, and the second place being at His right, or below Himself. So there would be no eager gesticulations of disciples starting totheir feet when our Lord uttered the sad announcement, 'One of youshall betray Me!' but only horror-struck amazement settled down uponthe group. These verses, which we have put together, show us threestages in the conversation which followed the sad announcement. Thethree evangelists give us two of these; John alone omits these two, and only gives us the third. First, we have their question, born of a glimpse into thepossibilities of evil in their hearts, 'Lord, is it I?' The form of that question in the original suggests that theyexpected a negative answer, and might be reproduced in English:'Surely it is not I?' None of them could think that he was thetraitor, yet none of them could be sure that he was not. TheirMaster knew better than they did; and so, from a humble knowledge ofwhat lay in them, coiled and slumbering, _but there_, theywould not meet His words with a contradiction, but with a question. His answer spares the betrayer, and lets the dread work in theirconsciences for a little longer, for their good. For many handsdipped in the dish together, to moisten their morsels; and to say, 'He that dippeth with Me in the dish, the same shall betray Me, ' wasto say nothing more than 'One of you at the table. ' Then comes the second stage. Judas, reassured that he has escapeddetection for the moment, and perhaps doubting whether the Masterhad anything more than a vague suspicion of treachery, or knew whowas the traitor, shapes his lying lips with loathsome audacity intothe same question, but yet not quite the same, The others had said, 'Is it I, Lord?' he falters when he comes to that name, and dare notsay 'Lord!' That sticks in his throat. 'Rabbi!' is as far as he canget. 'Is it I, Rabbi?' Christ's answer to him, 'Thou hast said, ' isanother instance of patient longsuffering. It was evidently awhisper that did not reach the ears of any of the others, for heleaves the room without suspicion. Our Lord still tries to save himfrom himself by showing Judas that his purpose is known, and bystill concealing his name. Then comes the third stage, which we owe to John's Gospel. Hereagain he is true to his task of supplementing the narrative of thethree synoptic Gospels. Remembering what I have said about theattitude of the disciples at the table, we can understand thatPeter, if he occupied the principal place at the Lord's left, wasless favourably situated for speaking to Christ than John, whoreclined in the second seat at His right, and so he beckoned overthe Master's head to John. The Revised Version gives the force ofthe original more vividly than the Authorised does: 'He, leaningback, as he was, on Jesus' breast, saith unto Him, Lord! who is it?'John, with a natural movement, bends back his head on his Master'sbreast, so as to ask and be answered, in a whisper. His question is_not_, 'Is it I?' He that leaned on Christ's bosom, and wascompassed about by Christ's love, did not need to ask that. Thequestion now is, 'Who is it?' Not a question of presumption, nor ofcuriosity, but of affection; and therefore answered: 'He it is towhom I shall give the sop, when I have dipped it. ' The morsel dipped in the dish and passed by the host's hand to aguest, was a token of favour, of unity and confidence. It was onemore attempt to save Judas, one more token of all-forgivingpatience. No wonder that that last sign of friendship embittered hishatred and sharpened his purpose to an unalterable decision, or, asJohn says: 'After the sop, Satan entered into him. ' For then, asever, the heart which is not melted by Christ's offered love ishardened by it. Now, if we take these three stages of this conversation we may learnsome valuable lessons from them. I take the first form of thequestion as an example of that wholesome self-distrust which aglimpse into the slumbering possibilities of evil in our heartsought to give us all. I take the second on the lips of Judas, as anexample of the very opposite of that self-distrust, the fixeddetermination to do a wrong thing, however clearly we know it to bewrong. And I take the last form of the question, as asked by John, as an illustration of the peaceful confidence which comes from theconsciousness of Christ's love, and of communion with Him. Now aword or two about each of these. I. First, we have an example of that wholesome self-distrust, whicha glimpse into the possibilities of evil that lie slumbering in allour hearts ought to teach every one of us. Every man is a mystery to himself. In every soul there lie, coiledand dormant, like hibernating snakes, evils that a very slight risein the temperature will wake up into poisonous activity. And let noman say, in foolish self-confidence, that any form of sin which hisbrother has ever committed is impossible for him. Temperamentshields us from much, no doubt. There are sins that 'we are inclinedto, ' and there are sins that 'we have no mind to. ' But the identityof human nature is deeper than the diversity of temperament, andthere are two or three considerations that should abate a man'sconfidence that _anything_ which one man has done it is impossiblethat he should do. Let me enumerate them very briefly. Remember, tobegin with, that all sins are at bottom but varying forms of one root. The essence of every evil is selfishness, and when you have that, itis exactly as with cooks who have the 'stock' by the fireside. Theycan make any kind of soup out of it, with the right flavouring. Wehave got the mother tincture of all wickedness in each of our hearts;and therefore do not let us be so sure that it cannot be manipulatedand flavoured into any form of sin. All sin is one at bottom, and thisis the definition of it--living to myself instead of living to God. So it may easily pass from one form of evil into another, just aslight and heat, motion and electricity, are all--they tell us--variousforms and phases of one force. Just as doctors will tell you thatthere are types of disease which slip from one form of sicknessinto another, so if we have got the infection about us it is a mattervery much of accidental circumstances what shape it takes. And noman with a human heart is safe in pointing to any sin, and saying, '_That_ form of transgression I reckon alien to myself. ' And then let me remind you, too, that the same consideration isreinforced by this other fact, that all sin is, if I may so say, gregarious; is apt not only to slip from one form into another, butthat any evil is apt to draw another after it. The tangled mass ofsin is like one of those great fields of seaweed that you some timescome across upon the ocean, all hanging together by a thousand slimygrowths; which, if lifted from the wave at any point, drags up yardsof it inextricably grown together. No man commits only one kind oftransgression. All sins hunt in couples. According to the grimpicture of the Old Testament, about another matter, 'None of themshall want his mate. The wild beasts of the desert shall meet withthe wild beasts of the islands. ' One sin opens the door for another, 'and seven other spirits worse than himself' come and make holidayin the man's heart. Again, any evil is possible to us, seeing that all sin is butyielding to tendencies common to us all. The greatest transgressionshave resulted from yielding to such tendencies. Cain killed hisbrother from jealousy; David besmirched his name and his reign byanimal passion; Judas betrayed Christ because he was fond of money. Many a man has murdered another one simply because he had a hottemper. And you have got a temper, and you have got the love ofmoney, and you have got animal passions, and you have got that whichmay stir you up into jealousy. Your neighbour's house has caughtfire and been blown up. Your house, too, is built of wood, andthatched with straw, and you have as much dynamite in your cellarsas he had in his. Do not be too sure that you are safe from thedanger of explosion. And, again, remember that this same wholesome self-distrust isneedful for us all, because all transgression is yielding totemptations that assail all men. Here are one hundred men in aplague-stricken city; they have all got to draw their water from thesame well. If five or six of them died of cholera it would be veryfoolish of the other ninety-five to say, 'There is no chance of ourbeing touched. ' We all live in the same atmosphere; and thetemptations that have overcome the men that have headed the count ofcrimes appeal to you. So the lesson is, 'Be not high-minded, butfear. ' And remember, still further, that the same solemn consideration isenforced upon us by the thought that men will gradually drop down tothe level which, before they began the descent, seemed to beimpossible to them. 'Is thy servant a dog that he should do thisthing?' said Hazael when the crime of murdering his master firstfloated before him. Yes, but he did it. By degrees he came down tothe level to which he thought that he would never sink. First theimagination is inflamed, then the wish begins to draw the soul tothe sin, then conscience pulls it back, then the fatal decision ismade, and the deed is done. Sometimes all the stages are hurriedquickly through, and a man spins downhill as cheerily and fast as adiligence down the Alps. Sometimes, as the coast of a country maysink an inch in a century until long miles of the flat seabeach areunder water, and towers and cities are buried beneath the barrenwaves, so our lives may be gradually lowered, with a motionimperceptible but most real, bringing us down within high-watermark, and at last the tide may wash over what was solid land. So, dear friends, there is nothing more foolish than for any man tostand, self-confident that any form of evil that has conquered hisbrother has no temptation for him. It may not have for you, underpresent circumstances; it may not have for you to-day; but, oh!we have all of us one human heart, and 'he that trusteth in his ownheart is a fool. ' 'Blessed is the man that feareth always. ' Humbleself-distrust, consciousness of sleeping sin in my heart that may veryquickly be stirred into stinging and striking; rigid self-control overall these possibilities of evil, are duties dictated by the plainestcommon-sense. Do not say, 'I know when to stop. ' Do not say, 'I can go so far; itwill not do me any harm. ' Many a man has said that, and many a manhas been ruined by it. Do not say, 'It is natural to me to havethese inclinations and tastes, and there can be no harm in yieldingto them. ' It is perfectly natural for a man to stoop down over theedge of a precipice to gather the flowers that are growing in somecranny in the cliff; and it is as natural for him to topple over, and be smashed to a mummy at the bottom. God gave you yourdispositions and your whole nature 'under lock and key, '--keep themso. And when you hear of, or see, great criminals and great crimes, say to yourself, as the good old Puritan divine said, looking at aman going to the scaffold, 'But for the grace of God there go I!'And in the contemplation of sins and apostasies, let us each lookhumbly at our own weakness, and pray Him to keep us from ourbrother's evils which may easily become ours. II. Secondly, we have here an example of precisely the oppositesort, namely, of that fixed determination to do evil which isunshaken by the clearest knowledge that it is evil. Judas heard his crime described in its own ugly reality. He heardhis fate proclaimed by lips of absolute love and truth; andnotwithstanding both, he comes unmoved and unshaken with hisquestion. The dogged determination in his heart, that dares to seehis evil stripped naked and is 'not ashamed, ' is even more dreadfulthan the hypocrisy and sleek simulation of friendship in his face. Now most men turn away with horror from even the sins that they arewilling to do, when they are put plainly and bluntly before them. Asan old mediaeval preacher once said, 'There is nothing that isweaker than the devil stripped naked. ' By which he meant exactlythis--that we have to dress wrong in some fantastic costume orother, so as to hide its native ugliness, in order to tempt men todo it. So we have two sets of names for wrong things, one of whichwe apply to our brethren's sins, and the other to the same sins inourselves. What I do is 'prudence, ' what you do of the same sort is'covetousness'; what I do is 'sowing my wild oats, ' what you do is'immorality' and 'dissipation'; what I do is 'generous living, ' whatyou do is 'drunkenness' and 'gluttony'; what I do is 'righteousindignation, ' what you do is 'passionate anger. ' And so you may gothe whole round of evil. Very bad are the men who can look at theirdeed, described in Its own inherent deformity, and yet say, 'Yes;that is it, and I am going to do it. ' 'One of you shall betray Me. ''Yes; I will betray you!' It must have taken something to look intothe Master's face, and keep the fixed purpose steady. Now I ask you to think, dear friends, of this, that that obstinatecondition of dogged determination to do a wrong thing, knowing it tobe a wrong thing, is a condition to which all evil steadily tends. We may not come to it in this world--I do not know that men ever doso wholly; but we are all getting towards it in regard to thespecial wrong deeds and desires which we cherish and commit. Andwhen a man has once reached the point of saying to evil, 'Be thou mygood, ' then he is a 'devil' in the true meaning of the word; andwherever he is, he is in hell! And the one unpardonable sin is thesin of clear recognition that a given thing is contrary to God'swill, and unfaltering determination, notwithstanding, to do it. Thatis the only sin that cannot be pardoned, 'either in this world or inthe world to come. ' And so, my brother, seeing that such a condition is possible, andthat all the paths of evil, however tentative and timorous they maybe at first, and however much the sin may be wrapped up with excusesand forms and masks, tend to that condition, let us take that oldprayer upon our lips, which befits both those who distrustthemselves because of slumbering sins, and those who dread beingconquered by manifest iniquity:--'Who can understand his errors?Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Keep back Thy servant also frompresumptuous sins. Let them not have dominion over me. ' III. Now, lastly, we have in the last question an example of thepeaceful confidence that comes from communion with Jesus Christ. John leaned on the Master's bosom. 'He was the disciple whom Jesusloved. ' And so compassed with that great love, and feeling absolutesecurity within the enclosure of that strong hand, his question isnot, 'Is it I?' but 'Who is it?' From which I think we may fairlydraw the conclusion that to feel that Christ loves me, and that I amcompassed about by Him, is the true security against my falling intoany sin. It was not John's love to Christ, but Christ's to John that made hissafety. He did not say: 'I love Thee so much that I cannot betrayThee. ' For all our feelings and emotions are but variable, and tobuild confidence upon them is to build a heavy building uponquicksand; the very weight of it drives out the foundations. But hethought to himself--or he felt rather than he thought--that allabout him lay the sweet, warm, rich atmosphere of his Master's love;and to a man who was encompassed by that, treachery was impossible. Sin has no temptation so long as we actually enjoy the greatersweetness of Christ's felt love. Would thirty pieces of silver havebeen a bribe to John? Would anything that could have terrifiedothers have frightened him from his Master's side whilst he felt Hislove? Will a handful of imitation jewellery, made out of colouredglass and paste, be any temptation to a man who bears a rich diamondon his finger? And will any of earth's sweetness be a temptation toa man who lives in the continual consciousness of the great richlove of Christ wrapping him round about? Brethren, not ourselves, not our faith, not our emotion, not our religious experience;nothing that is in us, is any security that we may not be tempted, and yield to the temptation, and deny or betray our Lord. There isonly one thing that is a security, and that is that we be folded tothe heart, and held by the hand, of that loving Lord. Then--then wemay be confident that we shall not fall; for 'the Lord is able tomake us stand. ' Such confidence is but the other side of our self-distrust; is theconstant accompaniment of it, must have that self-distrust for itscondition and prerequisite, and leads to a yet deeper and moreblessed form of that self-distrust. Faith in Him and 'no confidencein the flesh' are but the two sides of the same coin, the obverseand the reverse. The seed, planted in the ground, sends a littlerootlet down, and a little spikelet up, by the same vital act. Andso in our hearts, as it were, the downward rootlet is self-despair, and the upward shoot is faith in Christ. The two emotions gotogether--the more we distrust ourselves the more we shall rest uponHim, and the more we rest upon Him, and feel that all our strengthcomes, not from our foot, but from the Rock on which it stands, themore we shall distrust our own ability and our own faithfulness. Therefore, dear brethren, looking upon all the evil that is aroundus, and conscious in some measure of the weakness of our own hearts, let us do as a man would do who stands upon the narrow ledge of acliff, and look sheer down into the depth below, and feels his headbegin to reel and turn giddy; let us lay hold of the Guide's hand, and if we cleave by Him, He will hold up our goings that ourfootsteps slip not. Nothing else will. No length of obedient serviceis any guarantee against treachery and rebellion. As John Bunyansaw, there was a backdoor to hell from the gate of the CelestialCity. Men have lived for years consistent professing Christians, andhave fallen at last. Many a ship has come across half the world, andgone to pieces on the harbour bar. Many an army, victorious in ahundred fights, has been annihilated at last. No depths of religiousexperience, no heights of religious blessedness, no attainments ofpast virtue and self-sacrifice, are any guarantees for to-morrow. Trust in nothing and in nobody, least of all in yourselves and yourown past. Trust only in Jesus Christ. 'Now unto Him that is able to keep us from falling, and to presentus faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy; tothe only wise God our Saviour be glory and majesty, dominion andpower, both now and for ever. ' Amen. 'THIS CUP' 'And Jesus took the cup, and grave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; 28. For this is My blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins'--MATT. Xxvi. 27, 28. The comparative silence of our Lord as to the sacrificial characterof His death has very often been urged as a reason for doubting thatdoctrine, and for regarding it as no part of the original Christianteaching. That silence may be accounted for by sufficient reasons. It has been very much exaggerated, and those who argue from itagainst the doctrine of the Atonement have forgotten that JesusChrist founded the Lord's Supper. That rite shows us what He thought, and what He would have us think, of His death; and in the presence of its testimony it seems to meimpossible to deny that His conception of it was distinctlysacrificial. By it He points out the moment of His whole careerwhich He desires that men should remember. Not His words oftenderness and wisdom; not His miracles, amazing and gracious asthese were; not the flawless beauty of His character, though ittouches all hearts and wins the most rugged to love, and the mostdegraded to hope; but the moment in which He gave His life is whatHe would imprint for ever on the memory of the world. And not only so, but in the rite he distinctly tells us in whataspect He would have that death remembered. Not as the tragic end ofa noble career which might be hallowed by tears such as are shedover a martyr's ashes; not as the crowning proof of love; not as thesupreme act of patient forgiveness; but as a death for us, in which, as by the blood of the sacrifice, is secured the remission of sins. And not only so, but the double symbol in the Lord's Supper--whilstin some respects the bread and wine speak the same truths, andcertainly point to the same Cross--has in each of its parts speciallessons intrusted to it, and special truths to proclaim. The breadand the wine both say:--'Remember Me and My death. ' Taken inconjunction they point to that death as violent; taken separatelythey each suggest various aspects of it, and of the blessings thatwill flow to us therefrom. And it is my present purpose to bringout, as briefly and as clearly as I can, the special lessons whichour Lord would have us draw from that cup which is the emblem of Hisshed blood. I. First, then, observe that it speaks to us of a divine treaty orcovenant. Ancient Israel had lived for nearly 2000 years under the charter oftheir national existence which, as we read in the Old Testament, wasgiven on Sinai amidst thunderings and lightnings--'Now, therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shallbe a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people; for all the earthis Mine, and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and an holynation. ' And that covenant, or agreement, or treaty, on the part of God, wasratified by a solemn act, in which the blood of the sacrifice, divided into two portions, was sprinkled, one half upon the altar, and the other half, after their acceptance of the conditions andobligations of the covenant, on the people, who had pledgedthemselves to obedience. And now, here is a Galilean peasant, in a borrowed upper room, within four-and-twenty hours of His ignominious death which mightseem to blast all His work, who steps forward and says, 'I put awaythat ancient covenant which knits this nation to God. It isantiquated. I am the true offering and sacrifice, by the blood ofwhich, sprinkled on altar and on people, a new covenant, built uponbetter promises, shall henceforth be. ' What a tremendous piece of audacity, except on the one hypothesisthat He that spake was indeed the Word of God; and that He wasmaking that which Himself had established of old, to give way tothat which He establishes now! The new covenant which Christ sealsin His blood, is the charter, the better charter, under theconditions of which, not a nation but the world may find an externalsalvation which dwarfs all the deliverances of the past. That ideaof a covenant confirmed by Christ's blood may sound to many hearersdry and hard. But if you will try to think what great truths arewrapped up in the theological phraseology, you will find them veryreal and very strong. Is it not a grand thought that between us andthe infinite divine Nature there is established a firm and unmovableagreement? Then He has revealed His purposes; we are not left togrope in darkness, at the mercy of 'peradventures' and 'probablies';nor reduced to consult the ambiguous oracles of nature or ofProvidence, or the varying voices of our own hearts, or painfullyand dubiously to construct more or less strong bases for confidencein a loving God out of such hints and fragments of revelation asthese supply. He has come out of His darkness, and spoken articulatewords, plain words, faithful words, which bind Him to a distinctlydefined course of action. Across the great ocean of possible modesof action for a divine nature He has, if I may so say, buoyed outfor Himself a channel, so as that we know His path, which is in thedeep waters. He has limited Himself by the utterance of a faithfulword, and we can now come to Him with His own promise, and cast itdown before Him, and say: 'Thou hast spoken, and Thou art bound tofulfil it. ' We have a covenant wherein God has shown us His hand, has told us what He is going to do and has thereby pledged Himselfto its performance. And, still further, in order to get the full sweetness of thisthought, to break the husk and reach to the kernel, you mustremember what, according to the New Testament, are the conditions ofthis covenant. The old agreement was, 'If ye will obey My voice anddo My commandments, then, '--so and so will happen. The old conditionwas, 'Do and live; be righteous and blessed!' The new condition is:'Take and have; believe and live!' The one was law, the other isgift; the one was retribution, the other is forgiveness. One wasoutward, hard, rigid law, fitly 'graven with a pen of iron on therocks for ever'; the other is impulse, love, a power bestowed thatwill make us obedient; and the sole condition that we have to renderis the condition of humble and believing acceptance of the divinegift. The new covenant, in the exuberant fulness of its mercy, andin the tenderness of its gracious purposes, is at once thecompletion and the antithesis of the ancient covenant with itsprecepts and its retribution. And, still further, this 'new covenant, ' of which the essence isGod's bestowment of Himself on every heart that wills to possessHim; this new covenant, according to the teaching of these words ofmy text and of the symbol to which they refer, is ratified andsealed by that great sacrifice. The blood was sprinkled on thealtar; the blood was sprinkled on the people, which being translatedinto plain, unmetaphorical language is simply this, that Christ'sdeath remains for ever present to the divine mind as the greatreason and motive which modifies His government, and which ensuresthat His love shall ever find its way to every seeking soul. Hisdeath is the token; His death is the reason; His death is the pledgeof the unending and the inexhaustible mercy of God bestowed uponeach of us. 'He that spared not His own Son, shall He not with Himalso freely give us all things?' The outward rite with its symbol isthe exhibition in visible form of that truth, that the blood ofJesus Christ seals to the world the infinite mercy of God. And, on the other hand, that same blood of the covenant, sprinkledupon the other parties to the treaty, even our poor sinful hearts, binds them to the fulfilment of the condition which belongs to them. That is to say, by the power of that sacrifice there are evoked inour poor souls, faith, love, surrender. It, and it alone, knits usto God; it, and it alone, binds us to the fulfilment of thecovenant. My brother, have you entered into that sweet, solemn, sacred alliance and union with God? Have you accepted and fulfilledthe conditions? Is your heart 'sprinkled with the blood so freelyshed for you'; and have you thereby been brought into livingalliance with the God who has pledged His being and His name to bethe all-sufficient God to you? II. Still further, this cup speaks to us of the forgiveness of sins. One theory, and one theory only, as it seems to me, of the meaningof Christ's death, is possible if these words of my text everdropped from Christ's lips, or if He ever instituted the rite towhich they refer; He must have believed that His death was asacrifice, without which the sins of the world were not forgiven;and by which forgiveness came to us all. And I do not think that we rightly conceive the relation between thesacrifices of barbarous heathen tribes, or the sacrifices appointedin Israel, and the great sacrifice on the Cross, if we say that ourLord's death is only figuratively accommodated to these in order tomeet lower or grosser conceptions, but rather, I take it, that theaccommodation is the other way. In all nations beyond the limits ofIsrael the sacrifices of living victims spoke not only of surrenderand dependence, but likewise of the consciousness of demerit andevil on the part of the offerers, and were at once a confession ofsin, a prayer for pardon, and a propitiation of an offended God. AndI believe that the sacrifices in Israel were intended and adaptednot only to meet the deep-felt want of human nature, common to themas to all other tribes, but also were intended and adapted to pointonwards to Him in whose death a real want of mankind was met, inwhose death a real sacrifice was offered, in whose death an angryGod was not indeed propitiated, but in whose death the loving Fatherof our souls Himself provided the Lamb for the offering, withoutwhich, for reasons deeper than we can wholly fathom, it wasimpossible that sin should be remitted. I insist upon no theory of an Atonement. I believe there is noGospel, worth calling so, worth the preaching, worth your believing, or that will ever move the world or purify society, except theGospel which begins with the fact of an Atonement, and points to theCross as the altar on which the Sacrifice for the sins of the world, without whose death pardon is impossible, has died for us all. Oh! dear friends, do not let yourselves be confused by thedifficulties that beset all human and incomplete statements of thephilosophy of the death of Christ; but getting away from these, cleave you to the fact that your sins were laid upon Christ, andthat He has died for us all; that His death is a sacrifice; His bodybroken for us; and for the remission of our sins, His blood freelyshed. Thus, and only thus, will you come to the understanding eitherof the sweetness of His love or of the power of His example; then, and only then, shall we know why it was that He elected to beremembered, out of all the moments of His life, by that one when Hehung in weakness upon the Cross, and out of the darkness came thecry, 'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?' III. And now, again, let me remind you that this cup speaks likewiseof a life infused. 'The blood is the life, ' says the physiology of the Hebrews. Theblood is the life, and when men drink of that cup they symbolise thefact that Christ's own life and spirit are imparted to them thatlove Him. 'Except ye eat the flesh, and drink the blood of the Sonof Man, ye have no life in you. ' The very heart of Christ's gift tous is the gift of His own very life to be the life of our lives. Indeep, mystical reality He Himself passes into our being, and the'law of the spirit of life makes us free from the law of sin anddeath, ' so that we may say: 'He that is joined to the Lord is onespirit, ' and the humble believing soul may rejoice in this: 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in Me. ' This is, in one aspect, thevery deepest meaning of this Communion rite. As physicians sometimestried to restore life to an almost dead man by the transfusion intohis shrunken veins of the fresh warm blood from a young and healthysubject, so into our fevered life, into our corrupted blood, thereis poured the full tide of the pure and perfect life of Jesus ChristHimself, and we live, not by our own power, nor for our own will, nor in obedience to our own caprices, but by Him and in Him, andwith Him and for Him. This is the heart of Christianity, thepossession within us of the life, the immortal life of Him that diedfor us. My brother have you that great gift in your heart? Be sure of this, that unless the life of Christ is in you by faith, ye are dead, 'dead in trespasses and in sins'; dead, and sure to rot away anddisintegrate into corruption. The cup of blessing which we drinkspeaks to us of the transfusion into our spirits of the Spirit ofJesus Christ. IV. And lastly, it speaks of a festal gladness. The bread says nothing to us of the remission of sins. The brokenbread proclaims, indeed, our nourishment from Jesus, but falls shortof the deep and solemn truth that it is the very life-blood ofChrist Himself which nourishes us and vitalises us. And the bread, in like manner, proclaims indeed the fact that we are fed on Him, but says nothing of the joy of that feeding. The wine is the symbolof that, and it proclaims to us that the Christian life here onearth, just because it is the feeding on and the drinking in ofJesus Christ, ought ever to be a life of blessedness, of aboundingjoy, by whatsoever darkness, burdens, cares, toils, sorrows, andsolitude it may be shaded and saddened. They who live on Christ, they who drink in of His spirit, they should be glad in allcircumstances, they, and they alone. We sit at a table, though it bein the wilderness, though it be in the presence of our enemies, where there ought to be joy and the voice of rejoicing. But beyond that, as our Master Himself taught these apostles in thatupper room, this cup points onwards to a future feast. At thatsolemn hour Jesus stayed His own heart with the vision of theperfected kingdom and the glad festival then. So this Communion hasa prophetic element in it, and links on with predictions andparables which speak of the 'marriage supper' of the great King, andof the time when we shall sit at His table in His kingdom. For the past the Lord's Supper speaks of the one sufficient oblationand satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. For the present itspeaks of life produced and sustained by communion with JesusChrist. And for the future it speaks of the unending, joyfulsatisfaction of all desires in the 'upper room' of the heavens. How unlike, and yet how like to that scene in the upper room atJerusalem! From it the sad disciples went out, some of them to denytheir Master; all of them to struggle, to sin, to lose Him fromtheir sight, to toil, to sorrow, and at last to die. From that othertable we shall go no more out, but sit there with Him in fullfruition of unfailing blessedness and participation of His immortallife for evermore. Dear brethren, these are the lessons, these the hopes, which this'blood of the new covenant' teaches and inspires. Have you enteredinto that covenant with God? Have you made sure work of theforgiveness of your sins through His blood? Have you received intoyour spirits His immortal life? Then you may humbly be confidentthat, after life's weariness and lonesomeness are past, you will bewelcomed to the banqueting hall by the Lord of the feast, and sitwith Him and His servants who loved Him at that table and be glad. 'UNTIL THAT DAY' 'I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom. '--MATT. Xxvi. 29. This remarkable saying of our Lord's is recorded in all of theaccounts of the institution of the Lord's Supper. The thoughtembodied in it ought to be present in the minds of all who partakeof that rite. It converts what is primarily a memorial into aprophecy. It bids us hope as well as, and because we, remember. Thelight behind us is cast forward on to the dimness before. So theApostle Paul, in his solitary reference to the Communion--which, indeed, is an entirely incidental one, and evoked simply by thecorruptions in the Corinthian Church, emphasises this prophetic andonward-looking aspect of the backward-looking rite when he says, 'Yedo show the Lord's death _till He come_. ' Now, it seems to me that those of us who so strongly hold that theCommunion is primarily a simple memorial service, with no mysteriousor magical efficacy of any sort about it, do rather ignore in ourordinary thoughts the other aspect which is brought out in my text;and that comparative ignoring seems to me to be but a part of a verylamentable and general tendency of this day, whereby the prospect ofa future life has become somewhat dimmed and does not fill the placeeither in ordinary Christian thinking, or as a motive for Christianservice which the proportion of faith, and the relative importanceof the present and the future suggest that it ought to fill. TheChristianity of this day has so much to do with the present life, and the thought of the Gospel as a power in the present has been soemphasised, in legitimate reaction from the opposite exaggeration, that there is great need, as I believe, to preach to Christian peoplethe wisdom of making more prominent in their faith their immortalhope. I wish, then, to turn now to this aspect of the rite which weregard as a memorial, and try to emphasise its forward-lookingattitude, and the large blessed truths that emerge if we consider that. I. First, let me say just a word about the twin aspect of theCommunion as a memorial prophecy, or prophetic remembrance. Now, I need not remind you, I suppose, that according to the viewwhich, as I believe, the New Testament takes, and which certainly weNonconformists take, of all the rites of external worship, every oneof them is a prophecy, because every act in which our sense isbrought in to reinforce the spirit--and by outward forms, be theyvocal, or be they manual, or be they of any other sort, we try toexpress and to quicken spiritual emotions and intellectualconvictions--declares its own imperfection, digs its own grave, andprophecies its own resurrection in a nobler and better fashion. Justbecause these outward symbols of bread and wine do, through thesenses, quicken the faith and the love of the spirit, they declarethemselves to be transitory, and they point onwards to the time whenthat which is perfect shall absorb, and so destroy, that which is inpart, and when sense shall be no longer necessary as the ally andhumble servant of spirit. 'I saw no temple therein. ' Temples, andrites, and services, and holy days, and all the external apparatusof worship, are but scaffolding, and just as the scaffolding round abuilding is a prophecy of its own being pulled down when thebuilding is reared and completed, so we cannot partake of theseexternal symbols rightly, unless we recognise their transiency, andfeel that they say to us, 'A mightier than I cometh after me, thelatchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to unloose. ' The light thatshines in the dark heralds the day and its own extinction. So, looking back we must look forward, and partaking of the symbol, we must reach out to the time when the symbol shall be antiquated, the reality having come. The Passover of Israel did not more trulypoint onwards to the true Lamb of Sacrifice, and to the truePassover that was slain for us, and to its own elevation into theLord's Supper of the Christian Church, than the Lord's Supper of theChristian Church points onwards to the 'marriage supper of theLamb, ' and its own cessation. But then, again, let me remind you that this prophetic aspect isinherent in the memorial aspect of the Communion, because what weremember necessarily demands the coming of what we hope. That is tosay, if Jesus Christ be what the Lord's Supper says that He is, andif He has done what that broken bread and poured out wine proclaim, according to His own utterance, that He has done, then clearly thatdeath which was for the life of the world, that death which was theseal of a covenant, that body broken for the remission of sins, thatwine partaken of as a reception into ourselves of the very life-bloodof Jesus Christ, do all demand something far nobler and more perfectthan the broken, incomplete obedience and loyalties and communionswhich Christian men here exercise and possess. If He died, as the rite says that He did, and if dying He left sucha commentary upon His act as that ordinance affords, then He cannothave done with the world; then the powers that were set in motion byHis death cannot pause nor cease their action until they havereached their appropriate culmination in effecting all that it wasin them to effect. If, leaving His people, He said to them, 'Neverforget My death for you, My broken body, and My shed blood, ' Hetherein said that the time will come, must come, when all the powersof the Cross shall be incorporated in humanity, and when the partedshall be reunited. The Communion would stand as the expression ofChrist's mistaken estimate of His own importance, if there were notbeyond the grave the perfecting of it, and the full appropriationand joyful possession of all which the death that it signifiesbrought to mankind. Therefore, dear brethren, it seems to me that the best way by whichChristians can deepen their confidence and brighten their hope inthe perfect reunion and blessedness of the heavens, is to increasethe firmness of their faith in, and the depth of their apprehensionof, the sacrifice of the Cross. If the Cross demands the Crown, thenour surest way to realise as certain our own possession of thatCrown is to cling very close to that Cross. The more we lookbackwards to it the more will it fling its light into all the darkplaces that are in front of us, and flush the heavens up to theseventh and beyond, with the glories that stream from it. Hold fastby the Cross, and the more fully, believingly, joyously, unfalteringly, we recognise in it the foundation of our salvation, the more gladly, clearly, operatively, shall we cherish the hopethat 'the headstone shall be brought forth with shoutings, ' and thatthe imperfect symbolical communion of earth will grow and greateninto complete and real union in eternal bliss. Let me urge, then, this, that, as a matter of fact, a faith ineternal glory goes with and fluctuates in the same degree and manneras does the faith in the past sacrifice that Christ has made. He, and He alone, as I believe, turns nebulae into solidity, and makesof the more or less tremulous anticipation of a more or less dim anddistant future, a calm, still certainty. We know that He will comebecause, and in proportion as, we believe that He has come. Keepthese two things, then, always together, the memory and the hope. They stand like two great piers, one on either side of a narrow, dark glen, and suspended from them is stretched the bridge, alongwhich the happy pilgrims may travel and enter into rest. II. And now, let us turn for a moment to the lovely vision of thatfuture which is suggested by our text. The truest way, I was going to say the only way, by which we canhave any conceptions of a condition of being of which we have noexperience, is to fall back upon the experiences which we have, anduse them as symbols and metaphors. The curtain is the picture. Soour Lord here, in accordance with the necessary limitations of ourhuman knowledge, contents Himself with using what lay at His hand, and taking it as giving faint shadows and metaphorical suggestionsas to spiritual blessedness yonder. There is one other way, as it seems to me, by which we can in anymeasure body forth to ourselves that unknown condition of things, and that is to fall back upon our present experiences in anotherfashion, and negative all of them which involve pain and limitationand incompleteness. There shall be no night--no sorrow--no tears--nosighing, and the like. These negatives of the strong and stinginggriefs and limitations of the present are perhaps our second-bestway of coming to some prophetic vision of that great future. Remembering, then, that we are dealing with pure metaphor, and thatthe exact translation of the metaphor into reality is not yetpossible for us, let us take one or two very plain thoughts out ofthis great saying--'Until I drink it new with you in My Father'skingdom. ' Then, we have to think of the completion of the Christian lifebeyond, which is also the completion of the results of Christ'sdeath on the Cross, as being, according to the very frequentmetaphor both of the Old and the New Testament, a prolongedfestival. I do not need to speak of the details of the thoughts thatthence emerge. Let me sum them up as briefly as may be. They includethe satisfaction of every desire and the nourishment of allstrength, and food for every faculty. When we think of the hungryhearts that all men carry, and how true it is that even the wisestand the holiest of us are 'spending our money for that which is notbread, and our labour for that which satisfieth not'; when we thinkof how the choicest foods that life can provide, even for thenoblest hunger of noble hearts, are too often to us but as a feedingon ashes that will leave grit between the teeth and a foul tasteupon the palate, surely it is blessed to think that we may, afterall life's disappointments, cherish the hope of a perfect fruition, and that yonder, if not here, it will be fully true that 'God neversends mouths but He sends meat to feed them. ' That is not so in thisworld, for we all carry hungers which impel us forward to noblerliving, and which it would not be good for us to have satisfiedhere. But, unless the whole universe is a godless chaos, there mustbe somewhere a state in which a man shall have all that he wants, and shall want only what he ought. The emblem of a feast suggests also society. The solitary travellerswho have been toiling and moiling through the desert all the daylong, snatching up a hasty mouthful as they march, and lonely many atime, come together at last, and sit together there joyous andunited. Deep down in our hearts some of us have gashes that alwaysbleed. We know losses and loneliness, and we can feel, I hope, howblessed is the thought that all the wanderers shall sit theretogether, and rejoice in each other's communion, 'and so shall_we_ ever be with the Lord. ' But besides satisfaction and society the figure suggests repose. That rest is not indolence, for we have to carry other metaphorswith us in order to come to the full significance of this one, andthe festal imagery is not all that we have to take into account; forwe read, 'I grant unto you a kingdom, and ye shall sit on twelvethrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel, ' as well as 'ye shalleat and drink with Me at My table in My kingdom. ' So repose, whichis consistent and coexistent with the intensest activity, is thegreat hope that comes out of these metaphors. But for many of us--Isuppose for all of us elderly people--who are about weary of workand worry, there is no deeper hope than the hope of rest. 'I havehad labour enough for one, ' says one of our poets. And I think thereis something in most of our hearts that echoes that and rejoices tohear that, after the long march, 'ye shall sit with Me at My table. ' But besides satisfaction, society, and rest, the figure suggestsgladness. Wine is the emblem of the joyous side of a feast, just asbread is the emblem of the necessary nourishment. And it is_new_ wine; joy raised to a higher power, transformed andglorified; and yet the old emotion in a new form. As for thatgladness, 'eye hath not seen, neither hath it entered into the heartof man to conceive, the things that God hath prepared for them thatlove Him. ' Only all we weary, heavy-laden, saddened, anxious, disappointed, tormented people may hope for these festal joys, if weare Christ's. The feast will last when all the troubles and thecares which helped us to it are dead and buried and forgotten. These four things, brethren--satisfaction, society, rest, newgladness--are proclaimed and prophesied to each of us, if we will, by this memorial rite. Again, there comes from this aspect of the Communion the thoughtthat the blessed condition of the Christian soul hereafter is afeast on a sacrifice. We must distinguish between the sense in whichour Lord drinks with us, and the sense in which we alone partake ofthat feast of which He provides the viands. But just as in thesymbolic ordinance of the Communion the very essence of it is thatwhat was offered as sacrifice is now incorporated into theparticipant's spiritual being, and becomes part of himself, and thelife of his life, so, in the future, all the blessedness of theclustered and constellated joys of that life, which is one eternalfestival, shall arise from the reception into perfected spirits withever-growing greatness and blessedness of the Christ that died andever lives for them. That heavenly glory, to its highest pinnacle ofaspiration, to its most rapt completeness of gladness, is all theconsequence of Christ's death on the Cross. That death, which wecommemorate, is the procuring cause of man's entrance into bliss, and that death is the subject of the continual, grateful remembranceof the saints in the seventh heaven of their glory. Life yonder, asall true life here, consists in taking into ourselves the life ofJesus Christ, and the law for heaven is the same as the law forearth, 'He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me. ' Lastly, the conception of the future for Christian souls arisingfrom this aspect of the Lord's Supper is that it is not only afeast, and a feast on a sacrifice, but that it is a feast with theKing. '_With you_ I will drink it. ' Brethren, we pass beyond metaphor whenwe gather up and condense all the vague brightness and glories of thatperfect future into this one rapturous, overwhelming, all-embracingthought: 'So shall we ever be with the Lord. ' I could almost wishthat Christian people had no other thought of that future than this, for surely in its grand simplicity, in its ineffable depth, there liethe germs of every blessedness. How poor all the material emblems areof which sensuous imaginations make so much, when compared with thathope! As the good old hymn has it, which to me says more, in its boldsimplicity, than all the sentimental enlargements of Scripturalmetaphors which some people admire so much-- 'It is enough that Christ knows all, And I shall be with Him. ' Strange that He says, 'I will drink it _with you. _' Does Heneed sustenance? Does He need any external things in order to makeHis feast? No! and Yes! 'I will sup with Him' as well as 'He withme. ' And, surely, His meat and drink are the love, the loyalty, theobedience, the receptiveness, the society of His redeemed children. 'The joy of the Lord' comes from 'seeing of the travail of Hissoul, ' and His servants do enter into that joy in deep and wondrousfashion. We not only shall live on Christ, but He Himself puts toHis own lips the chalice that He commends to ours, and in marvellouscondescension to, and identity with, our glorified humanity drinkswith us the 'new wine' in the Father's kingdom. GETHSEMANE, THE OIL-PRESS 'Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. 37. And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. 38. Then saith He unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with Me. 39. And He went a little farther, and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me: nevertheless not as I will, but as Thou wilt. 40. And He cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with Me one hour! 41. Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak. 42. He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O My Father, if this cup may not pass away from Me, except I drink it, Thy will be done. 43. And He came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were heavy. 44. And He left them, and went away again, and prayed the third time, saying the same words. 45. Then cometh He to His disciples, and saith unto them, Sleep on now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. 46. Rise, let us be going: behold, he is at hand that doth betray Me. '--MATT. Xxvi. 36-46. One shrinks from touching this incomparable picture of unexampledsorrow, for fear lest one's finger-marks should stain it. There isno place here for picturesque description, which tries to mend thegospel stories by dressing them in to-day's fashions, nor fortheological systematisers and analysers of the sort that would'botanise upon their mother's grave. ' We must put off our shoes, andfeel that we stand on holy ground. Though loving eyes saw somethingof Christ's agony, He did not let them come beside Him, but withdrewinto the shadow of the gnarled olives, as if even the moonbeams mustnot look too closely on the mystery of such grief. We may go as nearas love was allowed to go, but stop where it was stayed, while wereverently and adoringly listen to what the Evangelist tells us ofthat unspeakable hour. I. Mark the 'exceeding sorrow' of the Man of Sorrows. Somewhere onthe western foot of Olivet lay the garden, named from an oil-pressformerly or then in it, which was to be the scene of the holiest andsorest sorrow on which the moon, that has seen so much misery, hasever looked. Truly it was 'an oil-press, ' in which 'the good olive'was crushed by the grip of unparalleled agony, and yielded preciousoil, which has been poured into many a wound since then. Eight ofthe eleven are left at or near the entrance, while He passes deeperinto the shadows with the three. They had been witnesses of Hisprayers once before, on the slopes of Hermon, when He wastransfigured before them. They are now to see a no less wonderfulrevelation of His glory in His filial submission. There is somethingremarkable in Matthew's expression, 'He began to be sorrowful, '--asif a sudden wave of emotion, breaking over His soul, had swept Hishuman sensibilities before it. The strange word translated by theRevisers 'sore troubled' is of uncertain derivation, and maypossibly be simply intended to intensify the idea of sorrow; butmore probably it adds another element, which Bishop Lightfootdescribes as 'the confused, restless, half-distracted state which isproduced by physical derangement or mental distress. ' A storm ofagitation and bewilderment broke His calm, and forced from Hispatient lips, little wont to speak of His own emotions, or to seekfor sympathy, the unutterably pathetic cry, 'My soul is exceedingsorrowful'--compassed about with sorrow, as the word means--'evenunto death. ' No feeble explanation of these words does justice tothe abyss of woe into which they let us dimly look. They tell thefact, that, a little more and the body would have sunk under theburden. He knew the limits of human endurance, for 'all things weremade by Him, ' and, knowing it, He saw that He had grazed the veryedge. Out of the darkness He reaches a hand to feel for the grasp ofa friend, and piteously asks these humble lovers to stay beside Him, not that they could help Him to bear the weight, but that theirpresence had some solace in it. His agony must be endured alone, therefore He bade them tarry there; but He desired to have them athand, therefore He went but 'a little forward. ' They could not bearit with Him, but they could 'watch with' Him, and that poor comfortis all He asks. No word came from them. They were, no doubt, awedinto silence, as the truest sympathy is used to be, in the presenceof a great grief. Is it permitted us to ask what were the fountainsof these bitter floods that swept over Christ's sinless soul? Wasthe mere physical shrinking from death all? If so, we may reverentlysay that many a maiden and old man, who drew all their fortitudefrom Jesus, have gone to stake or gibbet for His sake, with a calmwhich contrasts strangely with His agitation. Gethsemane is robbedof its pathos and nobleness if that be all. But it was not all. Rather it was the least bitter of the components of the cup. Whatlay before Him was not merely death, but the death which was toatone for a world's sin, and in which, therefore, the whole weightof sin's consequences was concentrated. 'The Lord hath made to meeton Him the iniquities of us all'; that is the one sufficientexplanation of this infinitely solemn and tender scene. Unless webelieve that, we shall find it hard to reconcile His agitation inGethsemane with the perfection of His character as the captain of'the noble army of martyrs. ' II. Note the prayer of filial submission. Matthew does not tell usof the sweat falling audibly and heavily, and sounding to the threelike slow blood-drops from a wound, nor of the strengthening angel, but he gives us the prostrate form, and the threefold prayer, renewed as each moment of calm, won by it, was again broken in uponby a fresh wave of emotion. Thrice He had to leave the disciples, and came back, a calm conqueror; and twice the enemy rallied andreturned to the assault, and was at last driven finally from thefield by the power of prayer and submission. The three Synopticsdiffer in their report of our Lord's words, but all mean the samething in substance; and it is obvious that much more must have beenspoken than they report. Possibly what we have is only the fragmentsthat reached the three before they fell asleep. In any case, Jesuswas absent from them on each occasion long enough to allow of theirdoing so. Three elements are distinguishable in our Lord's prayer. There is, first, the sense of Sonship, which underlies all, and was never moreclear than at that awful moment. Then there is the recoil from 'thecup, ' which natural instinct could not but feel, though sinlessly. The flesh shrank from the Cross, which else had been no suffering;and if no suffering, then had been no atonement. His manhood wouldnot have been like ours, nor His sorrows our pattern, if He had notthus drawn back, in His sensitive humanity, from the awful prospectnow so near. But natural instinct is one thing, and the controllingwill another. However currents may have tossed the vessel, the firmhand at the helm never suffered them to change her course. The will, which in this prayer He seems so strangely to separate from theFather's, even in the act of submission, was the will which wishes, not that which resolves. His fixed purpose to die for the world'ssin never wavered. The shrinking does not reach the point ofabsolutely and unconditionally asking that the cup might pass. Evenin the act of uttering the wish, it is limited by that 'if it bepossible, ' which can only mean--possible, in view of the greatpurpose for which He came. That is to be accomplished, at any cost;and unless it can be accomplished though the cup be withdrawn, Hedoes not even wish, much less will, that it should be withdrawn. So, the third element in the prayer is the utter resignation to theFather's will, in which submission He found peace, as we do. He prayed His way to perfect calm, which is ever the companion ofperfect self-surrender to God. They who cease from their own worksdo 'enter into rest. ' All the agitations which had come storming inmassed battalions against Him are defeated by it. They have failedto shake His purpose, they now fail even to disturb His peace. So, victorious from the dreadful conflict, and at leisure of heart tocare for others, He can go back to the disciples. But even whilstseeking to help them, a fresh wave of suffering breaks in on Hiscalm, and once again He leaves them to renew the struggle. Theinstinctive shrinking reasserts itself, and, though overcome, is noteradicated. But the second prayer is yet more rooted in acquiescencethan the first. It shows that He had not lost what He had won by theformer; for it, as it were, builds on that first supplication, andaccepts as answer to its contingent petition the consciousness, accompanying the calm, that it was not possible for the cup to passfrom Him. The sense of Sonship underlies the complete resignation ofthe second prayer as of the first. It has no wish but God's will, and is the voluntary offering of Himself. Here He is both Priest andSacrifice, and offers the victim with this prayer of consecration. So once more He triumphs, because once more, and yet morecompletely, He submits, and accepts the Cross. For Him, as for us, the Cross accepted ceases to be a pain, and the cup is no morebitter when we are content to drink it. Once more in fainter fashionthe enemy came on, casting again his spent arrows, and beaten backby the same weapon. The words were the same, because no others couldhave expressed more perfectly the submission which was the heart ofHis prayers and the condition of His victory. Christ's prayer, then, was not for the passing of the cup, but thatthe will of God might be done in and by Him, and 'He was heard inthat He feared, ' not by being exempted from the Cross, but by beingstrengthened through submission for submission. So His agony is thepattern of all true prayer, which must ever deal with our wishes, asHe did with His instinctive shrinking, --present them wrapped in an'if it be possible, ' and followed by a 'nevertheless. ' The meaningof prayer is not to force our wills on God's, but to bend our willsto His; and that prayer is really answered of which the issue is ourcalm readiness for all that He lays upon us. III. Note the sad and gentle remonstrance with the drowsy three. 'The sleep of the disciples, and of these disciples, and of allthree, and such an overpowering sleep, remains even after Luke'sexplanation, "for sorrow, " a psychological riddle' (_Meyer_). It is singularly parallel with the sleep of the same three at theTransfiguration--an event which presents the opposite pole of ourLord's experiences, and yields so many antithetical parallels toGethsemane. No doubt the tension of emotion, which had lasted formany hours, had worn them out; but, if weariness had weighed downtheir eyelids, love should have kept them open. Such sleep of suchdisciples may have been a riddle, but it was also a crime, andaugured imperfect sympathy. Gentle surprise and the pain ofdisappointed love are audible in the question, addressed to Peterespecially, as he had promised so much, but meant for all. This wasall that Jesus got in answer to His yearning for sympathy. 'I lookedfor some to take pity, but there was none. ' Those who loved Him mostlay curled in dead slumber within earshot of His prayers. If ever asoul tasted the desolation of utter loneliness, that suppliantbeneath the olives tasted it. But how little of the pain escapes Hislips! The words but hint at the slightness of their task comparedwith His, at the brevity of the strain on their love, and at thecompanionship which ought to have made sleep impossible. May we notsee in Christ's remonstrance a word for all? For us, too, the taskof keeping awake in the enchanted ground is light, measured againstHis, and the time is short, and we have Him to keep us company inthe watch, and every motive of grateful love should make it easy;but, alas, how many of us sleep a drugged and heavy slumber! The gentle remonstrance soon passes over into counsel as gentle. Watchfulness and prayer are inseparable. The one discerns dangers, the other arms against them. Watchfulness keeps us prayerful, andprayerfulness keeps us watchful. To watch without praying ispresumption, to pray without watching is hypocrisy. The eye thatsees clearly the facts of life will turn upwards from its scanningof the snares and traps, and will not look in vain. These two arethe indispensable conditions of victorious encountering oftemptation. Fortified by them, we shall not 'enter into' it, thoughwe encounter it. The outward trial will remain, but its power tolead us astray will vanish. It will still be danger or sorrow, butit will not be temptation; and we shall pass through it, as asunbeam through foul air, untainted, and keeping heaven's radiance. That is a lesson for a wider circle than the sleepy three. It is followed by words which would need a volume to expound in alltheir depth and width of application, but which are primarily areason for the preceding counsel, as well as a loving apology forthe disciples' sleep. Christ is always glad to give us credit foreven imperfect good; His eye, which sees deeper than ours, sees morelovingly, and is not hindered from marking the willing spirit byrecognising weak flesh. But these words are not to be made a pillowfor indolent acquiescence in the limitations which the flesh imposeson the spirit. He may take merciful count of these, and so may we, in judging others, but it is fatal to plead them at the bar of ourown consciences. Rather they should be a spur to our watchfulnessand to our prayer. We need these because the flesh is weak, stillmore because, in its weakness toward good, it is strong to evil. Such exercise will give governing power to the spirit, and enable itto impose its will on the reluctant flesh. If we watch and pray, theconflict between these two elements in the renewed nature will tendto unity and peace by the supremacy of the spirit; if we do not, itwill tend to cease by the unquestioned tyranny of the flesh. In oneor other direction our lives are tending. Strange that such words had no effect. But so it was, and so deepwas the apostles' sleep that Christ left them undisturbed the secondtime. The relapse is worse than the original disease. Sleep brokenand resumed is more torpid and fatal than if it had not beeninterrupted. We do not know how long it lasted, though the wholeperiod in the garden must have been measured by hours; but at lastit was broken by the enigmatical last words of our Lord. Theexplanation of the direct opposition between the consecutivesentences, by taking the 'Sleep on now' as ironical, jars on one'sreverence. Surely irony is out of keeping with the spirit of Christthen. Rather He bids them sleep on, since the hour is come, in sadrecognition that the need for their watchful sympathy is past, andwith it the opportunity for their proved affection. It is said witha tone of contemplative melancholy, and is almost equivalent to 'toolate, too late. ' The memorable sermon of F. W. Robertson, on thistext, rightly grasps the spirit of the first clause, when it dwellswith such power on the thought of 'the irrevocable past' of wastedopportunities and neglected duty. But the sudden transition to thesharp, short command and broken sentences of the last verse is to beaccounted for by the sudden appearance of the flashing lights of theband led by Judas, somewhere near at hand, in the valley. The moodof pensive reflection gives place to rapid decision. He summons themto arise, not for flight, but that He may go out to meet thetraitor. Escape would have been easy. There was time to reach somesheltering fold of the hill in the darkness; but the prayer beneaththe silver-grey olives had not been in vain, and these last words inGethsemane throb with the Son's willingness to yield Himself up, andto empty to its dregs the cup which the Father had given Him. THE LAST PLEADING OF LOVE 'And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come?'--MATT. Xxvi. 50. We are accustomed to think of the betrayer of our Lord as a kind ofmonster, whose crime is so mysterious in its atrocity as to put himbeyond the pale of human sympathy. The awful picture which the greatItalian poet draws of him as alone in hell, shunned even there, asguilty beyond all others, expresses the general feeling about him. And even the attempts which have been made to diminish the greatnessof his guilt, by supposing that his motive was only to precipitateChrist's assumption of His conquering Messianic power, are promptedby the same thought that such treason as his is all butinconceivable. I cannot but think that these attempts fail, and thatthe narratives of the Gospels oblige us to think of his crime asdeliberate treachery. But even when so regarded, other emotions thanwondering loathing should be excited by the awful story. There had been nothing in his previous history to suggest such sin, as is proved by the disciples' question, when our Lord announcedthat one of them should betray Him. No suspicion lighted on him--nofinger pointed to where he sat. But self-distrust asked, 'Lord, isit I?' and only love, pillowed on the Master's breast, and strong inthe happy sense of His love, was sufficiently assured of its ownconstancy, to change the question into 'Lord! who is it?' Theprocess of corruption was unseen by all eyes but Christ's. He cameto his terrible pre-eminence in crime by slow degrees, and by pathswhich we may all tread. As for his guilt, that is in other handsthan ours. As for his fate, let us copy the solemn and pityingreticence of Peter, and say, 'that he might go to _his own_place'--the place that belongs to him, and that he is fit for, wherever that may be. As for the growth and development of his sin, let us remember that 'we have all of us one human heart, ' and thatthe possibilities of crime as dark are in us all. And instead ofshuddering abhorrence at a sin that can scarcely be understood, andcan never be repeated, let us be sure that whatever man has done, man may do, and ask with humble consciousness of our own deceitfulhearts, 'Lord, is it I?' These remarkable and solemn words of Christ, with which He meets thetreacherous kiss, appear to be a last appeal to Judas. They maypossibly not be a question, as in our version--but an incompletesentence, 'What thou hast come to do'--leaving the implied command, 'That do, ' unexpressed. They would then be very like other wordswhich the betrayer had heard but an hour or two before, 'That thoudoest, do quickly. ' But such a rendering does not seem soappropriate to the circumstances as that which makes them aquestion, smiting on his heart and conscience, and seeking to tearaway the veil of sophistications with which he had draped from hisown eyes the hideous shape of his crime. And, if so, what awonderful instance we have here of that long-suffering love. Theyare the last effort of the divine patience to win back even thetraitor. They show us the wrestle between infinite mercy and atreacherous, sinful heart, and they bring into awful prominence thepower which that heart has of rejecting the counsel of God againstitself. I venture to use them now as suggesting these three things:the patience of Christ's love; the pleading of Christ's love; andthe refusal of Christ's love. I. The patience of Christ's love. If we take no higher view of this most pathetic incident than that thewords come from a man's lips, even then all its beauty will not belost. There are some sins against friendship in which the manner isharder to bear than the substance of the evil. It must have been astrangely mean and dastardly nature, as well as a coarse and cold one, that could think of fixing on the kiss of affection as the concertedsign to point out their victim to the legionaries. Many a man whocould have planned and executed the treason would have shrunk fromthat. And many a man who could have borne to be betrayed by his ownfamiliar friend would have found that heartless insult worse to endurethan the treason itself. But what a picture of perfect patience andunruffled calm we have here, in that the answer to the poisonous, hypocritical embrace was these moving words! The touch of the traitor'slips has barely left His cheek, but not one faint passing flush ofanger tinges it. He is perfectly self-oblivious--absorbed in otherthoughts, and among them in pity for the guilty wretch before Him. His words have no agitation in them, no instinctive recoil from thepollution of such a salutation. They have grave rebuke, but it isrebuke which derives its very force from the appeal to formercompanionship. Christ still recognises the ancient bond, and is trueto it. He will still plead with this man who has been beside Him long;and though His heart be wounded yet He is not wroth, and He will notcast him off. If this were nothing more than a picture of humanfriendship it would stand alone, above all other records that theworld cherishes in its inmost heart, of the love that never fails, andis not soon angry. But we, I hope, dear brethren, think more loftily and more truly ofour dear Lord than as simply a perfect manhood, the exemplar of allgoodness. How He comes to be that, if He be not more than that, I donot understand, and I, for one, feel that my confidence in theflawless completeness of His human character lives or dies with mybelief that He is the Eternal Word, God manifest in the flesh. Certainly we shall never truly grasp the blessed meaning of His lifeon earth until we look upon it all as the revelation of God. Thetears of Christ are the pity of God. The gentleness of Jesus is thelong-suffering of God. The tenderness of Jesus is the love of God. 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father'; and all that life sobeautiful but so anomalous as to be all but incredible, when wethink of it as only the life of a man, glows with a yet fairerbeauty, and corresponds with the nature which it expresses, when wethink of it as being the declaration to us by the divine Son of thedivine Father--our loftiest, clearest, and authentic revelation ofGod. How that thought lifts these words before us into a still higherregion! We are now in the presence of the solemn greatness of adivine love. If the meaning of this saying is what we havesuggested, it is pathetic even in the lower aspect, but howinfinitely that pathos is deepened when we view it in the higher! Surely if ever there was a man who might have been supposed to beexcluded from the love of God, it was Judas. Surely if ever therewas a moment in a human life, when one might have supposed that evenChrist's ever open heart would shut itself together against any one, it was this moment. But no, the betrayer in the very instant of histreason has that changeless tenderness lingering around him, andthat merciful hand beckoning to him still. And have we not a right to generalise this wonderful fact, and todeclare its teaching to be--that the love of God is extended to usall, and cannot be made to turn away from us by any sins of ours?Sin is mighty; it can work endless evils on us; it can disturb andembitter all our relations with God; it can, as we shall presentlyhave to point out, make it necessary for the tenderest 'grace of Godto come disciplining'--to 'come with a rod, ' just because it comesin 'the spirit of meekness. ' But one thing it cannot do, and thatis--make God cease to love us. I suppose all human affection can beworn out by constant failure to evoke a response from cold hearts. Isuppose that it can be so nipped by frosts, so constantly checked inblossoming, that it shrivels and dies. I suppose that constantingratitude, constant indifference can turn the warmest springs ofour love to a river of ice. 'Can a mother forget her child?--Yea, she may forget. ' But we have to do with a God, whose love is Hisvery being; who loves us not for reasons in us but in Himself; whoselove is eternal and boundless as all His nature; whose love, therefore, cannot be turned away by our sin--but abides with us forever, and is granted to every soul of man. Dear brethren, we cannotbelieve too firmly, we cannot trust too absolutely, we cannotproclaim too broadly that blessed thought, without which we have nohope to feed on for ourselves, or to share with our fellows--theuniversal love of God in Christ. Is there a _worst_ man on earth at this moment? If there be, he, too, has a share in that love. Harlots and thieves, publicansand sinners, leprous outcasts, and souls tormented by uncleanspirits, the wrecks of humanity whom decent society and respectableChristianity passes by with averted head and uplifted hands, criminals on the gibbet with the rope round their necks--and thosewho are as hopeless as any of these, self-complacent formalists and'Gospel-hardened professors'--all have a place in that heart. Andthat, not as undistinguished members of a class, but as separatesouls, singly the objects of God's knowledge and love. He loves all, because He loves each. We are not massed together in His view, norin His regard. He does not lose the details in the whole; as we, looking on some great crowd of upturned faces, are conscious of allbut recognise no single one. He does not love a class--a world--butHe loves the single souls that make it up--you and me, and every oneof the millions that we throw together in the vague phrase, 'therace. ' Let us individualise that love in our thoughts as itindividualises us in its outflow--and make our own the 'exceedingbroad' promises, which include us, too. 'God loves _me_; Christgave Himself for _me_. _I_ have a place in that royal, tenderheart. ' Nor should any sin make us doubt this. He loved us with exceedinglove, even when we were 'dead in trespasses. ' He did not begin tolove because of anything in us; He will not cease because ofanything in us. We change; 'He abideth faithful, He cannot denyHimself. ' As the sunshine pours down as willingly and abundantly onfilth and dunghills, as on gold that glitters in its beam, andjewels that flash back its lustre, so the light and warmth of thatunsetting and unexhausted source of life pours down 'on theunthankful and on the good. ' The great ocean clasps some black andbarren crag that frowns against it, as closely as with its waves itkisses some fair strand enamelled with flowers and fragrant withperfumes. So that sea of love in which we 'live, and move, and haveour being, ' encircles the worst with abundant flow. He Himself setsus the pattern, which to imitate is to be the children of 'ourFather which is in heaven, ' in that He loves His enemies, blessingthem that curse, and doing good to them that hate. He Himself iswhat He has enjoined us to be, in that He feeds His enemies whenthey hunger, and when they thirst gives them drink, heaping coals offire on their heads, and seeking to kindle in them thereby the glowof answering love, not being overcome of their evil, so that Herepays hate with hate and scorn with scorn, but in patientcontinuance of loving kindness seeking to overcome evil with good. He is Himself that 'charity' which 'is not easily provoked, is notsoon angry, beareth all things, hopeth all things, and neverfaileth. ' His love is mightier than all our sins, and waits not onour merits, nor is turned away by our iniquities. 'God so loved theworld that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believethin Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. ' II. Then, secondly, we have here--the pleading of Christ's patientlove. I have been trying to say as broadly and strongly as I can, that oursins do not turn away the love of God in Christ from us. The moreearnestly we believe and proclaim that, the more needful is it toset forth distinctly--and that not as limiting, but as explainingthe truth--the other thought, that the sin which does not avert, does modify the expression of, the love of God. Man's sin compelsHim to do what the prophet calls his 'strange work'--the work whichis not dear to His heart, nor natural, if one may so say, to Hishands--His work of judgment. The love of Christ has to come to sinful men with patient pleadingand remonstrance, that it may enter their hearts and give itsblessings. We are familiar with a modern work of art in which thatlong-suffering appeal is wonderfully portrayed. He who is the Lightof the world stands, girded with the royal mantle clasped with thepriestly breastplate, bearing in His hand the lamp of truth, andthere, amidst the dew of night and the rank hemlock, He pleads forentrance at the closed door which has no handle on its outer side, and is hinged to open only from within. 'I stand at the door andknock. If any man open the door, I will come in. ' And in this incident before us, we see represented not only theendless patience of God's pitying love, but the method which itneeds to take in order to reach the heart. There is an appeal to the traitor's heart, and an appeal to hisconscience. Christ would have him think of the relations that haveso long subsisted between them; and He would have him think, too, ofthe real nature of the deed he is doing, or, perhaps, of the motivesthat impel him. The grave, sad word, by which He addresses him, ismeant to smite upon his heart. The sharp question which He puts tohim is meant to wake up his conscience; and both taken togetherrepresent the two chief classes of remonstrance which He brings tobear upon us all--the two great batteries from which He assails thefortress of our sins. There is first, then--Christ's appeal to the heart. He tries to makeJudas feel the considerations that should restrain him. Theappellation by which our Lord addresses him does not in the originalconvey quite so strongly the idea of amity, as our word 'Friend'does. It is not the same as that which He had used a few hoursbefore in the upper chamber, when He said, 'Henceforth I call younot servants, but I have called you friends. --Ye are My friends ifye do whatsoever I command you. ' It is the same as is put into thelips of the Lord of the vineyard, remonstrating with his jealouslabourer, 'Friend, I do thee no wrong. ' There is a tone, then, ofless intimate association and graver rebuke in it than in that namewith which He honours those who make His will theirs, and His wordthe law of their lives. It does not speak of close confidence, butit does suggest companionship and kindness on the part of thespeaker. There is rebuke in it, but it is rebuke which derives itswhole force from the remembrance of ancient concord and connection. Our Lord would recall to the memory of the betrayer the days inwhich they had taken sweet counsel together. It is as if He hadsaid--'Hast thou forgotten all our former intercourse? Thou hasteaten My bread, thou hast been Mine own familiar friend, in whom Itrusted--canst thou lift up thy heel against Me?' What happy hoursof quiet fellowship on many a journey, of rest together after many aday of toil, what forgotten thoughts of the loving devotion and theglow of glad consecration that he had once felt, what a long seriesof proofs of Christ's gentle goodness and meek wisdom should havesprung again to remembrance at such an appeal! And how black anddastardly would his guilt have seemed if once he had ventured toremember what unexampled friendship he was sinning against! Is it not so with us all, dear brethren? All our evils are betrayalsof Christ, and all our betrayals of Christ are sins against aperfect friendship and an unvaried goodness. We, too, have sat atHis table, heard His wisdom, seen His miracles, listened to Hispleadings, have had a place in His heart; and if we turn away fromHim to do our own pleasure, and sell His love for a handful ofsilver, we need not cherish shuddering abhorrence against that poorwretch who gave Him up to the cross. Oh! if we could see aright, weshould see our Saviour's meek, sad face standing between us and eachof our sins, with warning in the pitying eyes, and His pleadingvoice would sound in our ears, appealing to us by lovingremembrances of His ancient friendship, to turn from the evil whichis treason against Him, and wounds His heart as much as it harmsours. Take heed lest in condemning the traitor we doom ourselves. Ifwe flush into anger at the meanness of his crime, and declare, 'Heshall surely die, ' do we not hear a prophet's voice saying to each, 'Thou art the man'? The loving hand laid on the heart-strings is followed by a strongstroke on conscience. The heart vibrates most readily in answer togentle touches: the conscience, in answer to heavier, as the breaththat wakes the chords of an Aeolian harp would pass silent throughthe brass of a trumpet. 'Wherefore art thou come?'--if to be takenas a question at all, which, as I have said, seems most natural, iseither, 'What hast thou come to do?'--or, 'Why hast thou come to doit?' Perhaps it maybe fairly taken as including both. But, at allevents, it is clearly an appeal to Judas to make him see what hisconduct really is in itself, and possibly in its motive too. Andthis is the constant effort of the love of Christ--to get us to sayto ourselves the real name of what we are about. We cloak our sins from ourselves with many wrappings, as they swathea mummy in voluminous folds. And of these veils, one of the thickestis woven by our misuse of words to describe the very same thing bydifferent names, according as we do it, or another man does it. Almost all moral actions--the thing to which we can apply the wordsright or wrong--have two or more names, of which the one suggeststhe better and the other the worse side of the action. For instancewhat in ourselves we call prudent regard for our own interest, wecall, in our neighbour, narrow selfishness; what in ourselves islaudable economy, in him is miserable avarice. We are impetuous, heis passionate; we generous, he lavish; we are clever men ofbusiness, he is a rogue; we sow our wild oats and are gay, he isdissipated. So we cheat ourselves by more than half-transparentveils of our own manufacture, which we fling round the ugly featuresand misshapen limbs of these sins of ours, and we are made more thanever their bond-slaves thereby. Therefore, it is the office of the truest love to force us to look atthe thing as it is. It would go some way to keep a man from some ofhis sins if he would give the thing its real name. A distinct consciousstatement to oneself, 'Now I am going to tell a lie'--'This that I amdoing is fraud'--'This emotion that I feel creeping with devilishwarmth about the roots of my heart is revenge'--and so on, wouldsurely startle us sometimes, and make us fling the gliding poisonfrom our breast, as a man would a snake that he found just liftingits head from the bosom of his robe. Suppose Judas had answered thequestion, and, gathering himself up, had looked his Master in the face, and said--'What have I come for?' 'I have come to betray Thee forthirty pieces of silver!' Do you not think that putting his guilt intowords might have moved even him to more salutary feelings than theremorse which afterwards accompanied his tardy discernment of what he_had_ done? So the patient love of Christ comes rebuking, andsmiting hard on conscience. 'The grace of God that bringeth salvationto all men hath appeared disciplining'--and His hand is never moregentle than when it plucks away the films with which we hide our sinsfrom ourselves, and shows us the 'rottenness and dead men's bones'beneath the whited walls of the sepulchres and the velvet of the coffins. He must begin with rebukes that He may advance to blessing. He mustteach us what is separating us from Him that, learning it, we mayflee to His grace to help us. There is no entrance for the truestgifts of His patient love into any heart that has not yielded to Hispleading remonstrance, and in lowly penitence has answered Hisquestion as He would have us answer it, 'Friend and Lover of mysoul, I have sinned against Thy tender heart, against the unexampledpatience of Thy love. I have departed from Thee and betrayed Thee. Blessed be Thy merciful voice which hath taught me what I have done!Blessed be Thine unwearied goodness which still bends over me! Raiseme fallen! forgive me treacherous! Keep me safe and happy, ever trueand near to Thee!' III. Notice the possible rejection of the pleading of Christ'spatient love. Even that appeal was vain. Here we are confronted with a plaininstance of man's mysterious and awful power of 'frustrating thecounsel of God'--of which one knows not whether is greater, thedifficulty of understanding how a finite will _can_ rear itselfagainst the Infinite Will, or the mournful mystery that a creatureshould desire to set itself against its loving Maker and Benefactor. But strange as it is, yet so it is; and we can turn round uponSovereign Fatherhood bidding us to its service, and say, '_I willnot_. ' He pleads with us, and we can resist His pleadings. Heholds out the mercies of His hands and the gifts of His grace, andwe can reject them. We cannot cease to be the objects of His love, but we can refuse to be the recipients of its most precious gifts. We can bar our hearts against it. Then, of what avail is it to us?To go back to an earlier illustration, the sunshine pours down andfloods a world, what does that matter to us if we have fastened upshutters on all our windows, and barred every crevice through whichthe streaming gladness can find its way? We shall grope at noontideas in the dark within our gloomy house, while our neighbours havelight in theirs. What matters it though we float in the great oceanof the divine love, if with pitch and canvas we have carefullyclosed every aperture at which the flood can enter? A hermeticallyclosed jar, plunged in the Atlantic, will be as dry inside as if itwere lying on the sand of the desert. It is possible to perish ofthirst within sight of the fountain. It is possible to separateourselves from the love of God, not to separate the love of God fromourselves. The incident before us carries another solemn lesson--how simple andeasy a thing it is to repel that pleading love. What did Judas do?Nothing; it was enough. He merely held his peace--no more. There wasno need for him to break out with oaths and curses, to reject hisLord with wild words. Silence was sufficient. And for us--no more isrequired. We have but to be passive; we have but to stand still. Notto accept is to refuse; non-submission is rebellion. We do not needto emphasise our refusal by any action--no need to lift our clenchedhands in defiance. We have simply to put them behind our backs or tokeep them folded. The closed hand must remain an empty hand. 'Hethat believeth not is condemned. ' My friend, remember that, whenChrist pleads and draws, to do nothing is to oppose, and to delay isto refuse. It is a very easy matter to ruin your soul. You havesimply to keep still when He says 'Come unto Me'--to keep your eyesfixed where they were, when He says, 'Look unto Me, and be yesaved, ' and all the rest will follow of itself. Notice, too, how the appeal of Christ's love hardens where it doesnot soften. That gentle voice drove the traitor nearer the vergeover which he fell into a gulf of despair. It should have drawn himcloser to the Lord, but he recoiled from it, and was thereby broughtnearer destruction. Every pleading of Christ's grace, whether byprovidences, or by books, or by His own word, does something withus. It is never vain. Either it melts or it hardens. The sun eitherscatters the summer morning mists, or it rolls them into heavierfolds, from whose livid depths the lightning will be flashing bymid-day. You cannot come near the most inadequate exhibition of thepardoning love of Christ without being either drawn closer to Him ordriven further from Him. Each act of rejection prepares the way foranother, which will be easier, and adds another film to the darknesswhich covers your eyes, another layer to the hardness which incrustsyour hearts. Again, that silence, so eloquent and potent in its influence, wasprobably the silence of a man whose conscience was convicted whilehis will was unchanged. Such a condition is possible. It points tosolemn thoughts, and to deep mysteries in man's awful nature. Heknew that he was wrong, he had no excuse, his deed was before him insome measure in its true character, and yet he would not give it up. Such a state, if constant and complete, presents the most frightfulpicture we can frame of a soul. That a man shall not be able to say, 'I did it ignorantly'; that Christ shall not be able to ground Hisintercession on, 'They know not what they do'; that with fullknowledge of the true nature of the deed, there shall be no waveringof the determination to do it--we may well turn with terror fromsuch an awful abyss. But let us remember that, whether such acondition in its completeness is conceivable or not, at all eventswe may approach it indefinitely; and we do approach it by every sin, and by every refusal to yield to the love that would touch ourconsciences and fill our hearts. Have you ever noticed what a remarkable verbal correspondence thereis between these words of our text, and some other very solemn onesof Christ's? The question that He puts into the lips of the king whocame in to see his guests is, '_Friend, how camest thou_ inhither, not having on a wedding garment?' The question asked onearth shall be repeated again at last. The silence which onceindicated a convinced conscience and an unchanged will may at thatday indicate both of these and hopelessness beside. The clear visionof the divine love, if it do not flood the heart with joy and evokethe bliss of answering love, may fill it with bitterness. It ispossible that the same revelation of the same grace may be theheaven of heaven to those who welcome it, and the pain of hell tothose who turn from it. It is possible that love believed andreceived may be life, and love recognised and rejected may be death. It is possible that the vision of the same face may make some breakforth with the rapturous hymn, 'Lo, this is our God, we have waitedfor Him!' and make others call on the hills to fall on them andcover them from its brightness. But let us not end with such words. Rather, dear brethren, let usyield to His patient beseechings; let Him teach us our evil and oursin. Listen to His great love who invites us to plead, and promisesto pardon--'Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord:though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow;though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. ' THE REAL HIGH PRIEST AND HIS COUNTERFEIT 'And they that had laid hold on Jesus led Him away to Caiaphas the high priest, where the scribes and the elders were assembled. 58. But Peter followed Him afar off unto the high priest's palace, and went in, and sat with the servants, to see the end. 59. Now the chief priests, and elders, and all the council, sought false witness against Jesus, to put Him to death; 60. But found none: yea, though many false witnesses came, yet found they none. At the last came two false witnesses, 61. And said, This fellow said, I am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days. 62 And the high priest arose, and said unto Him, Answerest Thou nothing? what is it which these witness against Thee? 63. But Jesus held His peace. And the high priest answered and said unto Him, I adjure Thee by the living God, that Thou tell us whether Thou be the Christ, the Son of God. 64. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 65. Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard His blasphemy. 66. What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death. 67. Then did they spit in His face, and buffeted Him; and others smote Him with the palms of their hands, 68. Saying, Prophesy unto us, Thou Christ, Who is he that smote Thee?'--MATT. Xxvi. 57-68. John's Gospel tells us that Jesus was brought before 'Annas first, 'probably in the same official priestly residence as Caiaphas, hisson-in-law, occupied. That preliminary examination brought outnothing to incriminate the prisoner, and was flagrantly illegal, being an attempt to entrap Him into self-accusing statements. It wasbaffled by Jesus being silent first, and subsequently taking Hisstand on the undeniable principle that a charge must be sustained byevidence, not based on self-accusation. Annas, having made nothingof this strange criminal, 'sent Him bound unto Caiaphas. ' A meeting of the Sanhedrin had been hastily summoned in the dead ofnight, which was itself an illegality. Now Jesus stands before thepoor shadow of a judicial tribunal, which, though it was all thatRome had left a conquered people, was still entitled to sit injudgment on Him. Strange inversion, and awful position for theseformalists! And with sad persistence of bitter prejudice theyproceeded to try the prisoner, all unaware that it was themselves, not Him, that they were trying. They began wrongly, and betrayed their animus at once. They weresitting there to inquire whether Jesus was guilty or no; they hadmade up their minds beforehand that He was, and their effort now wasbut to manufacture some thin veil of legality for a judicial murder. So they 'sought false witness, . .. That they might put Him todeath. ' Matthew simply says that no evidence sufficient for thepurpose was forthcoming; Mark adds that the weak point, was that thelies contradicted each other. Christ's presence has a strange, solemn power of unmasking our falsehoods, both of thought and deed, and it is hard to speak evil of Him before His face. If Hiscalumniators were confused when He stood as Prisoner, what will theybe when He sits as a Judge? Only Matthew and Mark tell us of the two witnesses whose twistedversion of the word about 'destroying the Temple and rebuilding itin three days' seemed to Caiaphas serious enough to require ananswer. Their mistake was one which might have been made in goodfaith, but none the less was their travesty 'false witness. ' Theirversion of His great word shows how easily the teaching of a loftysoul, passed through the popular brain, is degraded, and made tomean the opposite of what he had meant by it. For the destruction ofthe Temple had appeared in the saying as the Jews' work, and Jesushad presented Himself in it as the Restorer, not the Destroyer, ofthe Temple and of all that it symbolised. We destroy, He rebuilds. The murder of Jesus was the suicide of the nation. Caiaphas and hiscouncil were even now pulling down the Temple. And that murder wasthe destruction, so far as men could effect it, of the true 'Templeof His body, ' in which the fulness of the Godhead dwelt, and whichwas more gloriously reconstituted in the Resurrection. The risenChrist rears the true temple on earth, for through Him the HolyGhost dwells in His Church, which is collectively 'the Temple, ' andin all believing spirits, which are individually 'the temples' ofGod. So the false witnesses distorted into a lie a great truth. The Incarnate Word was dumb all the while. He 'was still andrefrained' Himself. It was the silence of the King before a lawlesstribunal of rebels, of patient meekness, 'as a sheep before hershearers'; of innocence that will not stoop to defend itself fromgroundless accusations; of infinite pity and forbearing love, whichsees that it cannot win, but will not smite. Jesus is still silent, but one day, 'with the breath of His lips shall He slay the wicked. 'Caiaphas seems to have been annoyed as well as surprised at Jesus'silence, for there is a trace of irritation, as at 'contempt ofcourt, ' in his words. But our Lord's continued silence appears tohave somewhat awed him, and the dawning consciousness of his dignityis, perhaps, the reason for the high priest's casting aside all thefoolery of false witnessing, and coming at last to the real point, --the Messianic claims of Jesus. Caiaphas was doing his duty as high priest in inquiring into suchclaims, but he was somewhat late in the day, and he had made up hismind before he inquired. What he wished to get was a plain assertionon which the death sentence could be pronounced. Jesus knew this, and yet He answered. But Luke tells us that He first scathinglypointed to the unreality and animus of the question by saying, 'If Itell you, ye will not believe. ' But yet it was fitting that Heshould solemnly, before the supreme court, representative of thenation, declare that He was the Messiah, and that, if He was to berejected and condemned, it should be on the ground of thatdeclaration. Before Caiaphas He claimed to be Messiah, before PilateHe claimed to be King. Each rejected Him in the character thatappealed to them most. The many-sidedness of the perfect Revealer ofGod brings Him to each soul in the aspect that most loudly addresseseach. Therefore the love in the appeal and the guilt in itsrejection are the greater. But Christ's self-attestation to the council was not limited to themere claim to the name of Messiah. It disclosed the implications ofthat name in a way altogether unlike the conceptions held byCaiaphas. When Caiaphas put in apposition 'the Christ' and 'the Sonof God, ' he was not speaking from the ordinary Jewish point of view, but from some knowledge, of Christ's teaching, and there are twocharges combined into one. But Jesus' answer, while plainly claiming to be the Messiah, expandsitself in regard to the claim to be 'Son of God, ' and shows itstremendous significance. It involves participation in divineauthority and omnipotence. It involves a future coming to be theJudge of His judges. It declares that these blind scribes and elderswill see Him thus exalted, and it asserts that all this is to beginthen and there ('henceforth'), as if that hour of humiliation was toHis consciousness the beginning of His manifestation as Lord, or, asJohn has it, 'the hour that the Son of Man should be glorified. ' Normust we leave out of sight the fact that it is 'the Son of Man' ofwhom all this is said, for thereby are indicated the raising of Hisperfect humanity to participation in Deity, and the possibility thatHis brethren, too, may sit where He sits. Much was veiled in theanswer to the council, much is veiled to us. But this remains, --thatJesus, at that supreme moment, when He was bound to leave nomisunderstandings, made the plainest claim to divinity, and couldhave saved His life if He had not done so. Either Caiaphas, in hisostentatious horror of such impiety, was right in calling Christ'swords blasphemy, and not far wrong in inferring that Jesus was notfit to live, or He is the everlasting 'Son of the Father, ' and will'come to be our Judge. ' JESUS CHARGED WITH BLASPHEMY 'Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses?'--MATT. Xxvi. 65. Jesus was tried and condemned by two tribunals, the Jewishecclesiastical and the Roman civil. In each case the chargecorresponded to the Court. The Sanhedrin took no cognisance of, andhad no concern with, rebellion against Caesar; though for the timethey pretended loyalty. Pilate had still less concern about Jewishsuperstitions. And so the investigation in each case turned on adifferent question. In the one it was, 'Art Thou the Son of God?' inthe other, 'Art Thou the King of Israel?' The answer to both was asimple 'Yes!' but with very significant differences. Pilate receivedan explanation; the Sanhedrin none. The Roman governor was taughtthat Christ's title of King belonged to another region altogetherfrom that of Caesar, and did not in the slightest degree infringeupon the dominion that he represented. But 'Son of God' was capableof no explanation that could make it any less offensive; and theonly thing to be done was to accept it or to condemn Him. So this saying of the high priest differs from other words of ourLord's antagonists, which we have been considering in recent pages, in that it is no distortion of our Lord's characteristics ormeaning. It correctly understands, but it fatally rejects, Hisclaims; and does not hesitate to take the further step, on theground of these, of branding Him as a blasphemer. We may turn the high priest's question in another direction: 'Whatfurther need have we of witnesses?' These horror-stricken judges, rending their garments in simulated grief and zeal, and that silentPrisoner, knowing that His life was the forfeit of His claims, yetsaying no word of softening or explanation of them, may teach usmuch. They are witnesses to some of the central facts of therevelation of God in Christ. Let us turn to these for a few moments. I. First, then, they witness to Christ's claims. The question that was proposed to Jesus, 'Art Thou the Christ, theSon of the living God?' was suggested by the facts of His ministry, and not by anything that had come out in the course of thisinvestigation. It was the summing up of the impression made on theecclesiastical authorities of Judaism by His whole attitude anddemeanour. And if we look back to His life we shall see that therewere instances, long before this, on which, on the same ground, thesame charge was flung at Him. For example, when He would heal theparalytic, and, before He dealt with bodily disease, attended tospiritual weakness, and said, 'Thy sins be forgiven thee, ' ere Hesaid, 'Take up thy bed and walk, ' there was a group of keen-eyedhunters after heresy sitting eagerly on the watch, who snatched atthe words in a moment, and said, 'Who is this that forgiveth sins?No _man_ forgiveth sins, but God only! This man speakethblasphemies!' And they were right. He did claim a divineprerogative; and either the claim must be admitted or the charge ofblasphemy urged. Again, when He infringed Rabbinical Sabbath law by a cure, and theysaid, 'This Man has broken the Sabbath day, ' His vindication wasworse than His offence, for He answered, 'My Father workethhitherto, and I work. ' And then they sought the more to kill Him, because He not only brake the Sabbath, but also called God His ownFather, making Himself equal with God. ' And again, when He declaredthat the safety of His sheep in His hands was identical with theirsafety in His Father's hands, and vindicated the audaciousparallelism by the tremendous assertion, 'I and My Father are One, 'the charge of blasphemy rang out; and was inevitable, unless theclaim was true. These outstanding instances are but, as it were, summits that riseabove the general level. But the general level is that of One whotakes an altogether unique position. No one else, professing to leadmen in paths of righteousness, has so constantly put the stress ofHis teaching, not upon morality, nor religion, nor obedience to God, but upon this, 'Believe in Me'; or ever pushed forward His ownpersonality into the foreground, and made the whole nobleness andblessedness and security and devoutness of a life to hinge upon thatone thing, its personal relation to Him. People talk about the sweet and gentle wisdom that flowed fromChrist's lips, and so on; about the lofty morality, about the beautyof pity and tenderness, and all the other commonplaces so familiarto us, and we gladly admit them all. But I venture to go a stepfurther than all these, and to say that the outstanding_differentia_, the characteristic which marks off Christ'steaching as something new, peculiar, and altogether _per se_, is not its morality, not its philanthropy, not its meek wisdom, notits sweet reasonableness, but its tremendous assertions of theimportance of Himself. And if I am asked to state the ground upon which such an assertionmay be vindicated, I would point you to such facts as these, thatthis Man took up a position of equality with, and of superiority to, the legislation which He and the people to whom He was speakingregarded as being divinely sent, and said, 'Ye have heard that ithath been said to them of old time' so and so; 'but I say unto you':that this Man declared that to build upon His words was to buildupon a rock; that this Man declared that He--He--was the legitimateobject of absolute trust, of utter submission and obedience; that Heclaimed from His followers affiance, love, reverence which cannot bedistinguished from worship, and that He did not therein conceivethat He was intercepting anything that belonged to the Father. ThisMan professed to be able to satisfy the desires of every human heartwhen He said, 'If any man thirst let him come to Me and drink. ' ThisMan claimed to be able to breathe the sanctity of repose in theblessedness of obedience over all the weary and the heavy laden; andassured them that He Himself, through all the ages, and in alllands, and for all troubles, would give them rest. This Man declaredthat He who stood there, in the quiet homes of Galilee, and wentabout its acres with those blessed feet for our advantage, was to beJudge of the whole world. This Man said that His name was 'Son ofGod'; and this Man declared, 'He that hath seen Me hath seen theFather. ' And then people say to us, 'Oh! your Gospel narratives, even if theybe the work of men in good faith, telling what they suppose He said, mistook the Teacher; and if we could strip away the accretion ofmistaken reverence, and come to the historical person, we shouldfind no claims like these. ' Well, this is not the time to enter into the large questions whichthat contention involves, but I point you to the incident whichmakes my text, and I say, 'What need we any further witnesses?'Nobody denies that Jesus Christ was crucified as the result of acombination of Sanhedrin and Pilate. What set the Jewish rulersagainst Him with such virulent and murderous determination? Is thereanything in the life of Jesus Christ, if it is watered down as thepeople, who want to knock out all the supernatural, desire to waterit down--is there anything in the life that will account for theinveterate acrimony and hostility which pursued Him to the death?The fact remains that, whether or not Evangelists and Apostlesmisconceived His teaching when they gave such prominence to Hispersonality and His lofty claims, His enemies were under the samedelusion, if it were a delusion; and the reason why the wholeorthodox religionism of Judaism rejoiced when He was nailed to theCross was summed up in the taunt which they flung at Him as He hungthere, 'If He be the Son of God, let Him come down, and we willbelieve Him. ' So, brethren, I put into the witness-box Annas and Caiaphas and alltheir satellites, and I say, 'What need we any further witnesses?'He died because He declared that He was the Son of God. And I beseech you ask yourselves whether we are not being put offwith a maimed version of His teaching, if there is struck out of itthis its central characteristic, that He, 'the sage and humble, 'declared that He was 'likewise One with the Creator. ' II. Secondly, note how we have here the witness that Jesus Christassented always to the loftiest meaning that men attached to Hisclaims. I have already pointed out the remarkable difference between theexplanations which He condescended to give to the Roman governor asto the perfectly innocent meaning of His claim to be the King ofIsrael, and His silence before the Sanhedrin. That silence is onlyexplicable because they rightly understood the meaning of the claimwhich they contemptuously and perversely rejected. Jesus Christ knewthat His death was the forfeit, as I have said, and yet He lockedHis lips and said not a word. In like manner when, on the other occasion to which I have alreadyreferred, the Pharisees stumbled at His claims to forgive sins, Hesaid nothing to soften down that claim. If He had meant then onlywhat some people would desire to make Him mean when He said, 'Thysins be forgiven thee'--viz. , that He was simply acting as aminister of the divine forgiveness, and assuring a poor sinner thatGod had pardoned him--why in common honesty, in discharge of Hisplain obligations of a teacher, did He not say so--not for His ownsake, but for the sake of preventing such a tremendousmisunderstanding of His meaning? But He let them go away with theconviction that He intended to claim a divine prerogative, andvindicated the assertion by doing what only a divine power could do:'That ye may know that the Son of Man hath power enough on earth toforgive sins, He saith unto the sick of the palsy, Take up thy bedand walk. ' There was no need for Him to have wrought a miracle toestablish His right to tell a poor soul that God forgave sin. Andthe fact that the miracle was supposed to be the demonstration andthe vindication of His right to declare forgiveness shows that Hewas exercising that prerogative which belongs, as they rightly said, to God only. And in precisely the same manner, the commonest obligations ofhonesty, the plain duty of a misunderstood Teacher, to say nothingof the duty of self-preservation, ought to have opened His lips inthe presence of the Jewish authorities, if they understood wronglyand set too high their estimate of the meaning of His claims. Hissilence establishes the fact that they understood these aright. And so, all through His life, we note this peculiarity, that Henever puts aside as too lofty for truth men's highest interpretationsof His claims, nor as too lowly for their mutual relation the lowestreverence which bowed before Him. Peter, in the house of Cornelius, said, 'Stand up! for I myself also am a man. ' Paul and Barnabas, whenthe priests brought out the oxen and garlands to the gates of Lystra, could say, 'We also are men of like passions with yourselves. ' Butthis meek Jesus lets men fall at His feet; and women wash them withtheir tears and wipe them with the hairs of their head; and soulsstretch out maimed hands of faith, and grasp Him as their only hope. When His apostle said, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, 'His answer was, 'Blessed art thou, for flesh and blood hath not revealedit unto thee, ' and when another exclaimed, 'My Lord and my God!' thisPattern of all meekness accepted and endorsed the title, and pronounceda benediction on all who, not having seen Him, should hereafter attaina like faith. Now I want to know whether that characteristic, which runs through allHis life, and is inseparable from it, can be vindicated on any groundexcept the ground that He was 'God manifest in the flesh. ' EitherJesus Christ had a greedy appetite for excessive adoration, was avictim to diseased vanity and ever-present self-regard--the mostdamning charge that you can bring against a religious teacher--or Heaccepted love and reverence and trust, because the love and thereverence and the trust knit souls to the Incarnate God their Saviour. III. And so, lastly we have here witness to the only alternative tothe acceptance of His claims. He hath spoken 'blasphemy, ' not because He had derogated from thedignity of divinity, but because He had presumed to participate init. And it seems to me, with all deference, that this roughalternative is the only legitimate one. If Jesus Christ did makesuch claims, and His relation to the Jewish hierarchy and His deathare, as I have shown you, apart even from the testimony of theEvangelists, strong confirmation of the fact that He did--if JesusChrist did make such claims, and they were not valid, one of twothings follows. Either He believed them, and then, what about Hissanity? or He did not believe them, and then, what about Hishonesty? In either case, what about His claims to be a Teacher ofreligion? What about His claims to be the Pattern of humanity? Thatpart of His teaching and character is either the manifestation ofHis glory or it is like one of those fatal black seams that runthrough and penetrate into the substance of a fair white marblestatue, marring all the rest of its pale and celestial beauty. Brethren, it seems to me that, when all is said and done, we come toone of three things about Jesus Christ. Either 'He blasphemeth' ifHe said these things, and they were not true, or 'He is besideHimself' if He said these things and believed them, or 'Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ; Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. ' Now I know that there are many men who, I venture to say, are farbetter than their creed, and who, believing it impossible to accept, in their plain meaning, the plain claims of Jesus Christ todivinity, do yet cleave to Him with a love and a reverence and anobedience which more orthodox men might well copy. And far be itfrom me to say one word which might seem even to quench the faintestbeam of light that, shining from His perfect character, draws anyheart, however imperfectly, to Himself. Only, if I speak to any suchat this time, I beseech them to follow the light which draws them, and to see whether their reverence for that fair character shouldnot lead them to accept implicitly the claims that came from His ownlips. I humbly venture to say that if we know anything at all aboutJesus Christ, we know that He lived declaring Himself to be theEverlasting Son of the Father, and that He died because He did sodeclare Himself. And I beseech you to ponder the question whetherreverence for Him and admiration of His character can be logicallyand reasonably retained, side by side with the repudiation of thatwhich is the most distinctive part of His message to men. Oh, brethren, if it is true that God has come in the flesh, and thatthat sweet, gracious, infinitely beautiful life is really therevelation of the heart of God, then what a beam of sunshine fallsupon all the darkness of this world! Then God is love; then thatlove holds us all; did not shrink from dying for us, and lives forever to bless us. If these claims are true, what should our attitudebe but that of infinite trust, love, submission, obedience, and theshaping of our lives after the pattern of His life? These rejectors, when they said, 'He speaketh blasphemies, ' weresealing their own doom, and the ruined Temple and nineteen centuriesof wandering misery show what comes to men who hear Christ declaringthat He is the Son of the living God and the Judge of the world, andwho find nothing in the words but blasphemy. On the other hand, ifwe will answer His question, 'Whom say ye that I am?' as the apostleanswered it, we shall, like the apostle, receive a benediction fromHis lips, and be set on that faith as on a rock against which the'gates of hell' shall not prevail. 'SEE THOU TO THAT!' 'I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? See thou to that. 24. I am innocent of the blood of this just Person: see ye to it. '--MATT. Xxvii. 4, 24. So, what the priests said to Judas, Pilate said to the priests. Theycontemptuously bade their wretched instrument bear the burden of hisown treachery. They had condescended to use his services, but hepresumed too far if he thought that that gave him a claim upon theirsympathies. The tools of more respectable and bolder sinners areflung aside as soon as they are done with. What were the agonies orthe tears of a hundred such as he to these high-placed and heartlesstransgressors? Priests though they were, and therefore bound bytheir office to help any poor creature that was struggling with awounded conscience, they had nothing better to say to him than thisscornful gibe, 'What is that to us? See thou to that. ' Pilate, on the other hand, metes to them the measure which they hadmeted to Judas. With curious verbal correspondence, he repeats thevery words of Judas and of the priests. 'Innocent blood, ' saidJudas. 'I am innocent of the blood of this just Person, ' saidPilate. 'See thou to that, ' answered they. 'See ye to it, ' says he. He tries to shove off his responsibility upon them, and they arequite willing to take it. Their consciences are not easily touched. Fanatical hatred which thinks itself influenced by religious motivesis the blindest and cruellest of all passions, knowing nocompunction, and utterly unperceptive of the innocence of itsvictim. And so these three, Judas, the priests, and Pilate, suggest to us, Ithink, a threefold way in which conscience is perverted. Judasrepresents the agony of conscience, Pilate represents the shufflingsophistications of a half-awakened conscience, and those priests andpeople represent the torpor of an altogether misdirected conscience. I. Judas, or the agony of conscience. 'I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. ' We donot need to enter at any length upon the difficult question as towhat were the motives of Judas in his treachery. For my part I donot see that there is anything in the Scripture narrative, simplyinterpreted, to bear out the hypothesis that his motives weremistaken zeal and affection for Christ; and a desire to force Him tothe avowal of His Messiahship. One can scarcely suppose zeal sostrangely perverted as to begin by betrayal, and if the object wasto make our Lord speak out His claims, the means adopted weresingularly ill-chosen. The story, as it stands, naturally suggests amuch less far-fetched explanation. Judas was simply a man of a low earthly nature, who became afollower of Christ, thinking that He was to prove a Messiah of thevulgar type, or another Judas Maccabęus. He was not attracted byChrist's character and teaching. As the true nature of Christ's workand kingdom became more obvious, he became more weary of Him and it. The closest proximity to Jesus Christ made eleven enthusiasticdisciples, but it made one traitor. No man could live near Him forthree years without coming to hate Him if he did not love Him. Then, as ever, He was set for the fall and for the rise of many. He wasthe 'savour of life unto life, or of death unto death. ' But be this as it may, we have here to do with the sudden revulsionof feeling which followed upon the accomplished act. This burst ofconfession does not sound like the words of a man who had beenactuated by motives of mistaken affection. He knows himself atraitor, and that fair, perfect character rises before him in itspurity, as he had never seen it before--to rebuke and confound him. So this exclamation of his puts into a vivid shape, which may help it tostick in our memories and hearts, this thought--what an awful differencethere is in the look of a sin before we do it and afterwards! Before wedo it the thing to be gained seems so attractive, and the transgressionthat gains it seems so comparatively insignificant. Yes! and when wehave done it the two change places; the thing that we win by it seemsso contemptible--thirty pieces of silver! pitch them over the Templeenclosure and get rid of them!--and the thing that we did to win themdilates into such awful magnitude! For instance, suppose we do anything that we know to be wrong, beingtempted to it by a momentary indulgence of some mere animal impulse. By the very nature of the case, that dies in its satisfaction andthe desire dies along with it. We do not wish the prize any morewhen once we have got it. It lasts but a moment and is past. Then weare left alone with the thought of the sin that we have done. Whenwe get the prize of our wrong-doing, we find out that it is not asall-satisfying as we expected it would be. Most of our earthly aimsare like that. The chase is a great deal more than the hare. Or, asGeorge Herbert has it, 'Nothing between two dishes--a splendidservice of silver plate, and when you take the cover off there is nofood to eat--such are the pleasures here. ' Universally, this is true, that sooner or later, when the deliriumof passion and the rush of temptation are over and we wake toconsciousness, we find that we are none the richer for the thinggained, and oh! so infinitely the poorer for the means by which wegained it. It is that old story of the Veiled Prophet that wooed andwon the hearts of foolish maidens, and, when he had them in hispower in the inner chamber, removed the silver veil which they hadthought hid dazzling glory and showed hideous features that struckdespair into their hearts. Every man's sin does that for him. And toyou I come now with this message: every wrong thing that you do, great or small, will be like some of those hollow images of the godsthat one hears of in barbarian temples--looked at in front, fair, but when you get behind them you find a hollow, full of dust andspiders' webs and unclean things. Be sure of this, every sin is ablunder. That is the first lesson that lies in these words of this wretchedtraitor; but again, here is an awful picture for us of the hell uponearth, of a conscience which has no hope of pardon. I do not supposethat Judas was lost, if he were lost, because he betrayed JesusChrist, but because, having betrayed Jesus Christ, he never asked tobe forgiven. And I suppose that the difference between the traitorwho betrayed Him and the other traitor who denied Him, was this, that the one, when 'he went out and wept bitterly, ' had the thoughtof a loving Master with him, and the other, when 'he went out andhanged himself, ' had the thought of nothing but that foul deedglaring before him. I pray you to learn this lesson--you cannotthink too much, too blackly, of your own sins, but you may think tooexclusively of them, and if you do they will drive you to madness ofdespair. My dear friend, there is no penitence or remorse which is deepenough for the smallest transgression; but there is no transgressionwhich is so great but that forgiveness for it may come. And we mayhave it for the asking, if we will go to that dear Christ that diedfor us. The consciousness of sinfulness is a wholesome consciousness. I would that every man and woman listening to me now had it deep intheir consciences, and then I would that it might lead us all to thatone Lord in whom there is forgiveness and peace. Be sure of this, that if Judas Iscariot, when his 'soul flared forth in the dark, 'died without hope and without pardon, it was not because his crimewas too great for forgiveness, but because the forgiveness had neverbeen asked. There is no unpardonable sin except that of refusing thepardon that avails for all sin. II. So much, then, for this first picture and the lessons that comeout of it. In the next place we take Pilate, as the representativeof what I have ventured to call the shufflings of a half-awakenedconscience. 'I am innocent of the blood of this just Person, ' says he: 'see yeto it. ' He is very willing to shuffle off his responsibility uponpriests and people, and they, for their part, are quite as willingto accept it; but the responsibility can neither be shuffled off byhim nor accepted by them. His motive in surrendering Jesus to themwas probably nothing more than the low and cowardly wish to humourhis turbulent subjects, and so to secure an easy tenure of office. For such an end what did one poor man's life matter? He had a greatcontempt for the accusers, which he is scarcely at the pains toconceal. It breaks out in half-veiled sarcasms, by which hecynically indemnifies himself for his ignoble yielding to theconstraint which they put upon him. He knows perfectly well that theRoman power has nothing to fear from this King, whose kingdom restedon His witness to the Truth. He knows perfectly well that unavowedmotives of personal enmity lie at the bottom of the whole business. In the words of our text he acquits Christ, and thereby condemnshimself. If Pilate knew that Jesus was innocent, he knew that he, asgovernor, was guilty of prostituting Roman justice, which was Rome'sbest gift to her subject nations, and of giving up an innocent manto death, in order to save himself trouble and to conciliate ahowling mob. No washing of his hands will cleanse them. 'All theperfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that hand. But his words let ussee how a man may sophisticate his conscience and quibble about hisguilt. Here, then, we get once more a vivid picture that may remind us ofwhat, alas! we all know in our own experience, how a man'sconscience may be clearsighted enough to discern, and vocal enoughto declare, that a certain thing is wrong, but not strong enough torestrain from doing it. Conscience has a voice and an eye; alas! ithas no hands. It shares the weakness of all law, it cannot getitself executed. Men will get over a fence, although the board thatsays, 'Trespassers will be prosecuted' is staring them in the facein capital letters at the very place where they leap it. Yourconscience is a king without an army, a judge without officers. 'Ifit had authority, as it has the power, it would govern the world, 'but as things are, it is reduced to issuing vain edicts and tosaying, 'Thou shalt not, ' and if you turn round and say, 'I will, though, ' then conscience has no more that it can do. And then here, too, is an illustration of one of the commonest ofthe ways by which we try to slip our necks out of the collar, and toget rid of the responsibilities that really belong to us. 'See ye toit' does not avail to put Pilate's crime on the priests' shoulders. Men take part in evil, and each thinks himself innocent, because hehas companions. Half-a-dozen men carry a burden together; none ofthem fancies that he is carrying it. It is like the case of turningout a platoon of soldiers to shoot a mutineer--nobody knows whosebullet killed him, and nobody feels himself guilty; but there theman lies dead, and it was somebody that did it. So corporations, churches, societies, and nations do things that individuals wouldnot do, and each man of them wipes his mouth and says, 'I have doneno harm. ' And even when we sin alone we are clever at findingscapegoats. 'The woman tempted me, and I did eat, ' is the formulauniversally used yet. The schoolboy's excuse, 'Please, sir, it wasnot me, it was the other boy, ' is what we are all ready to say. Now I pray you, brethren, to remember that, whether our consciencestry to shuffle off responsibility for united action upon the othermembers of the firm, or whether we try to excuse our individualactions by laying blame on our tempers, or whether we adopt themodern slang, and talk about circumstances and heredity and thelike, as being reasons for the diminution or the extinction of thenotion of guilt, it is sophistical trifling; and down at the bottommost of us know that we alone are responsible for the volition whichleads to our act. We could have helped it if we had liked. Nobodycompelled us to keep in the partnership of evil, or to yield to thetempter. Pilate was not forced by his subjects to give thecommandment that 'it should be as they required. ' They had their ownburden to carry. Each man has to bear the consequences of hisactions. There are many 'burdens' which we can 'bear for oneanother, and so fulfil the law of Christ'; but every man has to bearas his own the burden of the fruits of his deeds. In that harvest, he that soweth and he that reapeth are one, and each of us has todrink as we ourselves have brewed. You have to pay for your share, however many companions you may have had in the act. So do not you sophisticate your consciences with the delusion thatyour responsibility may be shifted to any other person or thing. These may diminish, or may modify your responsibility, and God takesall these into account. But after all these have been taken intoaccount there is this left--that you yourselves have done the act, which you need not have done unless you had so willed, and thathaving done it, you have to carry it on your back for evermore. 'Seethou to that, ' was a heartless word, but it was a true one. 'Everyone of us shall give an account of himself to God, ' and as the oldBook of Proverbs has it, 'If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise forthyself: and if thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it. ' III. And so, lastly, we have here another group still--the priestsand people. They represent for us the torpor and misdirection ofconscience. 'Then answered all the people and said, His blood be on us and onour children. ' They were perfectly ready to take the burden uponthemselves. They thought that they were 'doing God service' whenthey slew God's Messenger. They had no perception of the beauty andgentleness of Christ's character. They believed Him to be ablasphemer, and they believed it to be a solemn religious duty toslay Him then and there. Were they to blame because they slew ablasphemer? According to Jewish law--no. They were to blame becausethey had brought themselves into such a moral condition that thatwas all which they thought of and saw in Jesus Christ. With theirawful words they stand before us, as perhaps the crowning instancesin Scripture history of the possible torpor which may paralyseconsciences. I need not dwell, I suppose, even for a moment, upon the thought ofhow the highest and noblest sentiments may be perverted intobecoming the allies of the lowest crime. 'O Liberty! what crimeshave been done in thy name!' you remember one of the victims of theguillotine said, as her last words. 'O Religion! what crimes havebeen done in _thy_ name!' is one of the lessons to be gatheredfrom Calvary. But, passing that, to come to the thing that is of more consequenceto each of us, let us take this thought, dear brethren, as to theawful possibility of a conscience going fast asleep in the midst ofthe wildest storm of passion, like that unfaithful prophet Jonah, down in the hold of the heathen ship. You can lull your consciencesinto dead slumber. You can stifle them so that they shall not speaka word against the worst of your sins. You can do so by simplyneglecting them, by habitually refusing to listen to them. If youkeep picking all the leaves and buds off the tree before they open, it will stop flowering. You can do it by gathering round yourselfalways, and only, evil associations and evil deeds. The habit ofsinning will lull a conscience faster than almost anything else. Wedo not know how hot a room is, or how much the air is exhausted, when we have been sitting in it for an hour and a half. But if wecame into it from outside we should feel the difference. Styrianpeasants thrive and fatten upon arsenic, and men may flourish uponall iniquity and evil, and conscience will say never a word. Takecare of that delicate balance within you; and see that you do nottamper with it nor twist it. Conscience may be misguided as well as lulled. It may call evilgood, and good evil; it may take honey for gall, and gall for honey. And so we need something outside of ourselves to be our guide, ourstandard. We are not to be contented that our consciences acquit us. 'I know nothing against myself, yet I am not hereby justified, ' saysthe apostle; 'he that judgeth me is the Lord. ' And it is quitepossible that a man may have no prick of conscience and yet havedone a very wrong thing. So we want, as it seems to me, somethingoutside of ourselves that shall not be affected by our variations. Conscience is like the light on the binnacle of a ship. It tosses upand down along with the vessel. We want a steady light yonder onthat headland, on the fixed solid earth, which shall not heave withthe heaving wave, nor vary at all. Conscience speaks lowest when itought to speak loudest. The worst man is least troubled by hisconscience. It is like a lamp that goes out in the thickestdarkness. Therefore we need, as I believe, a revelation of truth andgoodness and beauty outside of ourselves to which we may bring ourconsciences that they may be enlightened and set right. We want astandard like the authorised weights and measures that are kept inthe Tower of London, to which all the people in the little countryvillages may send up their yard measures and their pound weights, and find out if they are just and true. We want a _Bible_, andwe want a _Christ_ to tell us what is duty, as well as to makeit possible for us to do it. These groups which we have been looking at now, show us how verylittle help and sympathy a wounded conscience can get from itsfellows. The conspirators turn upon each other as soon as thedetectives are amongst them, and there is always one of them readyto go into the witness-box and swear away the lives of the others tosave his own neck. Wolves tear sick wolves to pieces. Round us there stand Society, pitiless and stern, and Nature, rigidand implacable; not to be besought, not to be turned. And when I, inthe midst of this universe of fixed law and cause and consequence, wail out, 'I have sinned, ' a thousand voices say to me, 'What isthat to us? See thou to that. ' And so I am left with my guilt--itand I together. There comes One with outstretched, wounded hands, and says, 'Cast all thy burden upon Me, and I will free thee from itall. ' 'Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows!'Trust in Him, in His great sacrifice, and you will find that His'innocent blood' has a power that will liberate your conscience fromits torpor, its vain excuses, its agony and despair. THE SENTENCE WHICH CONDEMNED THE JUDGES And Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor asked Him, saying, Art Thou the King of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him, Thou sayest. 12. And when He was accused of the chief priests and elders, He answered nothing. 13. Then said Pilate unto Him, Hearest Thou not how many things they witness against Thee? 14. And He answered him to never a word; insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly. 15. Now at that feast the governor was wont to release unto the people a prisoner, whom they would. 16. And they had then a notable prisoner, called Barabbas. 17. Therefore when they were gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ? 18. For he knew that for envy they had delivered Him. 19. When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of Him. 20. But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. 21. The governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? They said, Barabbas. 22. Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let Him be crucified. 23. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath He done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified. 24. When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just Person: see ye to it. 25. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children. 26. Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered Him to be crucified. '--ST. MATT. Xxvii. 11-26. The principal figures in this passage are Pilate and the Jewishrulers and people. Jesus is all but passive. They are busy incondemning Him, and little know that they are condemning themselves. They are unconsciously exemplifying the tragic truth of Christ'ssaying, 'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken. ' Theydo not dislodge it, but their attempt to dislodge it wounds them. I. Matthew gives a very summary account of our Lord's appearingbefore Pilate, but, brief as it is, and much as it omits, it throwsup into strong light the two essential points, --Christ's declarationthat He was the King of the Jews, and His silence while a storm ofaccusations raged around Him. As to the former, it was the onlycharge with which Pilate was properly concerned. He had a right toknow whether this strange criminal was dangerous to Rome, because Heclaimed kingship, and, if he were satisfied that He was not, hisbounden duty was to liberate Him. One can understand the scornfulemphasis which Pilate laid on 'Thou' as he looked on his Prisoner, who certainly would not seem to his practical eyes a very formidableleader of revolt. There is a world of contempt, amused rather thanalarmed, in the question, and behind it lies the consciousness ofcommanding legions enough to crush any rising headed by such aperson. John's account shows the pains which Jesus took to make sureof the sense in which the question was asked before He answered it, and then to make clear that His kingship bore no menace to Rome. That being made plain, He answered with an affirmative. Just as Hehad in unmistakable language claimed before the Sanhedrin to be theMessiah, the Son of God, so He claimed before Pilate to be the Kingof Israel, answering each tribunal as to what each had the right toinquire into, and thus 'before Pontius Pilate witnessing the goodconfession, ' and leaving both tribunals without excuse. Jesus diedbecause He would not bate His claims to Messianic dignity. Did Hefling away His life for a false conception of Himself? He was eithera dreamer intoxicated with an illusion, and His death was suicide, or He was--what? The one avowal was all that Pilate was entitled to. For the rest Jesuslocked His lips, and He whose very name was The Word was silent. Whatwas the meaning of that silence? It was not disdain, nor unwillingnessto make Himself known; but it was partly merciful--inasmuch as He knewthat all speech would have been futile, and would but have added tothe condemnation of such hearers as Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate--andpartly judicial. Still more was it the silence of perfect, unresistingsubmission, --'as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openethnot His mouth. ' And it is a pattern for us, as Peter tells us in hisEpistle; for it is with regard to this very matter of taking unjustsuffering patiently and without resistance that the apostle says thatJesus has 'left us an example. ' There are limits to such silentendurance of wrong, for Paul defended himself tooth and nail beforepriests and kings; but Christ's followers are strongest by meekpatience, and descend when they take a leaf out of their enemies' book. II. The next point is Pilate's weak attempt to save Jesus. Christ'ssilence had impressed Pilate, and, if he had been a true man, hewould not have stopped at 'marvelling greatly. ' He was clearlyconvinced of Christ's innocence of any crime that threatened Romansupremacy, and therefore was bound to have given effect to hisconvictions, and let Jesus go. He had read the motives of thepriests, which were too plain for a shrewd man of the world to beblind to them. That Jews should be taken with such a sudden fit ofloyalty as to yell for the death of a fellow-countryman because hewas a rebel against Caesar was too absurd to swallow, and Pilate wasnot taken in. He knew that something else was working below ground, and hit on 'envy' as the solution. He was not far wrong; for thezeal which to the priests themselves seemed to be excited by devoutregard for God's honour was really kindled by determination to keeptheir own prerogatives, and keen insight into the curtailment ofthese which would follow if this Jesus were recognised as Messiah. Pilate's diagnosis coincided with Christ's in the parable: 'This isthe Heir; come, let us kill Him, and the inheritance shall be ours. ' So, willing to deliver Jesus, and yet afraid to cross the wishes ofhis ticklish subjects, Pilate, like other weak men, tries a trick bywhich he may get his way and seem to give them theirs. He hoped thatthey would choose Jesus rather than Barabbas as the object of thecustomary release. It was ingenious of him to narrow the choice toone or other of the two, ignoring all other prisoners who might havehad the benefit of the custom. But there is also, perhaps, a dash ofsarcasm, and a hint of his having penetrated the priests' motives, in his confining their choice to Jesus or Barabbas; for Barabbas waswhat they had charged Jesus with being, --a rebel; and, if theypreferred him to Jesus, the hypocrisy of their suspicious loyaltywould be patent. The same sub-acid tone is obvious in Pilate's twicedesignating our Lord as 'Jesus which is called Christ. ' He delightsto mortify them by pushing the title into their faces, as it were. He dare not be just, and he relieves and revenges himself by beingcynical and mocking. III. Having referred the choice to the 'multitude, ' Pilate takes hisplace on his official seat to wait for, and then to ratify, theirvote. In that pause, he perhaps felt some compunction at palteringwith justice, which it was Rome's one virtue to administer. How hiswife's message would increase his doubt! Was her dream a divinewarning, or a mere reflection in sleep of waking thoughts? It isnoticeable that Matthew records several dreams which conveyed God'swill, --for example, to Joseph and to the Magi, and here may beanother instance; or some tidings as to Jesus may have reached thelady, though not her husband, and her womanly sense of right mayhave shaped the dream, and given her vivid impressions of the dangerof abetting a judicial murder. But Matthew seems to tell of herintervention mainly in order to preserve her testimony to Jesus'innocence, and to point out one more of the fences which Pilatetrampled down in his dread of offending the rulers. A wife'smessage, conveying what both he and she probably regarded as asupernatural warning, was powerless to keep him back from hisdisgraceful failure of duty. IV. While he was fighting against the impression of that message, the rulers were busy in the crowd, suggesting the choice ofBarabbas. It was perhaps his wife's words that stung him to act atonce, and have done with his inner conflict. So he calls for thedecision of the alternative which he had already submitted. Hisdignity would suffer, if he had to wait longer for an answer. He gotit at once, and the unanimous vote was for Barabbas. Probably therulers had skilfully manipulated the people. The multitude is easilyled by demagogues, but, left to itself, its instincts are usuallyright, though its perception of character is often mistaken. Why wasBarabbas preferred? Probably just because he had been cast intoprison for sedition, and so was thought to be a good patriot. Popular heroes often win their reputation by very questionable acts, and Barabbas was forgiven his being a murderer for the sake of hisbeing a rebel. But it was not so much that Barabbas was loved asthat Jesus was hated, and it was not the multitude so much as therulers that hated him. Many of those now shrieking 'Crucify Him!'had shouted 'Hosanna!' a day or two before till they were hoarse. The populace was guilty of fickleness, blindness, rashness, too easycredence of the crafty calumnies of the rulers. But a far deeperstain rests on these rulers who had resisted the light, and were nowanimated by the basest self-interest in the garb of keen regard forthe honour of God. There were very different degrees of guilt in themany voices that roared 'Barabbas!' Pilate made one more feeble attempt to save Jesus by asking what wasto be done with Him. The question was an ignoble abdication of hisjudicial office, and perhaps was meant as a salve for his ownconscience, and an excuse to his wife, enabling him to say, 'I didnot crucify Him; they did, '--a miserable pretext, the last resort ofa weak man, who knew that he was doing a wrong and cowardly thing. V. The same nervous fear and vain attempt to shuffle responsibilityoff himself give tragic interest to his theatrical washing of hishands. The one thing that he feared was a riot, which would be likea spark in a barrel of gunpowder, if it broke out at the Passover, when Jerusalem swarmed with excited crowds. To avoid that, thesacrifice of one Jew's life was a small matter, even though he wasan interesting and remarkable person, and Pilate knew Him to beperfectly harmless. But no washing of hands could shift the guilt from Pilate. 'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No. ' His vain declaration of innocence is an acknowledgment of guilt, forhe is forced by conscience to declare that Jesus is a 'righteousMan, ' and, as such, He should have been under the broad shield ofRoman justice. We too often deceive ourselves by throwing the blameof our sins on companions or circumstances, and try to cheat ourconsciences into silence. But our guilt is ours, however many allieswe have had, and however strong have been our temptations; andthough we may say, 'I am innocent, ' God will sooner or later say toeach of us, 'Thou art the man!' The wild cry of passion with which the multitude accepted theresponsibility has been only too completely fulfilled in themillennium-long Iliad of woes which has attended the Jews. Surely, the existence, in such circumstances, for all these centuries, ofthat strange, weird, fated race, is a standing miracle, and the mostconspicuous proof that 'verily, there is a God that judgeth in theearth. ' But it is also a prophecy that Israel shall 'turn to theLord, ' and that the blood which has so long been on them as a crime, carrying its own punishment, will at last be sprinkled on theirhearts, and take away their sin. THE CRUCIFIXION 'And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull, 34. They gave Him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when He had tasted thereof, He would not drink. 35. And they crucified Him, and parted His garments, casting lots: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted My garments among them, and upon My vesture did they cast lots. 36. And sitting down they watched Him there; 37. And set up over His head His accusation written, THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS. 38. Then were there two thieves crucified with Him, one on the right hand, and another on the left 39. And they that passed by reviled Him, wagging their heads, 40. And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save Thyself. If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross. 41. Likewise also the chief priests mocking Him, with the scribes and elders, said, 42. He saved others; Himself He cannot save. If He be the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him. 43. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now, if He will have Him: for He said, I am the Son of God. 44. The thieves also, which were crucified with Him, cast the same in His teeth. 45. Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour. 46. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? 47. Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said. This Man calleth for Elias. 48. And straightway one of them ran, and took a spunge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave Him to drink. 49. The rest said, Let be, let us see whether Elias will come to save Him. 50. Jesus, when He had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. ' --MATT. Xxvii. 33-50. The characteristic of Matthew's account of the crucifixion is itsrepresentation of Jesus as perfectly passive and silent. His refusalof the drugged wine, His cry of desolation, and His other cry atdeath, are all His recorded acts. The impression of the whole is 'asa sheep before his shearers is dumb, so He openeth not His mouth. 'We are bid to look on the grim details of the infliction of theterrible death, and to listen to the mockeries of people andpriests; but reverent awe forbids description of Him who hung therein His long, silent agony. Would that like reticence had checked theill-timed eloquence of preachers and teachers of later days! I. We have the ghastly details of the crucifixion. --Conder'ssuggestion of the site of Calvary as a little knoll outside thecity, seems possible. It is now a low, bare hillock, with a scantyskin of vegetation over the rock, and in its rounded shape and bonyrockiness explains why it was called 'skull. ' It stands close to themain Damascus road, so that there would be many 'passers by' on thatfeast day. Its top commands a view over the walls into the templeenclosure, where, at the very hour of the death of Jesus, thePassover lamb was perhaps being slain. Arrived at the place, theexecutioners go about their task with stolid precision. What was thecrucifying of another Jew or two to them? Before they lift the crossor fasten their prisoner to it, a little touch of pity, or perhapsonly the observance of the usual custom, leads them to offer adraught of wine, in which some anodyne had been mixed, to deadenagony. But the cup which He had to drink needed that He should be infull possession of all His sensibilities to pain, and of all Hisunclouded firmness of resolve; and so His patient lips closedagainst the offered mercy. He would not drink because He wouldsuffer, and He would suffer because He would redeem. His last actbefore He was nailed to the cross was an act of voluntary refusal ofan opened door of escape from some portion of His pains. What a gap there is between verses 34 and 35! The unconcernedsoldiers went on to the next step in their ordinary routine on suchan occasion, --the fixing of the cross and fastening of the victim toit. To them it was only what they had often done before; to Matthew, it was too sacred to be narrated, He cannot bring his pen to writeit. As it were, he bids us turn away our eyes for a moment; and whennext we look, the deed is done, and there stands the cross, and theLord hanging, dumb and unresisting, on it. We see not Him, but thesoldiers, busy at their next task. So little were they touched bycompassion or awe, that they paid no heed to Him, and suspendedtheir work to make sure of their perquisites, --the poor robes whichthey stripped from His body. Thus gently Matthew hints at theignominy of exposure attendant on crucifixion, and gives the measureof the hard stolidity of the guards. Gain had been their firstthought, comfort was their second. They were a little tired withtheir march and their work, and they had to stop there on guard foran indefinite time, with nothing to do but two more prisoners tocrucify: so they take a rest, and idly keep watch over Him till Heshall die. How possible it is to look at Christ's sufferings and seenothing! These rude legionaries gazed for hours on what has touchedthe world ever since, and what angels desired to look into, and sawnothing but a dying Jew. They thought about the worth of theclothes, or about how long they would have to stay there, and in thepresence of the most stupendous fact in the world's history were allunmoved. We too may gaze on the cross and see nothing. We too maylook at it without emotion, because without faith, or anyconsciousness of what it may mean for us. Only they who see therethe sacrifice for their sins and the world's, see what is there. Others are as blind as, and less excusable than, these soldiers whowatched all day by the Cross, seeing nothing, and tramped back atnight to their barrack utterly ignorant of what they had been doing. But their work was not quite done. There was still a piece of grimmockery to be performed, which they would much enjoy. The 'cause, 'as Matthew calls it, had to be nailed to the upper part of thecross. It was tri-lingual, as John tells us, --in Hebrew, thelanguage of revelation; in Greek, the tongue of philosophy and art;in Latin, the speech of law and power. The three chief forces of thehuman spirit gave unconscious witness to the King; the three chieflanguages of the western world proclaimed His universal monarchy, even while they seemed to limit it to one nation. It was meant as agibe at Him and at the nation, and as Pilate's statement of thereason for his sentence; but it meant more than Pilate meant by it, and it was fitting that His royal title should hang above His head;for the cross is His throne, and He is the King of men because Hehas died for them all. One more piece of work the soldiers had stillto do. The crucifixion of the two robbers (perhaps of Barabbas'gang, though less fortunate than he) by Christ's side was intendedto associate Him in the public mind with them and their crimes, andwas the last stroke of malice, as if saying, 'Here is your King, andhere are two of His subjects and ministers. ' Matthew says nothing ofthe triumph of Christ's love, which won the poor robber for adisciple even at that hour of ignominy. His one purpose seems to beto accumulate the tokens of suffering and shame, and so to emphasisethe silent endurance of the meek Lamb of God. Therefore, without aword about any of our Lord's acts or utterances, he passes on to thenext group of incidents. II. The mockeries of people and priests. There would be many comingand going on the adjoining road, most of them too busy about theirown affairs to delay long; for crucifixion was a slow process, and, when once the cross has been lifted, there would be little to see. But they were not too busy to spit venom at Him as they passed. Howmany of these scoffers, to whom death cast no shield round theobject of their poor taunts, had shouted themselves hoarse on theMonday, and waved palm branches that were not withered yet! What hadmade the change? There was no change. They were running with thestream in both their hosannas and their jeers, and the one wereworth as much as the other. They had been tutored to cry, 'Blessedis He that cometh!' and now they were tutored to repeat what hadbeen said at the trial about destroying the temple. The worshippersof success are true to themselves when they mock at failure. Theywho shout round Jesus, when other people are doing it, are onlyconsistent when they join in the roar of execration. Let us takecare that our worship of Him is rooted in our own personalexperience, and independent of what rulers or influential minds todaysay of Him. A common passion levels all distinctions of culture and rank. Thereverend dignitaries echoed the ferocious ridicule of the mob, whomthey despised so much. The poorest criminal would have been left todie in peace; but brutal laughter surged round the silent sufferer, and showers of barbed sarcasms were flung at Him. The throwersfancied them exquisite jests, and demonstrations of the absurdity ofChrist's claims; but they were really witnesses to His claims, andexplanations of His sufferings. Look at them in turn, with thisthought in our minds. 'He saved others; Himself He cannot save, ' waslaunched as a sarcasm which confuted His alleged miracles by Hispresent helplessness. How much it admits, even while it denies!Then, He did work miracles; and they were all for others, never forHis own ends; and they were all for saving, never for destroying. Then, too, by this very taunt His claim to be the 'Saviour' ispresupposed. And so, 'Physician, heal Thyself, ' seemed to them anunanswerable missile to fling. If they had only known what made the'cannot, ' and seen that it was a 'will not, ' they would have stoodfull in front of the great miracle of love which was before themunsuspected, and would have learned that the not saving Himself, which they thought blew to atoms His pretensions to save others, wasreally the condition of His saving a world. If He is to save othersHe cannot save Himself. That is the law for all mutual help. Thelamp burns out in giving light, but the necessity for the death ofHim who is the life of the world is founded on a deeper 'must. ' Hisonly way of delivering us from the burden of sin is His taking it onHimself. He has to 'bear our griefs and carry our sorrows, ' if He isto bear away the sin of the world. But the 'cannot' derives all itspower from His own loving will. The rulers' taunt was a venomouslie, as they meant it. If for 'cannot' we read 'will not, ' it is thecentral truth of the Gospel. Nor did they succeed better with their second gibe, which made mirthof such a throne, and promised allegiance if He would come down. Oblind leaders of the blind! That death which seemed to them toshatter His royalty really established it. His Cross is His throneof saving power, by which He sways hearts and wills, and because ofit He receives from the Father universal dominion, and every kneeshall bow to Him. It is just because He did not come down from itthat we believe on Him. On His head are many crowns; but, howevermany they be, they all grow out of the crown of thorns. The truekingship is absolute command over willingly submitted spirits; andit is His death which bows us before Him in raptures of glad lovewhich counts submission, liberty, and sacrifice blessed. He has theright to command because He has given Himself for us, and His deathwakes all-surrendering and all-expecting faith. Nor was the third taunt more fortunate. These very religious men hadread their Bibles so badly that they might never have heard of Job, nor of the latter half of Isaiah. They had been poring over theletter all their lives, and had never seen, with their microscopes, the great figure of the Innocent Sufferer, so plain there. So theythought that the Cross demonstrated the hollowness of Jesus' trustin God, and the rejection of Him by God. Surely religious teachersshould have been slow to scoff at religious trust, and surely theymight have known that failure and disaster even to death were nosigns of God's displeasure. But, in one aspect, they were right. Itis a mystery that such a life should end thus; and the mystery isnone the less because many another less holy life has also ended insuffering. But the mystery is solved when we know that God did notdeliver Him, just because He 'would have Him, ' and that the Father'sdelight in the Son reached its very highest point when He becameobedient until death, and offered Himself 'a sacrifice acceptable, well pleasing unto God. ' III. We pass on to the darkness, desolation, and death. Matthewrepresents these three long hours from noon till what answers to our3 P. M. As passed in utter silence by Christ. What went on beneaththat dread veil, we are not meant to know. Nor do we need to ask itsphysical cause or extent. It wrapped the agony from cruel eyes; itsymbolised the blackness of desolation in His spirit, and by it Goddraped the heavens in mourning for man's sin. What were theonlookers doing then? Did they cease their mocking, and feel sometouch of awe creeping over them? 'His brow was chill with dying, And His soul was faint with loss. ' The cry that broke the awful silence, and came out of the darkness, was more awful still. The fewer our words the better; only we maymark how, even in His agony, Jesus has recourse to prophetic words, and finds in a lesser sufferer's cry voice for His desolation. Further, we may reverently note the marvellous blending of trust andsense of desertion. He feels that God has left Him, and yet he holdson to God. His faith, as a man, reached its climax in that supremehour when, loaded with the mysterious burden of God's abandonment, He yet cried in His agony, 'My God!' and that with reduplicatedappeal. Separation from God is the true death, the 'wages of sin';and in that dread hour He bore in His own consciousness theuttermost of its penalty. The physical fact of Christ's death, if itcould have taken place without this desolation from theconsciousness of separation from God, would not have been thebearing of all the consequences of man's sins. The two must never beparted in our grateful contemplations; and, while we reverentlyabjure the attempt to pierce into that which God hid from us by thedarkness, we must reverently ponder what Christ revealed to us bythe cry that cleft it, witnessing that He then was indeed bearingthe whole weight of a world's sin. By the side of such thoughts, andin the presence of such sorrow, the clumsy jest of the bystanders, which caught at the half-heard words, and pretended to think thatJesus was a crazy fanatic calling for Elijah with his fiery chariotto come and rescue Him, may well be passed by. One little touch ofsympathy moistened His dying lips, not without opposition from theheartless crew who wanted to have their jest out. Then came the end. The loud cry of the dying Christ is worthy of record; forcrucifixion ordinarily killed by exhaustion, and this cry wasevidence of abundant remaining vitality. In accordance therewith, the fact of death is expressed by a phrase, which, though used forordinary deaths, does yet naturally express the voluntariness ofChrist. 'He sent away His spirit, ' as if He had bid it depart, andit obeyed. Whether the expression may be fairly pressed so far orno, the fact is the same, that Jesus died, not because He wascrucified, but because He chose. He was the Lord and Master ofDeath; and when He bid His armour-bearer strike, the slave struck, and the King died, not like Saul on the field of his defeat, but avictor in and by and over death. THE BLIND WATCHERS AT THE CROSS 'And sitting down they watched Him there. ' --MATT. Xxvii. 36. Our thoughts are, rightly, so absorbed by the central Figure in thisgreat chapter that we pass by almost unnoticed the groups round thecross. And yet there are large lessons to be learned from each ofthem. These rude soldiers, four in number, as we infer from John'sGospel, had no doubt joined with their comrades in the coarsemockery which preceded the sad procession to Calvary; and then theyhad to do the rough work of the executioners, fastening thesufferers to the rude wooden crosses, lifting these, with theirburden, filing them into the ground, then parting the raiment. Andwhen all that is done they sit stolidly down to take their ease atthe foot of the cross, and idly to wait, with eyes that look and seenothing, until the sufferers die. A strange picture; and a strangething to think of, how they were so close to the great event in theworld's history, and had to stare at it for three or four hours, andnever saw anything! The lessons that the incident teaches us may be very simply gatheredtogether. I. First we infer from this the old truth of how ignorant men are ofthe real meaning and outcome of what they do. These four Roman soldiers were foreigners; I suppose that they couldnot speak a word to a man in that crowd. They had no means ofcommunication with them. They had had plenty of practice incrucifying Jews. It was part of their ordinary work in thesetroublesome times, and this was just one more. Think of what acorporal's guard of rough English soldiers, out in Northern India, would think if they were bidden to hang a native who was chargedwith rebellion against the British Government. So much, and not onewhit more, did these men know of what they were doing; and they wentback to their barracks, stolid and unconcerned, and utterly ignorantof what they had been about. But in part it is so with us all, though in less extreme fashion. None of us know the real meaning, and none of us know the possibleissues and outcome of a great deal of our lives. We are like peoplesowing seed in the dark; it is put into our hands and we sow. We dothe deed; this end of it is in our power, but where it runs out to, and what will come of it, lie far beyond our ken. We are compassedabout, wherever we go, by this atmosphere of mystery, and enclosedwithin a great ring of blackness. And so the simple lesson to be drawn from that clear fact, about allour conduct, is this--let results alone. Never mind about what youcannot get hold of; you cannot see to the other end, and you havenothing to do with it. You can see this end; make that right. Besure that the motive is right, and then into whatever unlooked-forconsequences your act may run out at the further end, you will beright. Never mind what kind of harvest is coming out of your deeds, you cannot forecast it. 'Thou soweth not that body that shall be, but bare grain. .. . God giveth it a body as it pleaseth Him. ' Letalone that profitless investigation, the attempt to fashion andunderstand either the significance or the issues of your conduct, and stick fast by this--look after your motive for doing it, andyour temper in doing it; and then be quite sure, 'Thou shalt find itafter many days, ' and the fruit will be 'unto praise and honour andglory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. ' II. Take another very simple and equally plain lesson from thisincident, viz. , the limitation of responsibility by knowledge. These men, as I said, were ignorant of what they were doing, and, therefore, they were guiltless. Christ Himself said so: 'They knownot what they do. ' But it is marvellous to observe that whilst thepeople who stood round the cross, and were associated in the actthat led Jesus there, had all degrees of responsibility, the leastguilty of the whole were the men who did the actual work of nailingHim to the cross, and lifting it with Him upon it. These soldierswere not half as much to blame as were many of the men that stoodby; and just in the measure in which the knowledge or thepossibility of knowledge increased, just in that measure did theresponsibility increase. The high priest was a great deal more toblame than the Roman soldiers. The rude tool that nailed Christ tothe cross, the hammer that was held in the hand of the legionary, was almost as much to blame as the hand that wielded it. For thehand that wielded it had very little more knowledge than it had. In so far as it was possible that these men might have knownsomething of what they were doing, in so far were they to blame; butremember what a very, very little light could possibly have shoneupon these souls. If there is no light there cannot be any shadow;and if these men were, as certainly they were, all but absolutelyignorant, and never could have been anything else, of what they weredoing, then they were all but absolutely guiltless. And so you cometo this, which is only a paradox to superficial thinkers, that themen that did the greatest crime in the whole history of the world, did it with all but clean hands; and the people that were to becondemned were those who delivered 'the Just One' into the hands ofmore lawless, and therefore less responsible, men. So here is the general principle, that as knowledge and light riseand fall, so responsibility rises and falls along with them. Andtherefore let us be thankful that we have not to judge one another, but that we have all to stand before that merciful and lovingtribunal of the God who is a God of knowledge, and by whom actionsare _weighed_, as the Old Book has it--not _counted_, but weighed. Andlet us be thankful, too, that we may extend our charity to all roundus, and refrain from thinking of any man or woman that we can pronounceupon their criminality, because we do not know the light in which theywalk. III. And now the last lesson, and the one that I most desire to layupon your hearts, is this, how possible it is to look at Christ onthe cross, and see nothing. For half a day there they sat, and it was but a dying Jew that theysaw, one of three. A touch of pity came into their hearts once ortwice, alternating to mockery, which was not savage because it wassimply brutal; but when it was all over, and they had pierced Hisside, and gone away back to their barracks, they had not the leastnotion that they, with their dim, purblind eyes, had been looking atthe most stupendous miracle in the whole world's history, had beengazing at the thing into which angels desired to look; and had seenthat to which the hearts and the gratitude of unconverted millionswould turn for all eternity. They laid their heads down on theirpillows that night and did not know what had passed before theireyes, and they shut the eyes that had served them so ill, and wentto sleep, unconscious that they had seen the pivot on which thewhole history of humanity had turned; and been the unmoved witnessesof 'God manifest in the flesh, ' dying on the cross for the wholeworld, and for them. What should they have seen if they had seen thereality? They should have seen not a dying rebel but a dying Christ;they should have looked with emotion, they should have looked withfaith, they should have looked with thankfulness. Any one who looks at that cross, and sees nothing but a pure andperfect man dying upon it, is very nearly as blind as the Romanlegionaries. Any one to whom it is only an example of perfectinnocence and patient suffering has only seem an inch into theInfinite; and the depths of it are as much concealed from him asthey were from them. Any one who looks with an unmoved heart, without one thrill of gratitude, is nearly as blind as the roughsoldiers. He that looks and does not say-- 'My faith would lay her hand On that dear head of Thine; While like a penitent I stand And there confess my sin, ' has not learned more of the meaning of the Cross than they did. Andany one who looks to it, and then turns away and forgets, or wholooks at it and fails to recognise in it the law of his own life andpattern for his own conduct, has yet to see more deeply into itbefore he sees even such portion of its meaning as here we canapprehend. Oh! dear friends, we all of us, as the apostle says in one of hisletters, have had this Christ 'manifestly set forth before us as ifpainted upon a placard upon a wall' (for that is the meaning of thepicturesque words that he employs). And if we look with calm, unmoved hearts; if we look without personal appropriation of thatCross and dying love to ourselves, and if we look without our heartsgoing out in thankfulness and laying themselves at His feet in acalm rapture of life-long devotion, then we need not wonder thatfour ignorant heathen men sat and looked at Him for four long hoursand saw nothing, for we are as blind as ever they were. You say, 'We see. ' Do you see? Do you look? Does the look touch yourhearts? Have you fathomed the meaning of the fact? Is it to you thesacrifice of the living Christ for your salvation? Is it to you thedeath on which all your hopes rest? You say that you see. Do you seethat in it? Do you see your only ground of confidence and peace? Anddo you so see that, like a man who has looked at the sun for amoment or two, when you turn away your head you carry the image ofwhat you beheld still stamped on your eyeball, and have it both as amemory and a present impression? So is the cross photographed onyour heart; and is it true about us that every day, and all days, webehold our Saviour, and beholding Him are being changed into Hislikeness? Is it true about us that we thus bear about with us in thebody 'the dying of the Lord Jesus'? If we look to Him with faith andlove, and make His Cross our own, and keep it ever in our memory, ever before us as an inspiration and a hope and a joy and a pattern, then we see. If not, 'for judgment am I come into the world, thatthey which see not may see, and that they which see might be madeblind. ' For what men are so blind to the infinite pathos andtenderness, power, mystery, and miracle of the Cross, as the men andwomen who all their lives long have heard a Gospel which has beenheld up before their lack-lustre eyes, and have looked at it so longthat they cannot see it any more? Let us pray that our eyes may be purged, that we may see, and seeingmay copy, that dying love of the ever-loving Lord. TAUNTS TURNING TO TESTIMONIES '. .. The chief priests mocking Him . .. Said, 42. He saved others; Himself He cannot save. If He be the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him. 43. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now, if He will have Him. ' --MATT. Xxvii. 41-43. It is an old saying that the corruption of the best is the worst. What is more merciful and pitiful than true religion? What is moremerciless and malicious than hatred which calls itself 'religious'?These priests, like many a persecutor for religion since, came tofeast their eyes on the long-drawn-out agonies of their Victim, andtheir rank tongues blossomed into foul speech. Characteristicallyenough, though they shared in the mockeries of the mob, they keptthemselves separate. The crowd pressed near enough to the cross tospeak their gibes _to_ Jesus; the dignified movers of theignorant crowd stood superciliously apart, and talked scoffingly_about_ Him. Whilst the populace yelled, 'Thou that destroyestthe Temple and buildest it in three days, come down, ' the chiefpriests, with the scribes, looked at each other with a smile, andsaid, '_He_ saved others; Himself _He_ cannot save. ' Now, these brutal taunts have lessons for us. They witness to the popularimpression of Christ, and what His claims were. He asserted Himselfto be a worker of miracles, the Messiah-King of Israel, the Son of God, therefore He died. And they witness to the misconception which ruledin the minds of these priests as to the relation of His claims to theCross. They thought that it had finally burst the bubble, and disposedonce for all of these absurd and blasphemous pretensions. Was itcredible that a man who possessed miraculous power should not, inthis supreme moment, use it to deliver Himself? Did not 'Physician, heal Thyself, ' come in properly there? Would any of the most besottedfollowers of this pretender retain a rag of belief in His Messiahshipif He was crucified? Could it be possible that, if there was a God atall, He should leave a man that really trusted in Him, not to saywho was really His Son, to die thus? A cracked mirror gives a distortedimage. The facts were seen, but their relation was twisted. If we willtake the guidance of these gibes, and see what is the real explanationto the anomaly that they suggest, then we shall find that the tauntsturn to Him for a testimony, and that 'out of the mouths of mockersthere is 'perfected praise. ' The stones flung at the Master turn toroses strewed in His path. I. So, then, first the Cross shows us the Saviour who could not saveHimself. The priests did not believe in Christ's miracles, and they thoughtthat this final token of his impotence, as they took it to be, wasclear proof that the miracles were either tricks or mistakes. Theysaw the two things, they fatally misunderstood the relation betweenthem. Let us put the two things together. Here, on the one hand, is a Man who has exercised absolute authorityin all the realms of the universe, who has spoken to dead matter, and it has obeyed; who by His word has calmed the storm, and hushedthe winds by His word, has multiplied bread, has transmuted pale waterinto ruddy wine; who has moved omnipotent amongst the disturbed mindsand diseased bodies of men, who has cast His sovereign word into thedepth and darkness of the grave, and brought out the dead, stumblingand entangled in the grave-clothes. All these are facts on the oneside. And on the other there is this--that there, passive, and, tosuperficial eyes, impotent, He hangs the helpless Victim of Romansoldiers and of Jewish priests. The short and easy vulgar way tosolve the apparent contradiction was to deny the reality of the oneof its members; to say 'Miracles? Absurd! He never worked one, or Hewould have been working one now. ' But let their error lead us into truth, and let us grasp therelation of the two apparently contradictory facts. 'He savedothers, ' that is certain. He did not 'save Himself, ' that isas certain. Was the explanation 'cannot'? The priests by 'cannot'meant physical impossibility, defect of power, and they werewrong. But there is a profound sense in which the word 'cannot'is absolutely true. For this is in all time, and in all humanrelations, the law of service--sacrifice; and no man can trulyhelp humanity, or an individual, unless he is prepared tosurrender himself in the service. The lamp burns away in givinglight. The fire consumes in warming the hearth, and no brotherlysympathy or help has ever yet been rendered, or ever will be, except at the price of self-surrender. Now, some people thinkthat this is the whole explanation of our Lord's history, bothin His life and in His death. I do not believe that it is thewhole explanation, but I do believe it carries us some waytowards the central sanctuary, where the explanation lies. Andyet it is not complete or adequate, because, to parallel Christ'swork with the work of any of the rest of us to our brethren, however beautiful, disinterested, self-oblivious, and self-consumingit may be, seems to me--I say it with deference, though I must hereremember considerations of brevity and be merely assertive--entirelyto ignore the unique special characteristic of the work of JesusChrist--viz. , that it was the atonement for the sins of the world. He could not bear away our sins, unless the burden of them was laidon His own back, and He carried our griefs, our sorrows, our diseases, and our transgressions. 'He saved others, Himself He cannot save. ' Butthe impossibility was purely the result of His own willing and obedientlove; or, if I put it in more epigrammatic form, the priests' 'cannot'was partially true, but if they had said '_would not_' they wouldhave hit the mark, and come to full truth. The reason for His deathbecomes clear, and each of the contrasted facts is enhanced, when weset side by side the opulence and ease of His manifold miracles andthe apparent impotence and resourcelessness of the passive Victim onthe cross. That 'cannot' did not come from defect of power, but from plenitudeof love, and it was a 'will not' in its deepest depths. For you willfind scattered throughout Scripture, especially these Gospels, indications from our Lord's own lips, and by His own acts, that, inthe truest and fullest sense, His sufferings were voluntary. 'No mantaketh it from me'--He says about His life--'I have power to lay itdown, and I have power to take it again. ' And once He did choose toflash out for a moment the always present power, that we might learnthat when it did not appear, it was not because he could not, butbecause he would not. When the soldiers came to lay their hands uponHim, He presented Himself before them, saving them all the troubleof search, and when He asked a question, and received the answerthat it was He of whom they were in search, there came one suddenapocalypse of His majesty, and they fell to the ground, and laythere prone before Him. They could have had no power at all againstHim, except He had willed to surrender Himself to them. Again, though it is hypercritical perhaps to attach importance to what mayonly be natural idiomatic forms of speech, yet in this connection itis not to be overlooked that the language of all the Evangelists, indescribing the supreme moment of Christ's death, is congruous withthe idea that He died neither from the exhaustion of crucifixion, nor from the thrust of the soldier's spear, but because He would. For they all have expressions equivalent to that of one of them, 'Hegave up His spirit. ' Be that as it may, the 'cannot' was a 'willnot'; and it was neither nails that fastened Him to the tree, norviolence that slew Him, but He was fixed there by His own steadfastwill, and He died because He would. So if we rightly understand the'cannot' we may take up with thankfulness the taunt which, as I say, is tuned to a testimony, and reiterate adoringly, 'He saved others, Himself He cannot save. ' II. The Cross shows us the King on His throne. To the priests it appeared ludicrous to suppose that a King ofIsrael should, by Israel, be nailed upon the cross. 'Let Him comedown, and we will believe Him. ' They saw the two facts, theymisconceived their relation. There was a relation between them, andit is not difficult for us to apprehend it. The Cross is Christ's throne. There are two ways in which thetragedy of His crucifixion is looked at in the Gospels, one thatprevails in the three first, another that prevails in the fourth. These two seem superficially to be opposite; they are complementary. It depends upon your station whether a point in the sky is your_zenith_ or your _nadir_. Here it is your zenith; at the antipodesit is the nadir. In the first three gospels the aspect of humiliation, degradation, inanition, suffering, is prominent in the references tothe Crucifixion. In the _fourth_ gospel the aspect of glory andtriumph is uppermost. 'Even so must the Son of Man be lifted up'; 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me'; 'Now the hour is comethat the Son of Man should be glorified. ' And it _is_ His glory, foron that Cross Jesus Christ manifests, in transcendent and superlativeform, at once power and love that are boundless and divine. The Crossis the foundation of His kingdom. In his great passage in Philippiansthe Apostle brings together, in the closest causal connection, Hisobedience unto death, the death of the Cross, and His exaltation andreception of 'the name that is above every name, that at the name ofJesus every knee should bow. ' The title over the Cross was meant fora gibe. It was a prophecy. By the Cross He becomes the 'King, ' and notonly the 'King of the Jews. ' The sceptre that was put in His hand, though it was meant for a sneer, was a forecast of a truth, for Herules, not with a rod of iron, but with the reed of gentleness; andthe crown of thorns, that was pressed down on His wounded andbleeding head, foretold for our faith the great truth that suffering isthe foundation of dominion, and that men will bow as to their Kingand Lord before Him who died for them, with a prostration of spirit, aloyalty of allegiance, and an alertness of service, which noneother, monarch or superior, may even dream of attaining. The Crossestablishes, not destroys, Christ's dominion over men. Yes; and that Cross wins their faith as nothing else can. The blindpriests said, 'Let Him come down, and we will believe Him. 'Precisely because He did not come down, do sad and sorrowful andsinful hearts turn to Him from the ends of the earth, and from thedistances of the ages pour the treasures of their trust and theirlove at His feet. Did you ever think how strange it is, except withone explanation, that the gibes of the priests did not turn out tobe true? Why is it that Christ's shameful death did not burst thebubble, as they thought it had done? Why is it that in His case--andI was going to say, and it would have been no exaggeration, in Hiscase only--the death of the leader did not result in the dispersionof the led? Why is it that His fate and future were the opposite ofthat of multitudes of other pseudo-Messiahs, of whom it is true thatwhen they were slain their followers came to nought? Why? There isonly one explanation, I think, and that is that the death was notthe end, but that He rose again from the dead. My brother, you willeither have to accept the Resurrection, with all that comes from it, or else you will have to join the ranks of the priests, and considerthat Christ's death blew to atoms Christ's pretensions. If we knowanything about Him, we know that He asserted miraculous power, Messiahship, and a filial relation to God. These things are facts. Did He rise or did He not? If He did not, He was an enthusiast. IfHe did, He is the King to whom our hearts can cleave, and to whomour loyalty is due. III. Now, lastly, the Cross shows us the Son, beloved of the Father. The priests thought that it was altogether incredible that Hisdevotion should have been genuine, or His claim to be the Son of Godshould have any reality, since the Cross, to their vulgar eyes, disproved them both. Like all coarse-minded people, they estimatedcharacter by condition, but they who do that make no end ofmistakes. They had forgotten their own Prophecies, which might havetold them that 'the Servant of the Lord in whom' His 'heartdelighted, ' was a suffering Servant. But whilst they recognised thefacts, here again, as in the other two cases, they misconceived therelation. We have the means of rectifying the distorted image. We ought to know, and to be sure, that the Cross of Christ was thevery token that this was God's 'beloved Son in whom He was wellpleased. ' If we dare venture on the comparison of parts of thatwhich is all homogeneous and perfect, we might say that in themoment of His death Jesus Christ was more than ever the object ofthe Father's delight. Why? It is not my purpose now to enlarge upon all the reasons whichmight be suggested. Let me put them together in a sentence or two. In that Cross Jesus Christ revealed God as God's heart had alwaysyearned to be revealed, infinite in love, pitifulness, forbearance, and pardoning mercy. There was the highest manifestation of theglory of God. 'What?' you say, 'a poor weak Man, hanging on a cross, and dying in the dark--is _that_ the very shining apex of allthat humanity can know of divinity?' Yes, for it is the puremanifestation that God is Love. Therefore the whole sunshine of theFather's presence rested on the dying Saviour. It was the hour whenGod most delighted in Him, if I may venture the comparison, for theother reasons that then He carried filial obedience to its utmostperfection, that then His trust in God was deepest, even at the hourwhen His spirit was darkened by the cloud that the world's sin, which He was carrying, had spread thunderous between Him and thesunshine of the Father's face. For in that mysterious voice, whichwe can never understand in its depths, there were blended trust anddesolation, each in its highest degree: 'My God! my God! Why hastThou forsaken Me?' And the Cross was the complete carrying out ofGod's dearest purpose for the world, that He might be 'just, and thejustifier of him that believeth in Jesus. ' Therefore, then--I wasgoing to say as never before--was Christ His Son, in whom Hedelighted. Brethren, let us, led by the errors of these scoffers, grasp thetruths that they pervert. Let us see that weak Man hanging helplesson the cross, whose 'cannot' is the impotence of omnipotence, imposed by His own loving will to save a world by the sacrifice ofHimself. Let us crown Him our King, and let our deepest trust andour gladdest obedience be rendered to Him because He did not comedown from, but 'endured, the cross. ' Let us behold with wonder, awe, and endless love the Father not withholding His only Son, but'delivering Him up to the death for us all, ' and from the emptygrave and the occupied Throne let us learn how the Father by bothproclaims to all the world concerning Him hanging dying on thecross: '_This_ is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. ' THE VEIL RENT 'Behold, the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. '--MATT. Xxvii. 51. As I suppose we are all aware, the Jewish Temple was divided intothree parts: the Outer Court, open to all; the Holy Place, to whichthe ministering priests had daily access to burn incense and trimthe lamps; and the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest waspermitted to go, and that but once a year, on the great Day ofAtonement. For the other three hundred and sixty-four days theshrine lay silent, untrodden, dark. Between it and the less sacredHoly Place hung the veil, whose heavy folds only one man waspermitted to lift or to pass. To all others it was death to peerinto the mysteries, and even to him, had he gone at another time, and without the blood of the sacrifice, death would have ensued. If we remember all this and try to cast ourselves back inimagination to the mental attitude of the ordinary Jew, the incidentof my text receives its true interpretation. At the moment when theloud cry of the dying Christ rung over the heads of the awestruckmultitude, that veil was, as it were, laid hold of by a pair ofgiant hands and torn asunder, as the Evangelist says, 'from the topto the bottom. ' The incident was a symbol. In one aspect itproclaimed the end of the long years of Israel's prerogative. Inanother it ushered in an epoch of new relations between man and God. If Jesus Christ was what He said He was, if His death was what Hedeclared it to be, it was fitting that it should be attended by atrain of subordinate and interpreting wonders. These were, besidesthat of my text, the darkened sun, the trembling earth, the shiveredrocks, the open graves, the rising saints--all of them, in theirseveral ways, illuminating the significance of that death onCalvary. Not less significant is this symbol of my text, and I desire now todraw your attention to its meanings. I. The rent veil proclaims the desecrated temple. There is a striking old legend, preserved by the somewhat mendacioushistorian of the Jewish people, that, before Jerusalem fell, theanxious watchers heard from within the sanctuary a great voicesaying, 'Let us depart hence!' and through the night were consciousof the winnowing of the mighty wings of the withdrawing cherubim. And soon a Roman soldier tossed a brand into the most Holy Place, and the 'beautiful house where their fathers praised was burned withfire. ' The legend is pathetic and significant. But that 'departing'had taken place forty years before; and at the moment when Jesus'gave up the ghost, ' purged eyes might have seen the long trail ofbrightness as the winged servitors of the Most High withdrew fromthe desecrated shrine. The veil rent declared that the sacred soilwithin it was now common as any foot of earth in Galilee; and itsrending, so to speak, made way for a departing God. That conception, that the death of Christ Jesus was the_de-consecration_--if I may coin a word--of the Temple, and the endof all its special sanctity, and that thenceforward the Presence haddeparted from it, is distinctly enough taught us by Himself in wordswhich move in the same circle of ideas as that in which the symbolresides. .. . You remember, no doubt, that, if we accept the testimonyof John's Gospel, at the very beginning of our Lord's ministry Hevindicated His authority to cleanse the sanctuary against the cavilsof the sticklers for propriety by the enigmatical words, 'Destroythis Temple, and in three days I will build it up, ' to which theEvangelist appends the comment, 'He spake of the Temple of Hisbody, ' that body in which 'all the fulness of the Godhead' dwelt, and which was, and is to-day, all that the Temple shadowed andforetold, the dwelling-place of God in humanity, the place ofsacrifice, the meeting-place between God and man. But just becauseour Lord in these dark words predicted His death and Hisresurrection, He also hinted the destruction of the literal stoneand lime building, and its rearing again in nobler and morespiritual form. When He said, 'Destroy this Temple, ' He implied, secondarily, the destruction of the house in which He stood, andlaid that destruction, whensoever it should come to pass, at theirdoors. And, inasmuch as the saying in its deepest depth meant Hisdeath by their violence and craft, therefore, in that early sayingof His, was wrapped up the very same truth which was symbolised bythe rent veil, and was bitterly fulfilled at last. When they slewChrist they killed the system under which they lived, and for whichthey would have been glad to die, in a zeal without knowledge; anddestroyed the very Temple on the distorted charge of being thedestroyer of which, they handed Him over to the Roman power. The death of Christ is, then, the desecration and the destruction ofthat Temple. Of course it is; because when a nation that had hadmillenniums of education, of forbearance, of revelation, turned atlast upon the very climax and brightest central light of all theRevelation, standing there amongst them in a bodily form, there wasnothing more to be done. God had shot His last arrow; His quiver wasempty. 'Last of all He sent unto them His Son, saying, ' with awistful kind of half-confidence, 'They will reverence My Son, ' andthe divine expectation was disappointed, and exhaustless Love wasempty-handed, and all was over. He could turn to themselves and say, 'Judge between Me and My vineyard. What more could have been donethat I have not done to it?' Therefore, there was nothing left butto let the angels of destruction loose, and to call for the Romaneagles with their broad-spread wings, and their bloody beaks, andtheir strong talons, to gather together round the carcase. When Hegave up the Ghost, 'the veil of the Temple was rent in twain fromthe top to the bottom. ' A time of repentance was given. It was possible for the most guiltyparticipator in that judicial murder to have his gory hands washedand made white in the very blood that he had shed; but, failingrepentance, that death was the death of Israel, and the destructionof Israel's Temple. Let us take the lesson, dear brethren. If weturn away from that Saviour, and refuse the offered gifts of Hislove, there is no other appeal left in the power of Heaven; andthere is nothing for it after that except judgment and destruction. We can 'crucify the Son of God afresh and put Him to an open shame. 'And the hearts that are insensitive, as are some of our hearts, tothat great love and grace, are capable of nothing except to bepulverised by means of a judgment. Repentance is possible for usall, but, failing that, the continuance of rejection of Christ isthe pulling down, on our own heads, of the ruins of the Temple, likethe Israelitish hero in his blindness and despair. II. Now, secondly, the rent veil means, in another way of looking atthe incident, light streaming in on the mystery of God. Let me recall to your imaginations what lay behind that heavy veil. In the Temple, in our Lord's time, there was no presence of theShekinah, the light that symbolised the divine presence. There wasthe mercy-seat, with the outstretched wings of the cherubim; therewere the dimly pictured forms on the tapestry hangings; there wassilence deep as death; there was darkness absolute and utter, whilstthe Syrian sun was blazing down outside. Surely that is the symbolof the imperfect knowledge or illumination as to the divine naturewhich is over all the world. 'The veil is spread over all nations, and the covering over all people. ' And surely that sudden, sharptearing asunder of the obscuring medium, and letting the brightsunlight stream into every corner of the dark chamber, is for us asymbol of the great fact that in the life, and especially in thedeath, of Jesus Christ our Lord, we have light thrown in to thedepths of God. What does that Cross tell us about God that the world did not know?And how does it tell us? and why does it tell us? It tells us ofabsolute righteousness, of that in the divine nature which cannottolerate sin; of the stern law of retribution which must be wroughtout, and by which the wages of every sin is death. It tells us notonly of a divine righteousness which sees guilt and administerspunishment, but it tells us of a divine love, perfect, infinite, utter, perennial, which shrinks from no sacrifice, which stoops tothe lowest conditions, which itself takes upon it all the miseriesof humanity, and which dies because it loves and will save men fromdeath. And as we look upon that dying Man hanging on the cross, thevery embodiment and consummation of weakness and of shame, we haveto say, 'Lo! this is our God! We have waited for Him'--through allthe weary centuries--'and He will save us. ' How does it tell us allthis? Not by eloquent and gracious thoughts, not by sweet andmusical words, but by a deed. The only way by which we can know menis by what they do. The only way by which we know God is by what Hedoes. And so we point to that Cross and say, 'There! not in words, not in thoughts, not in speculations, not in hopes and fears andperadventures and dim intuitions, but in a solid fact; there is theRevelation which lays bare the heart of God, and shows us its verythrobbing of love to every human soul. ' 'The veil was rent in twainfrom the top to the bottom. ' The Cross will reveal God to you only if you believe that JesusChrist was the Incarnate Word. Brethren, if that death was but thedeath of even the very holiest, noblest, sweetest, perfectest soulthat ever lived on earth and breathed human breath, there is norevelation of God in it for us. It tells us what Jesus was, and by avery roundabout inference may suggest something of what the divinenature is, but unless you can say, as the New Testament says, 'Inthe beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Wordwas God. .. . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and webeheld His glory, the glory as of the only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, ' I fail to see how the death of Christ canbe a revelation of the love of God. I need not occupy time in dilating upon the contrast between thissolid certitude, and all that the world, apart from Jesus Christ, has to lay hold of about God. We want something else than mist onwhich to build, and on which to lay hold. And there is asubstantial, warm, flesh-and-blood hand, if I may so say, put out tous through the mist when we believe in Christ the Son of God, whodied on the cross for us all. Then, amidst whirling mists andtossing seas, there is a fixed point to which we can moor; then ourconfidence is built, not on peradventures or speculations or wishesor dreams or hopes, but on a historical fact, and grasping that firmwe may stand unmoved. Dear friends, I may be very old-fashioned and very narrow--I supposeI am; but I am bound to declare my conviction, which I think everyday's experience of the tendency of thought only makes more certain, that, practically for this generation, the choice lies betweenaccepting the life and death of Jesus Christ as the historicalRevelation of God, or having no knowledge of Him--_knowledge_, I say, --of Him at all; you must choose between the barred sanctuary, within which lies couched a hidden Something--with a capital S--orperhaps a hidden Someone whom you never can know and never will; orthe rent veil, rent by Christ's death, through which you can pass, and behold the mercy-seat and, above the outstretched wings of theadoring cherubim, the Father whose name is Love. III. Lastly, the rent veil permits any and every man to draw near toGod. You remember what I have already said as to the jealous guarding ofthe privacy of that inner shrine, and how not only the common herdof the laity, but the whole of the priesthood, with the solitaryexception of its titular head, were shut out from ever entering it. In the old times of Israel there was only one man alive at once whohad ever been beyond the veil. And now that it is rent, what doesthat show but this, that by the death of Jesus Christ any one, everyone, is welcome to pass in to the very innermost sanctuary, and todwell, nestling as close as he will, to the very heart of thethroned God? There is a double veil, if I may so say, between manand God: the side turned outward is woven by our own sins; and theother turned inwards is made out of the necessary antagonism of thedivine nature to man's sin. There hangs the veil, and when thePsalmist asked, 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord; or whoshall stand in His holy place?' he was putting a question whichechoes despairingly in the very heart of all religions. And heanswered it as conscience ever answers it when it gets fair play:'He that hath clean hands and a pure heart, who hath not lifted uphis soul unto vanity. ' And where or who is he? Nowhere; nobody. Access is barred, because it is impossible that a holy and righteousGod should communicate the selectest gifts of His love, even thesense of His favour, and of harmony and fellowship with Him, tosinful men, and barred, because it is impossible that men, with theconsciousness of evil and the burden of guilt sometimes chafingtheir shoulders, and always bowing down their backs, should desireto possess, or be capable of possessing, that fellowship and unionwith God. A black, frowning wall, if I may change the metaphor of mytext, rises between us and God. But One comes with the sacrificialvessel in His hand, and pours His blood on the barrier, and thatmelts the black blocks that rise between us and God, and the path ispatent and permeable for every foot. 'The veil of the Temple wasrent in twain' when Christ died. That death, because it is asacrifice, makes it possible that the whole fulness of the divinelove should be poured upon man. That death moves our hearts, takesaway our sense of guilt, draws us nearer to Him; and so both by itsoperation--not on the love of God--but on the government of God, andby its operation on the consciousness of men, throws open the pathinto His very presence. If I might use abstract words, I would say that Christ's deathpotentially opens the path for every man, which being put into plainEnglish--which is better--is just that by the death of Christ everyman can, if he will, go to God, and live beside Him. And our faithis our personal laying hold of that great sacrifice and treading onthat path. It turns the 'potentiality' into an actuality, thepossibility into a fact. If we believe on Him who died on the crossfor us all, then by that way we come to God, than which there isnone other given under heaven among men. So all believers are priests, or none of them are. The absoluteright of direct access to God, without the intervention of any manwho has an officially greater nearness to Him than others, andthrough whom as through a channel the grace of sacrament comes, iscontained in the great symbol of my text. And it is a truth thatthis day needs. On the one hand there is agnostic unbelief, whichneeds to see in the rent veil the illumination streaming through iton to the depths of God; and on the other hand there is thecomplementary error--and the two always breed each other--thesuperstition which drags back by an anachronism the old Jewishnotions of priesthood into the Christian Church. It needs to see inthe rent veil the charter of universal priesthood for all believers, and to hearken to the words which declare, 'Ye are a chosengeneration, a spiritual house, a royal priesthood, that ye shouldoffer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable unto God by Jesus Christ. 'That is the lesson that this day wants. 'Having, therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest of all, by the blood ofJesus, by a new and living way, which He has consecrated for usthrough the veil, that is His flesh, let us draw near with truehearts in full assurance of faith. ' THE PRINCE OF LIFE 'In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre. 2. And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. 3. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: 4. And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. 5. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. 6. He is not here: for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 7. And go quickly, and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead; and, behold, He goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see Him: lo, I have told you. 8. And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring His disciples word. 9. And as they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. And they came and held Him by the feet, and worshipped Him. 10. Then said Jesus unto them, Be not afraid: go tell My brethren that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see Me. 11. Now, when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done. 12. And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, 13. Saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole Him away while we slept. 14. And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and secure you. 15. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day. ' --MATT. Xxviii. 1-15. The attempts at harmonising the resurrection narratives are not onlyunsatisfactory, but they tend to blur the distinctive characteristicsof each account. We shall therefore confine ourselves entirely toMatthew's version, and leave the others alone, with the simpleremark that a condensed report of a series of events does not denywhat it omits, nor contradict a fuller one. The peculiarities ofMatthew's last chapter are largely due to the purpose of his gospel. Throughout, it has been the record of the Galilean ministry, thepicture of the King of Israel, and of His treatment by those whoshould have been His subjects. This chapter establishes the fact ofHis resurrection; but, passing by the Jerusalem appearances of therisen Lord, as being granted to individuals and having less bearingon His royalty, emphasises two points: His rejection by therepresentatives of the nation, whose lie is endorsed by popularacceptance; and the solemn assumption, in Galilee, so familiar tothe reader, of universal dominion, with the world-wide commission, in which the kingdom bursts the narrow national limits and becomesco-extensive with humanity. It is better to learn the meaning ofMatthew's selection of his incidents than to wipe out instructivepeculiarities in the vain attempt after harmony. First, notice his silence (in which all the four narratives arealike) as to the time and circumstances of the resurrection itself. That had taken place before the grey twilight summoned the faithfulwomen, and before the earthquake and the angel's descent. No eye sawHim rise. The guards were not asleep, for the statement that theywere is a lie put into their mouths by the rulers; but though theykept jealous watch, His rising was invisible to them. 'The prisonwas shut with all safety, ' for the stone was rolled away after Hewas risen, 'and the keepers standing before the doors, ' but therewas 'no man within. ' As in the evening of that day He appeared inthe closed chamber, so He passed from the sealed grave. Divinedecorum required that that transcendent act should be done withoutmortal observers of the actual rising of the Sun which scatters forever the darkness of death. Matthew next notices the angel ministrant and herald. His narrativeleaves the impression that the earthquake and appearance of theangel immediately preceded the arrival of the women, and the'Behold!' suggests that they felt and saw both. But that is a pieceof chronology on which there may be difference of opinion. The othernarratives tell of two angels. Matthew's mention of one only may bedue either to the fact that one was speaker, or to the subjectiveimpressions of his informant, who saw but the one, or to variationin the number visible at different times. We know too little of thelaws which determine their appearances to be warranted in findingcontradiction or difficulty here. The power of seeing may depend onthe condition of the beholder. It may depend, not as with grossmaterial bodies, on optics, but on the volition of the radiantbeings seen. They may pass from visibility to its opposite, lightlyand repeatedly, flickering into and out of sight, as the Pleiadesseem to do. Where there is such store of possibilities, he is rashwho talks glibly about contradictions. Of far more value is it to note the purpose served by this waitingangel. We heard much of a herald angel of the Lord in the story ofthe Nativity. We hear nothing of him during the life of Christ. Nowagain he appears, as the stars, quenched in the noontide, shineagain when the sun is out of the sky. He attends as humble servitor, in token that the highest beings gazed on that empty grave withreverent adoration, and were honoured by being allowed to guard thesacred place. Death was an undreaded thing to them, and no hopes forthemselves blossomed from Christ's grave; but He who had lain in itwas their King as well as ours, and new lessons of divine love weretaught them, as they wondered and watched. They come to minister byact and word to the weeping women's faith and joy. Their appearanceparalyses the guards, who would have kept the Marys from the grave. They roll away the great circular stone, which women's hands, however nerved by love, could not have moved in its grooves. Theyspeak tender words to them. There by the empty tomb, the strongheavenly and the weak earthly lovers of the risen King meettogether, and clasp hands of help, the pledge and first-fruits ofthe standing order henceforth, and the inauguration of their officeof 'ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for . .. Heirs ofsalvation. ' The risen Christ hath made both one. The servants of thesame King must needs be friends of one another. The angel's words fall into three parts. First, he calms fears by theassurance that the seekers for Christ are dear to Him. 'Fear not _ye_'glances at the prostrate watchers, and almost acknowledges thereasonableness of their abject terror. To them he could not but behostile, but to hearts that longed for their and his Lord, he and allhis mighty fellows were brethren. Let us learn that all God's angelsare our lovers and helpers, if we love and seek for Jesus. Superstitionhas peopled the gulf between God and man with crowds of beings;revelation assures us that it is full of creatures who excel in strength. Men have cowered before them, but 'whether they be thrones, ordominions, or principalities, or powers, ' our King was their Creator, and is their Sovereign, and, if we serve Him, all these are on ourside. The true deliverer from superstitious terrors is the risen Christ. Again, the angel announces in simplest words the glorious fact, 'Heis risen, ' and helps them to receive it by a double way. He remindsthem of Christ's own words, which had seemed so mysterious andhad turned out so simple, so incredible, and now had proved so true. He calls them with a smile of welcome to draw near, and with him tolook into the empty place. The invitation extends to us all, for theone assurance of immortality; and the only answer to the despairingquestion, 'If a man die, shall he live again?' which is solid enoughto resist the corrosion of modern doubt as of ancient ignorance, isthat empty grave, and the filled throne, which was its necessaryconsequence. By it we measure the love that stooped so low, weschool our hearts to anticipate without dread or reluctance our ownlying down there, we fasten our faith on the risen Forerunner, andrejoice in the triumphant assurance of a living Christ. If thewonder of the women's stunned gaze is no more ours, our calmacceptance of the familiar fact need be none the less glad, and ourestimate of its far-reaching results more complete than their tumultof feeling permitted to them. No wonder that, swiftly, new duty which was privilege followed onthe new, glad knowledge. It was emphatically 'a day of goodtidings, ' and they could not hold their peace. A brief glance, enough for certitude and joy, was permitted; and then, with urgenthaste, they are sent to be apostles to the Apostles. The possessionof the news of a risen Saviour binds the possessors to be itspreachers. Where it is received in any power, it will impel toutterance. He who can keep silence has never felt, as he ought, theworth of the word, nor realised the reason why he has seen the Crossor the empty grave. 'He goeth before you into Galilee; there shallye see. ' It was but two complete days and one night since Christ hadsaid to the disciples that He would rise again, and, as the Shepherdof the scattered flock, go before them into Galilee. How long agosince that saying it would seem! The reasons for Matthew's omissionof all the other appearances of our Lord in Jerusalem, with theexception of the one which immediately follows, and for the stresshe lays on this rendezvous in their native Galilee, have alreadybeen touched on, and need not detain us now. The next point in the narrative is the glad interview with the risenJesus. The women had been at the grave but for a few moments. Butthey lived more in these than in years of quiet. Time is veryelastic, and five minutes or five seconds may change a life. Thesefew moments changed a world. Haste, winged by fear which had notorment, and by joy which found relief in swift movement, sent themrunning, forgetful of conventional proprieties, towards theawakening city. Probably Mary Magdalene had left them, as soon asthey saw the open grave, and had hurried back alone to tell thetidings. And now the crowning joy and wonder comes. How simply it istold!--the introductory 'Behold!' just hinting at the wonderfulness, and perhaps at the suddenness, of our Lord's appearance, and therest being in the quietest and fewest words possible. Note the deepsignificance of the name 'Jesus' here. The angel spoke of 'theLord, ' but all the rest of the chapter speaks of 'Jesus. ' The joyand hope that flow from the Resurrection depend on the fact of Hishumanity. He comes out of the grave, the same brother of our mortalflesh as before. It was no phantom whose feet they clasped, and Heis not withdrawn from them by His mysterious experience. All throughthe Resurrection histories and the narrative of the forty days, thesame emphasis attaches to the name, which culminates in the angel'sassurance at the Ascension, that 'this same Jesus, ' in His truehumanity, who has gone up on high our Forerunner, shall come againour Brother and our Judge. 'It is _Christ_ that died, yearather, that is risen again'; but that triumphant assurance losesall its blessedness, unless we say too, '_Jesus_ died for oursins according to the Scriptures, and . .. Rose again the third day. ' Note, too, the calmness of His greeting. He uses the common form ofsalutation, as if He had but been absent on some common occasion, and met them in ordinary circumstances. He speaks out of His owndeep tranquillity, and desires to impart it to their agitatedspirits. He would calm their joy, that it may be the deeper, likeHis own. If we may give any weight to the original meaning of theformula of greeting which He employs, we may see blessed prophecy init. The lips of the risen Christ bid us all 'rejoice. ' Hissalutation is no empty wish, but a command which makes its ownfulfilment possible. If our hearts welcome Him, and our faith isfirm in His risen power and love, then He gives us a deep andcentral gladness, which nothing 'That is at enmity with joy Can utterly abolish or destroy. ' The rush to His feet, and the silent clasp of adoration, areeloquent of a tumult of feeling most natural, and yet not withoutturbid elements, which He does not wholly approve. We have not herethe prohibition of such a touch which was spoken to Mary, but wehave substantially the same substitution, by His command, ofpractical service for mere emotion. That carries a lesson always inseason. We cannot love Christ too much, nor try to get too near Him, to touch Him with the hand of our faith. But there have been modesof religious emotion, represented by hymns and popular books, whichhave not mingled reverence rightly with love, and have spoken ofHim, and of the emotions binding us to Him, in tones unwholesomelylike those belonging to earthly passion. But, apart from that, Jesustaught these women, and us through them, that it is better toproclaim His Resurrection than to lie at His feet; and that, howeversweet the blessedness which we find in Him may be, it is meant toput a message into our lips, which others need. Our sight of Himgives us something to say, and binds us to say it. It was a blessingto the women to have work to do, in doing which their strainedemotions might subside. It was a blessing to the mournful company inthe upper room to have their hearts prepared for His coming by theseheralds. It was a wonderful token of His unchanged love, and ananswer to fears and doubts of how they might find Him, that He sendsthe message to them as brethren. In the hurry of that Easter morning, they had no time to ponder onall that it had brought them. The Resurrection as the demonstrationof Christ's divinity and of the acceptance of His perfect sacrifice, or as the pledge of their resurrection, or as the type of theirChristian life, was for future experience to grasp. For that day, itwas enough to pass from despair to joy, and to let the astoundingfact flood them with sunny hope. We know the vast sweep of the consequences and consolations of itfar better than they did. There is no reason, in our distance fromit, for its diminishing either in magnitude, in certitude, or inblessedness in our eyes. No fact in the history of the world standson such firm evidence as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. No age ofthe world ever needed to believe it more than this one does. Itbecomes us all to grasp it for ourselves with an iron tenacity ofhold, and to echo, in the face of the materialisms and know-nothingphilosophy of this day, the old ringing confession, 'Now is Christrisen from the dead!' We need say little about the last point in this narrative--theobstinate blindness of the rulers, and their transparent lie toaccount for the empty grave. The guard reports to the rulers, not tothe governor, as they had been handed over by Pilate for specialservice. But they were Roman soldiers, as appears from the dangerwhich the rulers provided against, that of their alleged crimeagainst military discipline, in sleeping at their post, coming tohis ears. The trumped-up story is too puerile to have taken in anyone who did not wish to believe it. How could they tell whathappened when they were asleep? How could such an operation asforcing back a heavy stone, and exhuming a corpse, have been carriedon without waking them? How could such a timid set of people havemustered up courage for such a bold act? What did they do it for?Not to bury their Lord. He had been lovingly laid there by reverenthands, and costly spices strewn upon the sacred limbs. The onlypossible motive would be that the disciples might tell lies aboutHis resurrection. That hypothesis that the Resurrection was adeliberately concocted falsehood has proved too strong for thestomach of modern unbelief, and has been long abandoned, as it hadneed to be. When figs grow on thistles, such characters as the earlyChristians, martyrs, heroes, saints, will be produced by a systemwhich has a lie, known to be one, for its foundation. But the lamestory is significant in two ways. It confesses, by its desperateattempt to turn the corner of the difficulty, that the great rock, on which all denials of Christ's resurrection split, is the simplequestion--If He did not rise again, what became of the body? Thepriests' answer is absurd, but it, at all events, acknowledges thatthe grave was empty, and that it is incumbent to produce anexplanation which reasonable men can accept without laughter. Further, this last appearance of the rulers in the gospel is full oftragic significance, and is especially important to Matthew, whosenarrative deals especially with Jesus as the King and Messiah ofIsrael. This is the end of centuries of prophecy and patience! Thisis what all God's culture of His vineyard has come to! Thehusbandmen cast the Heir out of the vineyard, and slew him. Butthere was a deeper depth than even that. They would not be persuadedwhen He rose again from the dead. They entrenched themselves in alie, which only showed that they had a glimmering of the truth andhated it. And the lie was willingly swallowed by the mass of thenation, who thereby showed that they were of the same stuff as theywho made it. A conspiracy of falsehood, which knew itself to besuch, was the last act of that august council of Israel. It is anawful lesson of the penalties of unfaithfulness to the lightpossessed, an awful instance of 'judicial blindness. ' So sets thesun of Israel. And therefore Matthew's Gospel turns away from theapostate nation, which has rejected its King, to tell, in its lastwords, of His assumption of universal dominion, and of the passageof the glad news from Israel to the world. THE RISEN LORD'S GREETINGS AND GIFTS 'And as they went to tell His disciples, behold, Jesus met them, saying, All hail. '--MATT. Xxviii. 9. 'Then the same day at evening . .. Came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. ' --JOHN xx. 19. So did our Lord greet His sad followers. The first of thesesalutations was addressed to the women as they hurried in themorning from the empty tomb bewildered; the second to the disciplesassembled in the upper room in the evening of the same day. Both areordinary greetings. The first is that usual in Greek, and literallymeans 'Rejoice'; the second is that common in Hebrew. The divergencebetween the two may be owing to the Evangelist Matthew havingrendered the words which our Lord actually did speak, in the tonguefamiliar to His time, into their equivalent Greek. But whateveraccount may be given of the divergence does not materially affectthe significance which I find in the salutations. And I desire toturn to them for a few moments now, because I think that, if weponder them, we may gain some precious lessons from these Eastergreetings of the Lord Himself. I. First, then, notice their strange and majestic simplicity. He meets His followers after Calvary and the Tomb and theResurrection, with the same words with which two casualacquaintances, after some slight absence, might salute one anotherby the way. Their very simplicity is their sublimity here. For thinkof what tremendous experiences He had passed through since they sawHim last, and of what a rush of rapture and disturbance of joy shookthe minds of the disciples, and then estimate the calm and calmingpower of that matter-of-fact and simple greeting. It bears upon itsvery front the mark of truth. Would anybody have imagined the sceneso? There have been one or two great poets who might conceivablyhave risen to the height of putting such words under suchcircumstances into the mouths of creatures of their own imagination. Analogous instances of the utmost simplicity of expression inmoments of intense feeling may be quoted from Ęschylus orShakespeare, and are regarded as the high-water marks of genius. Butdoes any one suppose that these evangelists were exceptionallygifted souls of that sort, or that they could have imagined anythinglike this--so strange in its calm, so unnatural at first sight, andyet vindicating itself as so profoundly natural and sublime--unlessfor the simple reason that they had heard it themselves, or beentold it by credible witnesses? Neither the delicate pencil of thegreat dramatic genius nor the coarser brush of legend can have drawnsuch an incident as this, and it seems to me that the onlyreasonable explanation of it is that these greetings are what Hereally did say. For, as I have remarked, unnatural as it seems at first sight, ifwe think for a moment, the very simplicity and calm, and, I wasgoing to say, the _matter-of-factness_, of such a greeting, asthe first that escaped from lips that had passed through death andyet were red and vocal, is congruous with the deepest truths ofHis nature. He has come from that tremendous conflict, and Hereappears, not flushed with triumph, nor bearing any trace of effort, but surrounded as by a nimbus with that strange tranquillity whichevermore enwrapped Him. So small does the awful scene which He haspassed through seem to this divine-human Man, and so utterly arethe old ties and bonds unaffected by it, that when He meets Hisfollowers, all He has to say to them as His first greeting is, 'Peace be unto you!'--the well-worn salutation that was bandied toand fro in every market-place and scene where men were wont to meet. Thus He indicates the divine tranquillity of His nature; thus Heminimises the fact of death; thus He reduces it to its trueinsignificance as a parenthesis across which may pass unaffected allsweet familiarities and loving friendships; thus He reknits thebroken ties, and, though the form of their intercourse is hereafterto be profoundly modified, the substance of it remains, whereof Hegiveth assurance unto them in these His first words from the dead. So, as to a man standing on some mountain plateau, the deep gorges whichseam it become invisible, and the unbroken level runs right on. So, there are a marvellous proof of the majesty and tranquillity of thedivine Man, a glorious manifestation of His superiority over death;a blessed assurance of the reknitting of all ancient ties, after itas before it, coming to us from pondering on the trivial words--trivialfrom other lips, but profoundly significant on His--wherewith Hegreeted His servants when He rose again from the dead. II. Then note, secondly, the universal destination of the greetingsof the risen Lord. I have said that it is possibly a mere accident that we should havethe two forms of salutation preserved for us here; and that it isquite conceivable that our Lord really spoke but one, which has beenpreserved unaltered from its Hebrew or Aramaic original in John, andrendered by its Greek equivalent by the Evangelist Matthew. But be that as it may, I cannot help feeling that in this fact, thatthe one salutation is the common greeting among Greek-speaking peoples, and the other the common greeting amongst Easterns, we may permissiblyfind the thought of the universal aspect of the gifts and greetings ofthe risen Christ. He comes to all men, and each man hears Him, 'in hisown tongue wherein he was born, ' breathing forth to him greetingswhich are promises, and promises which are gifts. Just as the mockinginscription on the Cross proclaimed, in 'Hebrew and Greek and Latin, 'the three tongues known to its readers, the one kingdom of thecrucified King--so in the greetings from the grave, the one declaresthat, to all the desires of eager, ardent, sensuous, joy-lovingWesterns, and all the aspirations of repose-loving Easterns, who hadhad bitter experience of the pangs and pains of a state of warfare, Jesus Christ is ready to respond and to bring answering gifts. Whatsoever any community or individual has conceived as its highestideal of blessedness and of good, that the risen Christ hath in Hishands to bestow. He takes men's ideals of blessedness, and deepensand purifies and refines them. The Greek notion of joy as being the good to be most wished forthose dear to us, is but a shallow one. They had to learn, and theirphilosophy and their poetry and their art came to corruption becausethey would not learn, that the corn of wheat must be cast into theground and die before it bring forth fruit. They knew little of theblessing and meaning of sorrow, and therefore the false glitterpassed away, and the pursuit of the ideal became gross and foul andsensuous. And, on the other hand, the Jew, with his longing forpeace, had an equally shallow and unworthy conception of what itmeant, and what was needed to produce it. If he had only externalconcord with men, and a competency of outward good within his reachwithout too much trouble, he thought that because he 'had much goodslaid up for many years' he might 'take his ease; and eat, and drink, and be merry. ' But Jesus Christ comes to satisfy both aspirations bycontradicting both, and to reveal to Greek and Jew how much deeperand diviner was his desire than he dreamed it to be; and, therefore, how impossible it was to find the joy that would last, in thedancing fireflies of external satisfactions or the delights of artand beauty; and how impossible it was to find the repose thatennobled and was wedded to action, in anything short of union withGod. The Lord Christ comes out of the grave in which He lay for everyman, and brings to each man's door, in a dialect intelligible to theman himself, the satisfaction of the single soul's aspirations andideals, as well as of the national desires. His gifts and greetingsare of universal destination, meant for us all and adapted for useach. III. Then, thirdly, notice the unfailing efficacy of the Lord'sgreetings. Look at these people to whom He spoke. Remember what they werebetween the Friday and the Sunday morning; utterly cowed and beaten, the women, in accordance with the feminine nature, apparently moredeeply touched by the personal loss of the Friend and Comforter; andthe men apparently, whilst sharing that sorrow, also touched bydespair at the going to water of all the hopes that they had beenbuilding upon His official character and position. 'We trusted thatit had been He which should have redeemed Israel, ' they said, 'asthey walked and were sad. ' They were on the point of parting. TheKeystone withdrawn, the stones were ready to fall apart. Then came_something_--let us leave a blank for a moment--then came_something_; and those who had been cowards, dissolved insorrow and relaxed by despair, in eight-and-forty hours becameheroes. From that time, when, by all reasonable logic and commonsense applied to men's motives, the Crucifixion should have crushedtheir dreams and dissolved their society, a precisely oppositeeffect ensues, and not only did the Church continue, but the menchanged their characters, and became, somehow or other, full ofthese very two things which Christ wished for them--namely, joy andpeace. Now I want to know--what bridges that gulf? How do you get the Peterof the Acts of the Apostles out of the Peter of the Gospels? Isthere any way of explaining that revolution of character, whilst yetits broad outlines remain identical, which befell him and all ofthem, except the old-fashioned one that the _something_ whichcame in between was the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and theconsequent gift of joy and peace in Him, a joy that no troubles orpersecutions could shake, a peace that no conflicts could for amoment disturb? It seems to me that every theory of Christianitywhich boggles at accepting the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as aplain fact, is shattered to pieces on the sharp-pointed rock of thisone demand--'Very well! If it is not a fact, account for theexistence of the Church, and for the change in the characters of itsmembers. ' You may wriggle as you like, but you will never get areasonable theory of these two undeniable facts until you believethat He rose from the dead. In His right hand He carried peace, andin His left joy. He gave these to them, and therefore 'out ofweakness they were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned toflight the armies of the aliens, ' and when the time came, 'weretortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a betterresurrection. ' There is omnipotent efficacy in Christ's greetings. The one instance opens up the general law, that His wishes aregifts, that all His words are acts, that He speaks and it is done, and that when He desires for us joy, it is a deed of conveyance andgift, and invests us with the joy that He desires if we observe theconditions. Christ's wishes are omnipotent, ours are powerless. We wish for ourfriends many good things, and the event turns wishes to mockery, andthe garlands which we prepared for their birthdays have sometimes tobe hung on their tombs. The limitations of human friendship and ofour deepest and sincerest wishes, like a dark background, enhancethe boundless efficacy of the greetings of the Master, which are notonly wishes but bestowments of the thing wished, and therein given, by Him. IV. So, lastly, notice our share in this twofold greeting. When it was first heard, I suppose that the disciples and the womenapprehended the salutation only in its most outward form, and thatall other thoughts were lost in the mere rapture of the suddenchange from the desolate sense of loss to the glad consciousness ofrenewed possession. When the women clung to His feet on that Eastermorning, they had no thought of anything but--'we clasp Thee again, O Soul of our souls. ' But then, as time went on, the meaning andblessedness and far-reaching issues of the Resurrection became moreplain to them. And I think we can see traces of the process, in thedevelopment of Christian teaching as presented in the Acts of theApostles and in the Epistles. Peter in his early sermons dwells onthe Resurrection all but exclusively from one point of view--viz. , as being the great proof of Christ's Messiahship. Then there came bydegrees, as is represented in the same Peter's letter, andabundantly in the Apostle Paul's, the recognition of the light whichthe Resurrection of Jesus Christ threw upon immortality; as aprophecy and a pattern thereof. Then, when the historical fact hadbecome fully accepted and universally diffused, and its bearingsupon men's future had been as fully apprehended as is possible here, there came, finally, the thought that the Resurrection of JesusChrist was the symbol of the new life, which from that risen Lordpassed into all those who loved and trusted Him. Now, in all these three aspects--as proof of Messiahship, as thepattern and prophecy of immortality, and as the symbol of the betterlife which is accessible for us, here and now--the Resurrection ofJesus Christ stands for us even more truly than for the rapturouswomen who caught His feet, or for the thankful men who looked uponHim in the upper chamber, as the source of peace and of joy. For, dear brethren, therein is set forth for us the Christ whosework is thereby declared to be finished and acceptable to God, andall sorrow of sin, all guilt, all disturbance of heart and mind byreason of evil passions and burning memories of former iniquity, andall disturbance of our concord with God, are at once and for everswept away. If Jesus Christ was 'declared to be the Son of God withpower by His Resurrection from the dead, ' and if in thatResurrection, as is most surely the case, the broad seal of thedivine acceptance is set to the charter of our forgiveness andsonship by the blood of the Cross, then joy and peace come to usfrom Him and from it. Again, the resurrection of Jesus Christ sets Him forth before us asthe pattern and the prophecy of immortal life. This Samson has takenthe gates of the prison-house on His broad shoulders and carriedthem away, and now no man is kept imprisoned evermore in thatdarkness. The earthquake has opened the doors and loosened everyman's bonds. Jesus Christ hath risen from the dead, and therein notonly demonstrated the certainty that life subsists through death, and that a bodily life is possible thereafter, but hath set beforeall those who give the keeping of their souls into His hands theglorious belief that 'the body of their humiliation shall be''changed into the likeness of the body of His glory, according tothe working whereby He is able even to subdue all things untoHimself. ' Therefore the sorrows of death, for ourselves and for ourdear ones, the agitation which it causes, and all its darkness intowhich we shrink from passing, are swept away when He comes forthfrom the grave, serene, radiant, and victorious, to die no more, butto dispense amongst us His peace and His joy. And, again, the risen Christ is the source of a new life drawn fromHim and received into the heart by faith in His sacrifice andResurrection and glory. And if I have, deep-seated in my soul, though it may be in imperfect maturity, that life which is hid withChrist in God, an inward fountain of gladness, far better than theeffervescent, and therefore soon flat, waters of Greek or earthlyjoy, is mine; and in my inmost being dwells a depth of calm peacewhich no outward disturbance can touch, any more than the winds thatrave along the surface of the ocean affect its unmoved and unsoundedabysses. Jesus Christ comes to thee, my brother, weary, distracted, care-laden, sin-laden, sorrowful and fearful. And He says to each ofus from the throne what He said in the upper room before the Cross, and on leaving the grave after it, 'My joy will remain in you, andyour joy shall be full. My peace I leave to you, My peace I giveunto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. ' ON THE MOUNTAIN 'Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. 17. And when they saw Him, they worshipped Him: but some doubted. ' --MATT. Xxviii. 16, 17. 'After that, He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once. '--1 COR. Xv. 4 To infer an historian's ignorance from his silence is a short andeasy, but a rash, method. Matthew has nothing to say of our Lord'sappearances in Jerusalem, except in regard to that of the women inthe early morning of Easter Day. But it does not follow that he wasignorant of these appearances. Imperfect knowledge may be theexplanation; but the scope and design of his Gospel is much morelikely to be so. It is emphatically the Gospel of the King ofIsrael, and it moves, with the exception of the story of thePassion, wholly within the limits of the Galilean ministry. Whatmore probable than that the same motive which induced Jesus toselect the mountain which He had appointed as the scene of thismeeting should have induced the Evangelist to pass by all the othermanifestations in order to fix upon this one? It was fitting that inGalilee, where He had walked in lowly gentleness, 'kindly with Hiskind, ' He should assume His sovereign authority. It was fitting thatin 'Galilee of the Gentiles, ' that outlying and despised province, half heathen in the eyes of the narrow-minded Pharisaic Jerusalem, He should proclaim the widening of His kingdom from Israel to allnations. If we had Matthew's words only, we should suppose that none but theeleven were present on this occasion. But it is obviously the sameincident to which Paul refers when he speaks of the appearance to'five hundred brethren at once. ' These were the Galilean discipleswho had been faithful in the days of His lowliness, and were thusnow assembled to hear His proclamation of exaltation. Apparently themeeting had been arranged beforehand. They came without Him to 'themountain where Jesus had appointed. ' Probably it was the same spoton which the so-called Sermon on the Mount, the first proclamationof the King, had been delivered, and it was naturally chosen to bethe scene of a yet more exalted proclamation. A thousand tendermemories and associations clustered round the spot. So we have tothink of the five hundred gathered in eager expectancy; and wenotice how unlike the manner of His coming is to that of the formermanifestations. _Then_, suddenly, He became visibly presentwhere a moment before He had been unseen. But _now_ He graduallyapproaches, for the doubting and the worshipping took place 'whenthey saw Him, ' and before 'He came to them. ' I suppose we mayconceive of Him as coming down the hill and drawing near to them, and then, when He stands above them, and yet close to them--else thefive hundred could not have seen Him 'at once'--doubts vanish; andthey listen with silent awe and love. The words are majestic; all isregal. There is no veiled personality now, as there had been to Mary, and to the two on the road to Emmaus. There is no greeting now, asthere had been in the upper chamber; no affording of a demonstrationof the reality of His appearance, as there had been to Thomas and tothe others. He stands amongst them as the King, and the music of Hiswords, deep as the roll of thunder, and sweet as harpers harping withtheir harps, makes all comment or paraphrase sound thin and poor. Butyet so many great and precious lessons are hived in the words that wemust reverently ponder them. The material is so abundant that I canbut touch it in the slightest possible fashion. This great utteranceof our Lord's falls into three parts: a great claim, a great commission, a great promise. I. There is a Great Claim. 'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. ' No words canmore absolutely express unconditional, unlimited authority andsovereignty. Mark the variety of the gift--'all power'; every kindof force, every kind of dominion is in His hands. Mark the sphere ofsovereignty--'in heaven and in earth. ' Now, brethren, if we knowanything about Jesus Christ, we know that He made this claim. Thereis no reason, except the unwillingness of some people to admit thatclaim, for casting any sort of doubt upon these words, or making anydistinction in authority between them and the rest of the words ofgraciousness which the whole world has taken to its heart. But if Hesaid this, what becomes of His right to the veneration of mankind, as the Perfect Example of the self-sacrificing, self-obliviousreligious life? It is a mystery that I cannot solve, how any man cankeep his reverence for Jesus, and refuse to believe that beneaththese tremendous words there lies a solemn and solid reality. Notice, too, that there is implied a definite point of time at whichthis all-embracing authority was given. You will find in the RevisedVersion a small alteration in the reading, which makes a greatdifference in the sense. It reads, 'All power _has been_ given';and that points, as I say, to a definite period. _When_ was itgiven? Let another portion of Scripture answer the question--'Declaredto be the Son of God with power, by the resurrection from the dead. '_Then_ to the Man Jesus was given authority over heaven and earth. All the early Christian documents concur in this view of the connectionbetween the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and His investiturewith this sovereign power. Hearken to Paul, 'Became obedient untodeath, even the death of the Cross; wherefore God also hath highlyexalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name. ' Hearkento Peter, 'Who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory. ' Hearkento the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 'We see Jesus crownedwith glory and honour for the suffering of death. ' Hearken to John, 'To Him that is the Faithful Witness, and the First-born from thedead, and the Prince of the kings of the earth. ' Look with hiseyes to the vision of the 'Lamb as it had been slain, ' enthronedin the midst of the throne, and say whether this unanimous consentof the earliest Christian teachers is explicable on any reasonablegrounds, unless there had been underlying it just the words of ourtext, and the Master Himself had taught them that all power wasgiven to Him in heaven and in earth. As it seems to me impossibleto account for the existence of the Church if we deny theResurrection, so it seems to me impossible to account for the faithof the earliest stratum of the Christian Church without theacceptance of some such declaration as this, as having come from theLord Himself. And so the hands that were pierced with the nails wieldthe sceptre of the Universe, and on the brows that were wounded andbleeding with the crown of thorns are wreathed the many crowns ofuniversal Kinghood. But we have further to notice that in this investiture, with 'allpower in heaven and on earth, ' we have not merely the attestation ofthe perfection of His obedience, the completeness of His work, andthe power of His sacrifice, but that we have also the elevation ofManhood to enthronement with Divinity. For the _new_ thing thatcame to Jesus after His resurrection was that His humanity was takeninto, and became participant of, 'the glory which I had with Thee, before the world was. ' Then our nature, when perfect and sinless, isso cognate and kindred with the Divine that humanity is capable ofbeing invested with, and bearing, that 'exceeding and eternal weightof glory. ' In that elevation of the Man Christ Jesus, we may read aprophecy, that shall not be unfulfilled, of the destiny of all thosewho conform to Him through faith, love, and obedience, finally tosit down with Him on His throne, even as He is set down with theFather on His throne. Ah! brethren, Christianity has dark and low views of human nature, and men say they are too low and too dark. It is 'Nature's sternestpainter, ' and, therefore, 'its best. ' But if on its palette theblacks are blacker than anywhere else, its range of colour isgreater, and its white is more lustrous. No system thinks socondemnatorily of human nature as it is; none thinks so glowingly ofhuman nature as it may become. There are bass notes far down beyondthe limits of the scale to which ears dulled by the world and sinand sorrow are sensitive; and there are clear, high tones, thrillingand shrilling far above the range of perception of such ears. Theman that is in the lowest depths may rise with Jesus to the highest, but it must be by the same road by which the Master went. 'If wesuffer with Him, we shall also reign with Him, ' and only 'if. ' Thereis no other path to the Throne but the Cross. _Via crucis, vialucis_--the way of the Cross is the way of light. It is to thosewho have accepted their Gethsemanes and their Calvarys that Heappoints a kingdom, as His Father has appointed unto Him. So much, then, for the first point here in these words; turn now tothe second. II. The Great Commission. One might have expected that the immediate inference to be drawn from'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth' would have beensome word of encouragement and strengthening to those who were so soonto be left, and who were beginning to be conscious of their feebleness. But there is nothing more striking in the whole of the incidents ofthose forty days than the prominence which is given in them to thework of the Church when the Master had left it, and to the imperativeobligations devolving upon it. And so here, not encouragement, butobligation is the inference that is drawn from that tremendous claim. 'Because I have all power, therefore you are charged with the dutyof winning the world for its King. ' The all-ruling Christ calls forthe universal proclamation of His sovereignty by His disciples. Thesefive hundred little understood the sweep of the commandment, and, ashistory shows, terribly failed to apprehend the emancipating powerof it. But He says to us, as to them, 'I am not content with theauthority given to Me by God, unless I have the authority that eachman for himself can give Me, by willing surrender of his heart andwill to Me. ' Jesus Christ craves no empty rule, no mere elevationby virtue of Divine supremacy, over men. He regards that elevationas incomplete without the voluntary surrender of men to become Hissubjects and champions. Without its own consent He does not countthat His universal power is established in a human heart. Thoughthat dominion be all-embracing like the ocean, and stretching intoall corners of the universe, and dominating over all ages, yet inthat ocean there may stand up black and dry rocks, barren as theyare dry, and blasted as they are black, because, with the awfulpower of a human will, men have said, 'We will not have this Manto reign over us. ' It is willing subjects whom Christ seeks, inorder to make the Divine grant of authority a reality. In that work He needs His servants. The gift of God notwithstanding, the power of His Cross notwithstanding, the perfection andcompleteness of His great reconciling and redeeming worknotwithstanding, all these are vain unless we, His servants, willtake them in our hands as our weapons, and go forth on the warfareto which He has summoned us. This is the command laid upon us all, 'Make disciples of all nations. ' Only so will the reality correspondto the initial and all-embracing grant. It would take us too far to deal at all adequately, or in anythingbut the most superficial fashion, with the remaining parts of thisgreat commission. 'Make disciples of all nations'--that is the firstthing. Then comes the second step: 'Baptizing them into the name ofthe Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. ' Who are to bebaptized? Now, notice, if I may venture upon being slightlytechnical for a moment, that the word 'nations' in the precedingclause is a neuter one, and that the word for 'them' in this clauseis a masculine, which seems to me fairly to imply that the command'baptizing them' does not refer to 'all nations, ' but to thedisciples latent among them, and to be drawn from them. Surely, surely the great claim of absolute and unbounded power has for itsconsequence something better than the lame and impotent conclusionof appointing an indiscriminate rite, as the means of makingdisciples! Surely that is not in accordance with the spirituality ofthe Christian faith! 'Baptizing them into the Name'--the name is one, that of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Does that mean the name of God, and of a man, and of an influence, all jumbled up together inblasphemous and irrational union? Surely, if Father, Son, and HolySpirit have one name, the name of Divinity, then it is but a step tosay that three Persons are one God! But there is a great deal morehere than a baptismal formula, for to be baptized into the Name isbut the symbol of being plunged into communion with this onethreefold God of our salvation. The ideal state of the Christiandisciple is that he shall be as a vase dropped into the Atlantic, encompassed about with God, and filled with Him. We all 'live, andmove, and have our being' in Him, but some of us have so wrappedourselves, if I may venture to use such a figure, in waterproofcovering, that, though we are floating in an ocean of Divinity, nota drop finds its way in. Cast the covering aside, and you will besaturated with God, and only in the measure in which you live andmove and have your being in the Name are you disciples. There is another step still. Making disciples and bringing intocommunion with the Godhead is not all that is to flow from, andcorrespond to, and realise in the individual, the absolute authorityof Jesus Christ--'Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever Ihave commanded you. ' We hear a great deal in these days about theworthlessness of mere dogmatic Christianity. Jesus Christanticipated all that talk, and guarded it from exaggeration. Forwhat He tells us here that we are to train ourselves and others in, is not creed but conduct; not things to be believed or _credenda_but things to be done or _agenda_--'teaching them to observe allthings whatsoever I have commanded you. ' A creed that is not wroughtout in actions is empty; conduct that is not informed, penetrated, regulated by creed, is unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian. What we are to know we are to know in order that we may do, and soinherit the benediction, which is never bestowed upon them thatknow, but upon them that, knowing these things, are blessed _in_, as well as _for_, the doing of them. That training is to be continuous, educating to new views of duty;new applications of old truths, new sensitiveness of conscience, unveiling to us, ever as we climb, new heights to which we aspire. The Christian Church has not yet learnt--thank God it is learning, though by slow degrees--all the moral and practical implications andapplications of 'the truth as it is in Jesus. ' And so these are thethree things by which the Church recognises and corresponds to theuniversal dominion of Christ, the making disciples universally; thebringing them into the communion of the Father, the Son, and theHoly Spirit; and the training of them to conduct ever approximatingmore and more to the Divine ideal of humanity in the glorifiedChrist. And now I must gather just into a sentence or two what is to be saidabout the last point. There is-- III. The Great Promise. 'I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world, ' or, as itmight be read, 'with you all the days, even to the accomplishment ofthe age. ' Note that emphatic 'I am, ' which does not only denotecertainty, but is the speech of Him who is lifted above the lowerregions where Time rolls and the succession of events occurs. That'I am' covers all the varieties of _was, is, will be_. Noticethe long vista of variously tinted days which opens here. Howsoevermany they be, howsoever different their complexion, days of summerand days of winter, days of sunshine and days of storm, days ofbuoyant youth and days of stagnant, stereotyped old age, days ofapparent failure and days of apparent prosperity, He is with us inthem all. They change, He is 'the same yesterday, and to-day, andfor ever. ' Notice the illimitable extent of the promise--'even untothe end. ' We are always tempted to think that long ago the earth wasmore full of God than it is to-day, and that away forward in thefuture it will again be fuller, but that this moment is comparativelyempty. The heavens touch the earth on the horizon in front and behind, and they are highest and remotest above us just where we stand. Butno past day had more of Christ in it than to-day has, and that Hehas gone away is the condition of His coming. 'He therefore departedfor a season, that we might receive Him for ever. ' But mark that the promise comes after a command, and is contingent, for all its blessedness and power, upon our obedience to theprescribed duty. That duty is primarily to make disciples of allnations, and the discharge of it is so closely connected with therealisation of the promise that a non-missionary Church never hasmuch of Christ's presence. But obedience to all the King's commandsis required if we stand before Him, and are to enjoy His smile. Ifyou wish to keep Christ very near you, and to feel Him with you, theway to do so is no mere cultivation of religious emotion, orsaturating your mind with religious books and thoughts, though thesehave their place; but on the dusty road of life doing His will andkeeping His commandments. 'If a man love Me he will keep My words, and My Father will love Him. We will come to Him, and make our abodewith Him. '