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 Annex 
 
 TEACHING AND HEALING. 
 
 AND 
 
 FINAL PERSEVERANCE NOT INEVITABLE. 
 
 Cfocr Sermons 
 
 PREACHED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 \ ox 
 
 SUNDAY AFTERNOONS, AUGUST ?TH AND HTH, 1881, 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D. 
 
 (Canon of St. Paufs.) 
 
 " And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, 
 and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every 
 disease among the people." Matt. ix. 35. 
 
 THERE can be no need' for insisting on the importance of an occasion 
 such as the present. No profession touches the outward conditions of 
 human life more constantly, more intimately, than the profession of 
 medicine; and when its foremost European representatives are assembled 
 under distinguished auspices in this metropolis to examine what their 
 science has hitherto done towards relieving human suffering, to decide, 
 what, with its present attainments and resources, it may yet hope to do, 
 we all are interested as a matter of course. Heirs as we are, all of us, to 
 the legacy of disease and pain which comes down to us from the first 
 father of our race, we welcome this serious and beneficent effort to 
 review and marshal the accumulated stores of knowledge by which a 
 kindly providence enables man, not indeed to escape his inevitable 
 doom, but to alleviate, to reduce in area, to keep at bay, the physical 
 sufferings which in the great majority of cases herald its approach. 
 This great international meeting where knowledge so precious to the 
 well-being of our race is brought together, inspected, sifted, compared, 
 analysed, and then consolidated and enhanced, is the common concern 
 of the civilised world, and it is the special concern of this country, which 
 has not been slow to express, through those who have a right to speak in 
 its name, its sense of the respect and gratitude which are due to its dis- 
 tinguished visitors and to the errand on which they come. At the 
 outset of what I may have to say, it is right once more to note with 
 thankful satisfaction the international character of this great gathering. 
 Nations are the creations of providence acting in history. They have 
 their frontiers, determined sometimes by the limits of race and language, 
 sometimes by the barriers of seas and mountains. They have as nations 
 their distinguishing characteristics for good and evil ; and the feeling 
 which binds a man to his country has its divinely appointed foundations 
 in nature not less truly than that stronger feeling which binds him to 
 his family and his home. But as the family is greater than the man, and 
 the nation greater than the family, so the human race represents a 
 greatness which altogether transcends that of the nation. Here in this 
 temple of Jesus Christ, which also bears the name of the glorious apostle 
 whose life-work it was to break down the walls by which Jewish 
 nationalism would fain have kept for ever the rest of the world at n 
 Nos. 1,142-43. B NEW SERIES,
 
 TEACHING AND HEALING. 
 
 distance from its God, here, if anywhere, we may remember that there 
 are troths and duties before which national barriers of feeling rightly 
 disappear. Like those councils of the Church which in ancient and more 
 recent days have brought together representatives from nations and 
 races parted by the prejudices and the hostilities of ages, like the great 
 neart of the apostle which in the unity of the early Christian body could 
 discern no difference between Jew and Greek, between barbarian and 
 Scythian, between bond and free, so a meeting such as the present rallies 
 the thoughtful and benevolent forces of humanity on a splendid scale, 
 silences the jealousies, the misunderstandings, the quarrels, which too 
 often part and keep asunder even the elect of intelligence and goodness, 
 and in the double name of science and philanthropy presents an array of 
 powerful and well-stored minds, such as perhaps never met together 
 before in London, at least, for the purpose of doing the best that the 
 modern world can do for the physical well-being of the human race. 
 Science and philanthropy did I say ? Yes, and it is a combination 
 which at once carries us over the interval of 1800 years to the feet of 
 Jesus of Nazareth, teaching in the assemblies and healing the diseases of 
 His contemporaries. In Him surely we are allied to the highest and the 
 largest knowledge and the most disinterested efforts for the physical and 
 moral welfare of man that our earth has ever seen. He " went about 
 the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel 
 of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every manner of disease 
 among the people." 
 
 Just consider the predominant character of His recorded miracles. 
 
 If we adopt the common but not altogether satisfactory division of 
 them into works of power and works of mercy, there are of the former 
 thirteen, and of the latter twenty-six. Of these last, three are cases of 
 restoration to life, six are cures of demoniacs forms, these, often, of 
 mental disease in which what is physical is mysteriously intermingled 
 with what is moral and spiritual while seventeen cures that He effected 
 were all cases that might any day have presented themselves for treat- 
 ment in a London hospital. Not only the blind, the deaf, the dumb, 
 but leprosy, fever, paralysis, incurable weakness, dropsy, an issue of 
 blood of twelve years' standing, a maimed limb, a laceration, passed 
 under that tender and healing touch. And, indeed, some of His works 
 of power (as they are called) over nature had a like object with these, 
 His miracles of healing mercy, as when, to allay human hunger, He fed 
 the five or the four thousand, or procured a draught of fishes when the 
 skill of the fishermen had failed. These single acts, remember, each of 
 them, were merely a sample of a habit. "We all remember the hyper- 
 bolical reference to the number of our Lord's unrecorded works at the 
 close of the fourth Gospel, and such passages as that before us show that 
 the earlier writers of our Lord's life have only selected a few typical 
 specimens of actions which were very numerous indeed. Times, indeed, 
 there were in His ministry when it might even have seemed that the 
 human body had a greater claim on His attention than the human soul. 
 Such was that occasion which St. Mark describes in the first chapter of 
 his Gospel, when St. Peter's mother-in-law had just been cured of a fever 
 at Capernaum. " And at even, when the sun did set, they brought unto 
 Him all that were diseased, and them that were possessed with devils. 
 And all the city was gathered together at the door. And He healed 
 378
 
 TEACHING AND HEALING. 
 
 many that were sick of divers diseases." If we may reverently com- 
 pare this scene with its modern analogies, it bears less a resemblance to 
 anything that occurs in the life of a clergyman than to the occupation 
 of a physician to a hospital on the day of his seeing his out-patients. 
 There is, indeed, all the difference in the world between the best profes- 
 sional advice and summary cure such as was our Lord's. But we are, 
 for the moment, looking at the outward aspects of the scene, and it 
 shows very vividly how largely our Lord's attention was directed to the 
 well-being of the bodily frame of man. 
 
 Now it would be a great mistake to suppose that this feature of 
 our Saviour's ministry was accidental, or was inevitable. Nothing in 
 His work was accident: all was deliberate : all had an object. Nothing 
 in His work was inevitable, except so far as it was freely dictated by 
 His wisdom and His mercy. To suppose that this nnion in Him of 
 prophet and physician was determined by the necessities of some rude 
 civilisation, such as that of certain tribes in Central Africa and else- 
 where, or of certain periods and places of mediaeval Europe when 
 knowledge was scanty, when it was easy and needful for a single 
 person at each social centre to master all that was known on two or 
 three great subjects this is to make a supposition which does not 
 apply to Palestine at the time of our Lord's appearance. The later 
 prophets were all of them prophets and nothing more neither 
 legislators, nor statesmen, nor physicians. In John the Baptist we 
 see no traces of the restorative power exerted on some rare occasions 
 by Elijah and Elisha; and when our Lord appeared, dispensing on 
 every side cures for bodily disease, the sight was just as novel to His 
 contemporaries as it was welcome. Nor are His healing works to be 
 accounted for by saying that they were only designed to draw attention 
 to His message, by certificating His authority to deliver it, or by 
 saying that they were only symbols of a higher work which He had 
 more at heart in its many and varying aspects the work of healing 
 the diseases of the human soul. True it is that His healing activity 
 had this double value: it was evidence of His authority as a divine 
 teacher: it was a picture in detail addressed to sense of what, as a 
 restorer of our race, He meant to do in regions altogether beyond the 
 sphere of sense. 
 
 But these aspects of His care for the human body were not I 
 repeat it primary: they were strictly incidental. We may affirm 
 reverently, but with certainty, that His first object was to show Him- 
 self as the deliverer and restorer of human nature as a whole not 
 of the reason and conscience merely, without the imagination and the 
 affections not of the spiritual side of man's nature merely, without 
 the bodily; and, therefore, He was not merely teacher, but also 
 physician, and therefore and thus He has shed upon the medical 
 profession to the end of time a radiance and a consecration which are 
 ultimately due to the conditions of that redemptive work to achieve 
 which He came down from heaven. 
 
 Teaching and healing. This, the motto of our Lord's life, is the 
 motto also of the profession of medicine. It also not merely heals but 
 teaches: it also is in its way a ministry of prophecy, with truths and 
 virtues specially entrusted to it, that it may recommend and propagate 
 them. It is little to say of this great profession in our time that it 
 
 879 
 
 2097QGO
 
 TEACHING AND HEALING. 
 
 is a keeper and teacher of intellectual truth. We all know that it, 
 has furnished of late years to literature some of its most enterprising 
 efforts in the way of speculative thought : " and the remarkable address 
 with which this Congress was opened will have informed the public 
 generally, while it vividly reminded the audience which listened to it, 
 of the additions which within the last score of years medical science 
 has made to human knowledge additions so vast, so intricate, as to 
 be for the moment well-nigh unmanageable, and of the immense per- 
 spectives which are thus opening before it. On these high themes it 
 would be impossible to dwell here; but, as a prominent teacher of 
 truth, medical science, I may be allowed to say, has ever powers and 
 responsibilities which are all its own. The physician can point out 
 with an authority given to no other man the present operative force 
 of some of the laws of God. The laws of nature, as we call them its 
 observed uniformity are not less the law and will of God than are 
 the ten commandments. Nay, that moral law finds its echo and its 
 countersign in this physical world; it is justified by the natural 
 catastrophes that follow on its neglect. It is not the clergyman, but 
 the physician, who can demonstrate the sure connection between un- 
 restrained indulgence and the decay of health and life who can put his 
 finger precisely upon the causes which too often fill even with strong 
 young men the corridors not only of our hospitals, but also of our 
 lunatic asylums, who can illustrate by instances drawn from experience 
 the tender foresight of moral provisions which, at first sight, may 
 appear to be tyrannical or capricious. To be able to show this in 
 detail to give men thus the physical reasons for moral truth this is 
 a great prophetic power; this is a vast capacity which we, who stand 
 in this pulpit, might well envy in its possessors: this is a vast 
 responsibility which they who wield it, like other prophets, must one 
 day account for. 
 
 The physician can point out, with an authority which is felt to be so 
 real in no other man of science, the true limits of human knowledge. 
 He knows that to-day science is as ignorant as she was two thousand 
 years ago of what, in its essence, life is. Of the physical conditions 
 under which life exists, science has, indeed, much that is wonderful to 
 say, and she has, indeed, just been telling us, through the voice of one 
 of her most distinguished sons, that life, viewed on its physical side, 
 is the sum of the joint action of all parts of the human system of 
 the lower or inferior as well as of the higher or vital parts that there 
 is no one seat of life, since every elementary part, every cell, is itself a 
 seat of life. And we listen with sincere respect and interest; but we 
 observe that this only states, after all, in language of beautiful precision, 
 what are the points of contact between life and the animal organism. 
 "We still ask what life is in itself, and we hear no answer. No. Just as 
 science pauses before each atom of matter, unable to satisfy herself 
 whether it be infinitely divisible or not, so, when she has exhausted the 
 skill of the anatomist in endeavouring to surprise the life-principle in 
 some secret recess of the animal frame, she again must pause to confess 
 that the constituted essence of the life-principle itself is a mystery still 
 beyond her ken. And never, never is science more worthy of her high 
 prophetic duty than when she dares to make this confession. True 
 science, like prophecy, from Moses downward, knows not merely what 
 380
 
 TBACBIKG AND 
 
 she knows, but the limits of her knowledge; and when she is tempted, 
 if ever, to forget this, as by him who whispered once into the ear of 
 the dying Laplace some praise of his reputation, which seemed for the 
 minute to ignore it, she replies, with the great Frenchman, " My friend, 
 don't speak of that. What we know is little enough: what we are 
 ignorant of is enormous." 
 
 The physician is a prophet, and this character is never so apparent 
 as when life is drawing towards it close. Often when to the sanguine 
 ignorance of friends the bright eye and the buoyant step seem to forbid 
 serious apprehension, medical science already hears not uncertainly the 
 approaching footsteps of the King of Terrors. There is a point, my 
 brethren, at which all forms of highly-cultivated knowledge become 
 instincts, and arc certain of their judgment, even when they are not able 
 at the moment to produce a reason; and no man can have passed middle 
 life without being struck with the sort of " second sight," as it may 
 seem, which is at the command of an accomplished physician. 
 
 Would that I might be permitted in the freedom of my ministry to 
 say one word as to the use of this tremendous power. Too often when 
 science knows that death is inevitable the dying man is allowed to 
 cherish hopes of life with a view to possibly prolonging in him for a few 
 days or hours more the struggle for mere physical existence, and thus 
 the precious, the irrevocable moments pass during which the soul, by 
 acts of faith, and hope, and love, and contrition, may unite itself to the 
 divine Redeemer, and may prepare for the presence chamber of the 
 Judge. It is not for this, brethren, that your higher knowledge is given 
 you; it is not for this that the departed will thank you when you, too, 
 meet them in the world of spirits. 
 
 But the medical profession may also be a great teacher of reverence. 
 Whatever else may be said of our age, reverence is not one of its leading 
 characteristics. We have, as we think, explored, examined, and appraised 
 all the sublimities, all the sanctities, all the mysteries which commanded 
 the awe of our less cultivated or more imaginative forefathers, and as a 
 generation we have ceased to revere; and the absence of reverence, 
 depend upon it, is a vast moral loss. What is reverence? It is the 
 sincere instinctive acknowledgment of a higher presence which awes and 
 which attracts the mind that gazes on it. We grow up insensibly to- 
 wards that which we revere, and to revere nothing is to fall back upon 
 self as the true standard of attainable excellence, and to be dwarfed and 
 blighted proportionately. Now, the profession of medicine should be 
 ever an apostolate of reverence; for its field of action is the human body, 
 and in no other school can reverence be learned more surely than here. 
 We Christians, indeed, have, to speak frankly, our own reasons for think- 
 ing this. As we contemplate the human body, we cannot forget what our 
 faith teaches us about its origin, about its present purpose, about its 
 coming destiny. We know that the body, like the soul, is from God. It is, 
 perhaps, on earth, His noblest visible handiwork. No lines of beauty, it 
 has been said by a great artist, rival those of the human form; no 
 mechanism in any other animal is so perfect. For our part, as we con- 
 template the human body, we cannot forget its Author. Even if evolution 
 should win for itself a permanent place in our conceptions of the past 
 history of man, it would still leave practically untouched the great ques- 
 tion of man's origin. When every step of this process continued through 
 
 881
 
 TEACHING AND HEALING. 
 
 ages has been elaborated by science, the question will still remain, Who fur- 
 nished the original material, the primal monad? Who gave the impact 
 which set the process in motion? Who prescribed the evolutionary 
 law? Who governed its application ? Above all, who must have inter- 
 vened at some critical moment to endow the subject of the evolution 
 with a spiritual and reflective faculty, making him thus visibly to differ, 
 not in degree, but altogether in kind, from the creatures that are around 
 him? That which gives every work of God its first title to interest 
 namely, the fact that it is His work confers this title with especial 
 emphasis on the human body. 
 
 And then, next, what is the present function of the human body? 
 We see in it at once a tabernacle and an instrument: it is the tabernacle of 
 the soul. That the soul is distinct from it, that that in us which con- 
 sciously perceives, thinks, wills, acts, which knows itself to be one and 
 identical from week to week, from year to year, Avhile the body is per- 
 petually changing both its substance and its outward mien this is for 
 us a fact of experience. In order to be certain of it we do not need a 
 revelation. We know that we cannot understand the functions of the 
 body unless we know something about the functionising organs, that, 
 for example, we cannot understand the circulation of the blood unless 
 we know what the heart is, what the arteries, what the veins; but we can 
 understand the intellectual and moral faculties, we can arrange, we can 
 appreciate them, while we are altogether in ignorance of the nature and 
 functions of the brain. In short, we are conscious that the " I " which 
 is the seat and centre of these faculties, is something radically distinct 
 from the bodily organism which is most immediately related to it, but 
 which is related to it undoubtedly, partly as a tabernacle, and partly as 
 an instrument. The soul inhabits and employs the body; the body is 
 the veil, and it is the interpretation of the soul. Who does not know 
 how the soul of man speaks through the voice with its intonations vary- 
 ing from moment to moment, according to the dictates from within? 
 Who has not felt how the soul of man speaks through the eye? how, 
 when the eye is dull and languid, when it is bright and animated, when 
 it flashes forth fire and passion these are the moods of the immaterial 
 spirit within ? Who does not perceive the eloquence of gesture, 
 specially of involuntary gesture, that it is also the language of something 
 infinitely greater than matter and force? We note its successive phases 
 of energy and repose, of suggestiveness and insistence, of conciliation 
 and defiance; and we read, in characters that are not to be mistaken 
 the language of the being which dwells within the frame, whose move- 
 ments it thus controls. More than this, we Christians believe that the 
 tenant of our material frame may and does become the temple of a life 
 higher than its own, that our bodies are temples of the eternal Spirit, 
 because He, in a mode which we cannot understand, makes our spirits to 
 be His temples. And thus the human body is, in our eyes, itself precious 
 and sacred. It is an object of true reverence, if only by reason of 
 Him whom it is thus permitted to house and to serve. 
 
 And, again, there is the destiny of the body. As we Christians gaze 
 at it we know that there awaits it the humiliation of death and decay. 
 We know that it will be resolved into its chemical constituents, but we 
 look beyond. We know also that it has a future. Beyond the hour of 
 death is the hour of resurrection; beyond the humiliations of the coffin 
 332
 
 TEACHING AND HEALING. 
 
 and the grave, there is the life which will not die. The reconstruction 
 of the decayed body presents to us no greater difficulties than its original 
 creation ; and if we ask the question how it will be, we are told, upon 
 what is for uy quite sufficient authority, that our Lord Jesus Christ 
 " shall change our vile body that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious 
 body, according to the mighty working whereby He is able even to sub- 
 due all things unto Himself." And thus in this life the body is like a 
 child that has great prospects before it, and we are interested in, and we 
 respect it accordingly. But you, gentlemen, you our visitors, can add 
 to these motives for reverence another, which appeals not to faith, but to 
 experience. It has been finely said that among the students of nature 
 irreverence is possible only to the superficial. You are too conscious of 
 the great powers in whose presence you move and work, of the mysteries 
 above, around, within you, of the magnificent and exhaustless subjects 
 whose fringes you seem only to have touched when you know most about 
 them, to escape from the awe which all true knowledge, with its ever- 
 present consciousness of a much larger ignorance, must always inspire. 
 In this matter, science, whatever be her immediate interests, is ever the 
 same. You can understand Pascal, "The highest effort of reason 
 is to admit that there is an infinity of things which altogether and per- 
 petually transcend it." You can understand our own Newton compar- 
 ing his finest achievements to those of the child playing with the waves 
 as they break upon the sand. The temper of true science is ever the 
 same, and as you move along the awful frontier where the world of 
 matter shades off into the world of spirit, not the least service that you 
 can do to the men of this generation is by teaching them the mysterious- 
 ness of what they see and what they are, to prepare them to do some sort 
 of justice to what revelation has to say about what they do not see, and 
 what they will be. 
 
 And, lastly, the profession of medicine is, from the nature I had 
 almost dared to say from the necessity of the case, a teacher of benevo- 
 lence. Often must we have witnessed the transformation one of the 
 most striking and beautiful to be seen in life by which the medical 
 student becomes the medical practitioner. We may have known a 
 medical student who is reckless, selfish, or worse, and we presently 
 behold him as a medical practitioner leading a more unselfish and 
 devoted life than any other member of society. " What," we ask 
 " What is this something, akin surely to ministerial ordination, that has 
 wrought this altogether surprising change, that has brought with it 
 such an inspiration of tenderness and sympathy ? " The answer, 
 apparently, is that now, as a practitioner, lie approaches human suffering 
 from a new point of view. As a student he looked on it as something 
 to be observed, discussed, analysed, if possible anyhow, lectured upon ; 
 anyhow, examined in. As a practitioner he is absorbed by the idea 
 that it is something to be relieved. This new point of view, so pro- 
 foundly Christian, will often take possession of a man's whole moral 
 nature, and give it nothing less than a totally new direction; and thus, 
 as a rule, the medical practitioner is at once a master and a teacher of 
 the purest benevolence not only or chiefly those great heads and lights 
 of the profession, whose names are household words in all the universities 
 of Europe, and who have some part of their reward, at any rate, in a 
 homage which neither wealth nor birth can possibly command ; but
 
 TEACHINC4 AND HEALING. 
 
 also, at least, in this country, and, pre-eminently, the obscurer 
 country doctor, whose sphere of fame is his parish or his neighbour- 
 hood, upon whom the sun of publicity rarely or never sheds its rays. 
 His life is passed chiefly in the homes of the very poor, and amidst acts 
 of the kindliest and most self-sacrificing service. For him the loss of 
 rest and the loss of health are too often nothing less than a law of his 
 work; and as he pursues his career so glorious yet so humble, from 
 day to day, his left hand rarely knows what his right hand doeth. And 
 yet, such men as these, in the words of Ecclesiasticus, maintain the 
 state of the world while all their desire is in the work of their craft. 
 They pour oil and wine, as can, or do, few or none others, into the 
 gaping wounds of our social system: they bind and heal, not merely the 
 limbs of their patients, but the more formidable fractures, which 
 separate class from class. And unless He whom now we worship on 
 His throne in heaven is very unlike all that He was 1800 years since 
 on earth, such lives as these must be, in not a few cases, very welcome 
 indeed to Him, if only for the reason that they are so like one very 
 conspicuous aspect of His own. 
 
 And here may I add one word? If it is knowledge which makes the 
 profession of medicine so capable of a lofty and practical benevolence, 
 must not we hope that this knowledge may not be purchased at the cost 
 of the virtue which it promotes? It would ill become me to attempt to 
 suggest in detail what pathological experiments are necessary or legiti- 
 mate; but may it not be said that they are only justified, if at all, by 
 some recognised philanthropic aim as distinct from the general instinct 
 of scientific curiosity? 
 
 Occasions like the present always recall the memories of the dead, 
 and it is impossible not to think of two Englishmen among others who 
 were still living a few months since, and who, had they still been here, 
 would have welcomed and been welcomed by this Congress with no 
 stinted enthusiasm. If, as having had the happiness of knowing them, 
 I recall their names, it is because in their several ways they illustrate 
 very remarkably those aspects of the medical profession to which your 
 attention has been directed. Of these, the first represented the specu- 
 lative and scientific rather than the practical side of the profession. 
 He filled with great distinction a chair in his university. He devoted 
 himself with unwearied industry to all that could illustrate the past 
 history of man. He was almost as much at home in the early formation 
 of language as among the skulls and bones which might be unearthed 
 in a Yorkshire barrow; and nothing was trivial for a mind which 
 believed firmly in the unity of truth, and in the value of all contribu- 
 tions, of whatever kind, towards attaining it. But that which should 
 be especially recalled here and to-day is his reverent bearing as he 
 traversed that obscure region which divides the physical from the super- 
 sensuous world, his resolute faith in immaterial existence, his profound 
 sense of over-aweing mystery everywhere penetrating the great subject 
 which had been entrusted to his care and skill, the child-like conscious- 
 ness that he was beginning to learn when to others he seemed to be 
 already a master of sentences. Long will his university, long will his 
 country, mourn the late Professor Eolleston. And the other of whom 
 I am thinking, and who was the first to leave us, illustrates by his 
 career no less remarkably the connection between the medical 
 384
 
 TEACHING AND HEALING. 
 
 profession and .active philanthropy. Whether it was within the walls 
 of Kars, or on the later battle-fields of the Danube, wherever there was 
 suffering, wherever there was oppression and wrong, the quick eye and 
 tender heart of Dr. Humphrey Sandwith were ready for even heroic 
 service. For him medicine was ever the right hand of philanthropy, 
 and his philanthropy was always quickened by a keen sense of social and 
 human justice. Many years, too, will pass before a life so unselfish in 
 its aim as his can pass from memory. 
 
 Whatever else may be said of a cosmopolitan occasion like the 
 present, this assuredly must be said of it, that its members will not meet 
 again in this life. In a few hours, gentlemen, you will be on your way 
 to all quarters of the civilised world, bearing with you, let us trust, 
 solid additions to the knowledge which you brought us, and cherishing 
 some kindly memories of this great city and of the English people; 
 but you will never, never, all of you meet again. This solemn thought 
 must surely deepen the sense of responsibility with which you address 
 yourselves anew to the task of influencing the thought of your age and 
 of promoting its works of mercy. The two objects are in the last 
 analysis strictly one. Never forget that there is a truth beyond, and 
 higher than, the truths of physics, that there is a better and a brighter 
 world than the world of sense. Of that world our divine Redeemer 
 did not lose sight when He healed so mercifully the woes of this ; 
 and medical science will in the long run assert its true claim to human 
 admiration and gratitude when it keeps its eye fixed upon those 
 summits of truth to which indeed it may most persuasively point us on, 
 but which we can only reach under the guidance of faith. 
 
 385
 
 FINAL PERSEVERANCE NOT INEVITABLE. 
 
 Preached on Sunday Afternoon, August 14/A, 1881. 
 
 "But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved." Matthew 
 xxiv. 13. 
 
 THROUGHOUT that portion of the Gospel which has been read this after- 
 noon as the second lesson, it is often very difficult indeed to say whether 
 our Lord is speaking of the fall of Jerusalem or of the end of the world. 
 The first event was to be a kind of rehearsal, on a small scale, of the second. As 
 yet, it is possible the two events were confused in the minds of the apostles, and 
 thus much of what our Lord said would be applicable in different degrees to both. 
 As the earthly Jerusalem would be compassed by the army of Titus, and burnt with 
 fire, so the earth, and all things that are in it, would, one day, through whatever 
 intermediate agency, be burnt up too. In either case, the unreflecting many would 
 remain in the City of Destruction, and share its doom. In either case, those who 
 noted with awe and expectation the instructive movements of God's providence 
 would have fled for safety to the appointed refuge. " When ye shall see the abomi- 
 nation of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place " 
 " Whoso rcadeth," adds the evangelist, " let him understand: " in other words, this 
 means something more than may appear at first sight " then let them which be 
 in Judaea flee into the mountains : let him which is on the housetop not come down 
 to take any thing out of his house: neither let him which is in the field return back 
 to take his clothes." Is He advising what to do when the earthly Jerusalem is visibly 
 doomed ? Undoubtedly. And yet His words point on to the greater event beyond. 
 In both cases, remark, the catastrophe is preceded by a parade of religious, or, 
 rather, I should say, of irreligious delusion by false Christs. In both cases it is 
 * heralded by physical, as well as by political troubles. In both cases the faithful 
 servants of God are exposed to persecution before the end arrives; and it is in 
 view of this complication of anxieties that our Lord says, " He that endureth to the 
 end, the same shall be saved." 
 
 The importance of perseverance in the service of God is a point which occu- 
 pies, we may venture to say, a leading place in our Lord's teaching. We know 
 from St. Matthew's Gospel that He used these very words, " He that endureth to 
 the end, the same shall be saved," on a different and earlier occasion, in His address 
 to the twelve apostles on sending them out to their work. In the same way He 
 rewarded their perseverance up to a certain point by an especial promise " Ye are 
 they who have continued with Me in My temptations; and I appoint unto you a 
 kingdom, as My Father hath appointed unto Me." And, in like manner, He warns 
 that no man having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for 
 the kingdom of God ; and He depicts the pitiable state of the man who began to 
 build and was not able to finish. And to the same purpose were His parting pre- 
 cepts to the apostles, " Continue ye in My love," " If ye keep My commandments, ye 
 shall abide in My love;" and His reference to His own life-obedience. " My meat is 
 to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work;" and, in His inter- 
 cessory prayer, " I have finished the work that Thou gavest Me to do;" and His 
 sixth word on the cross, " It is finished." 
 
 The vital importance of perseverance enters no less constantly into the teach- 
 ing of the apostles. St. Paul warns the convert from heathenism at Rome, " Thou 
 standest by faith: be not high-minded, but fear." He bids the Corinthians "so 
 
 386
 
 FINAL PERSEVEKAXCE NOT INEVITABLE. 
 
 run that they may obtain ;" or, again, to be " steadfast and uninoveable, always 
 abounding in the work of the Lord; forasmuch as they know that their labour is 
 not in vain in the Lord;" or, again, as in to-day's Epistle, in view of the conduct 
 of apostate Israel of old, while they stand, to " take heed lest they fall." The Gala- 
 tians had fallen away from the apostolic doctrine into Judaizing error, and, accord- 
 ingly, St. Paul wonders that they had " so soon removed from Him that called them 
 into the grace of Christ, unto another Gospel." He asks if they are so foolish as to 
 think that, " having begun in the Spirit, they will be made perfect in the flesh." 
 The Thessalonians are bidden " not to be weary in well doing." Timothy is told 
 by the apostle in his very last epistle, that his master " has fought a good fight, 
 has finished his course, has kept the faith, so that henceforth there is laid up for him 
 the crown of righteousness." And the Epistle to the Hebrews written, as it was, 
 to a Christian church under peculiar temptations to relapse altogether into Judaism 
 is full of this question of perseverance. It contains the two passages on the 
 difficulty of recovering those who have apostatized, which excited so much attention, 
 and occasioned so much perplexity in the early ages of the church. And the other 
 apostles write to the same effect. St. John warns the elect lady and her children, 
 " Look to yourselves that ye lose not those things which ye have wrought, but that 
 ye receive a full reward," and St. Jude describes the fate of those " wandering stars to 
 whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever." And our Lord's warnings to 
 the angels that is, to the bishops of the seven Asiatic churches often turn upon 
 this very point. " Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of 
 life," He says to one. " Hold fast that thou hast, that no man take thy crown," He 
 says to another. 
 
 And in the early ages of the church, this question of perseverance occupied the 
 attention of Christians, very much more than has been the case in modern times. 
 Few of the great teachers of the primitive church leave this matter altogether 
 untouched. Cyprian, at Carthage, wrote on it with a fervour which was 
 heightened by the persecution raging all around him. St. Jerome enters on it at 
 length with one of those many correspondents in whose spiritual welfare he felt so 
 deep an interest. One of the most valuable of the treatises of St. Augustine is that 
 on the gift of perseverance. In our days it is much more in the background of 
 thought, even in the case of serious Christians. They take it for granted that they 
 will and must somehow persevere ; that, as they grow older, they will certainly 
 grow better ; that they will go, too, from strength to strength, till they appear 
 before God in Zion. And if we ask how and why, and can get any sort of answer, 
 the answer will be, sometimes, by the inert force of religious habit ; sometimes, 
 by the active force of natural will ; sometimes, by the irresistible force of divine 
 grace. 
 
 It is assumed, then, first of all, that perseverance will be easy as a matter of 
 habit. Once be a Christian, and once have formed Christian modes of thought 
 and practice, and why should you not go on ? The Christian life, it appears, is 
 thus conceived of. as though it were moving on a line of rails which prevents 
 divergence to the right hand or the left. The line may traverse a district with a 
 very broken surface ; sometimes it is carried along a high embankment ; some- 
 times it buries itself in deep cuttings, or in dark tunnels ; but its general direction 
 is constant ; its gradients are moderate ; the rolling stock which is placed on it 
 goes forward as a matter of course ; and nothing but a catastrophe a catastrophe 
 which a study of the doctrine of chances seems to make highly improbable can 
 interfere with safe arrival at the terminus at the other end of the line. Habit is 
 like those iron rods, it appears, which, without checking movement, prescribe its 
 direction, and so secure the attainment of the end. 
 
 Habit, no doubt, my brethren, is a great power in human life. If we were to 
 examine all the acts of a single day, and the motives which produce them, we 
 should, probably, find that nearly three-quarters were dictated by habit. We walk, 
 eat, sleep, move our bodies, manage the several faculties of our minds, very largely 
 indeed by habit. We do not think of each successive act ; we do it instinctively, 
 as we say, because the law of habit impels, or compels us. And there is no doubt 
 that many of our religious duties become, in the course of years, matters of habit 
 sometimes in a good sense, sometimes in a bad ; in a good sense, when habit 
 prompts obedience, but does not deaden the conscious seriousness and meaning 
 which we throw into each particular art ; in a bad sense, when all such conscious- 
 ness and meaning has gone, and habit is merely the surviving mechanism, or the 
 skeleton of a lite that is no more, carrying on the outward framework of prayer and 
 piety, while the spirit, the motive, the temper, the purpose which should animate it 
 
 387
 
 FINAL PERSEVERANCE NOT INEVITABLE. 
 
 is gone. This is what we lightly call formalism that is, not the observance of 
 forms as such, since some forms are necessary for all religions, even the most 
 puritanical ; but the observance of forms which are mere forms forms which have 
 no living meaning ; forms which are prescribed by habit, and which are not 
 seconded and vivified by the inner devotion, by the deliberate intention of the soul. 
 It is clear that habit of this kind, extending only to the outer framework, and not 
 to the spirit, the motive, the temper of the religious life, is no sort of guarantee for 
 pei-severance. It is in no kind of condition even to withstand a shock, much less 
 to surmount an obstacle. It is like the scaffolding still remaining in the air when 
 the building which it supported, and which, in turn, supported it. is removed. It is 
 clearly in a very precarious situation ; it may even come down with a crash at 
 any moment. 
 
 It is supposed, secondly, that perseverance can be achieved by determination, 
 by the resolute effort of a strong natural will. We English, it has been said by a 
 popular writer, are, as a rule. by nature Pelagians a self-reliant people, with good 
 reasons in the past for knowing that we have qualities which can hold their own 
 against the world. We carry sometimes into our religious life a temper which is 
 strangely out of place in it. Will can do a very great deal in the order and 
 sphere of nature. It can make the most of time ; it can crush down opponents : 
 it can silence insurgent passion : it can make light of even formidable obstacles ; 
 it can lash decaying strength into unwonted effort : it can conquer lassitude, 
 fear, misgiving. Most self-made men, to use the familiar phrase, are men of some 
 intelligence, indeed, and common sense, but of still more will. Will, it is, that has 
 surmounted the successive difficulties that hampered them, and, by conquering 
 which, they are what they are. 
 
 But it does not follow from this that will can persevere at pleasure in such a 
 region as that of the Christian life. The will can do much almost everything, 
 except be sure of itself under circumstances which are against the grain of 
 nature. The will to persevere must exist in force before the will can achieve 
 perseverance ; and such a will to persevere is not a matter of course, like the will 
 to get on in business is with one class of men, or the will to rise in society with 
 another class. The will to be a downright Christian to the end of life must be 
 rooted in a deep, constantly present sense of the preciousness and the difficulty of 
 being a downright Christian, and of the need of constant supplies of grace and 
 strength from Almighty God in order to be one. Without God we are not able to 
 please Him. A natural will, however strong, is a sorry substitute in this matter for 
 supernatural grace. 
 
 And then again and i n a very different quarter it is assumed that if a man once 
 has the grace of Jesus Christ in his heart, he must persevere in the Christian life. 
 This is what is called the doctrine of indefectible grace. It is no part of the 
 apostolic teaching. It is a creation of the genius the misdirected genius, as we 
 must think it of Calvin. Calvin wanted to find and proclaim a sort of personal 
 assurance of salvation which might stand timid and doubtful minds in good 
 stead in an age of religious revolution, when the old landmarks of authority were 
 being lost sight of, and there was a disposition abroad to despair of the power of 
 religion to present anything whatever as fixed and certain. To the mass of 
 minds in this condition, Calvin said in effect, " Only be satisfied that you have once 
 received God's grace in conversion, and it must be well with you. His grace, 
 once given, is never withdrawn. His grace, once given, proves His will to save 
 you ; and is not His will stronger than yours ? Did not our Saviour say that none 
 should pluck out of the Father's hand those whom the Father had given to Him ? 
 Did not St. Paul lay down the rule that ' the gifts and calling of God are without 
 repentance ' in individuals, it may be presumed, no less than in races ? Did not 
 St. John teach that ' he that is born of God sinneth not.' and that ' the wicked one 
 toucheth him not ' ? Is it. after all, strange " this is the emphatic point of the 
 argument " is it strange that if the Almighty and infinite Being deigns to visit us 
 at all, His lightest touch should have a resistless power ? And can our hearts refuse 
 to welcome a message which thus summarily relieves us of anxiety, and makes us 
 comfortable for the rest of our existence ? " Calvin, my brethren, as I have said. 
 was a man of genius ; but, it may be questioned whether any misrepresentation of 
 the apostolic teaching, since the days of the apostles themselves, has, upon the 
 whole, done more mischief than this particular theory of indefectible grace. It 
 is, I say, a misrepresentation of the teaching of the New Testament, since it 
 entirely ignores the drift of the greater part of it, in order to fix a particular 
 sense upon a few isolated passages. 
 
 388
 
 FINAL PERSEVERANCE NOT INEVITABLE. 
 
 When our Lord says that none can pluck from the Father's hand those who 
 are His, He does not say that they who are His may not themselves break or fall 
 away from Him. What else is the meaning of that terrible question, ' ; Have not I 
 chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil .' " When St. Paul says that God's 
 gifts are without repentance on God's part, he does not add that they cannot be 
 rejected by man, since this had already been the case, with that very generation 
 of Jews about which he was writing ~lo the llomans. When St. John says that 
 ' He that is born of God sinneth not," he does not forget his own saying, " If we 
 (Christians) say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in 
 us." He only urges that that in us which sins is not the principle of the ne\v life; 
 that a regenerate man, so far as his new nature controls him. does not sin. 
 
 On the other hand, our Lord and His apostle? treat human nature as free, 
 practically, to choose evil, even when it is under the influence of grace. Not to 
 multiply quotations, consider that pathetic account of his own self-discipline 
 which St. Paul gives to the Church at Corinth, " I keep under my body, and bring 
 it into subjection." Why .' " Lest that by any means, when I have preached to 
 others, I myself should be a reprobate." There is no question, I take it, that St. Paul 
 was in a state of grace when he wrote the first epistle to the Corinthians, and, if 
 language has any meaning, there can be as little question that he distinctly puts 
 before his mind, as a fearful possibility, the contingency of his forfeiting apostle 
 as he was by an unchastened life, the great graces which he had received, and 
 that altogether. 
 
 The ruinous consequences of this misapprehension about grace are not far to 
 seek. It reduces, for instance, first of all, Christian sacraments to the level of mere 
 charms. Christians believe that the sacraments are means of grace ; that grace, 
 so far as we know, at least with certainty, not otherwise to be had, is certainly 
 conveyed through them as its appointed channels. But if this grace, instead of 
 being a Divine gift which may be forfeited, and is forfeited by unfaithfulness in 
 the recipient, is held to be an endowment which, once conveyed, can never pos- 
 sibly be withdrawn, then the sacraments become the means of insuring our salvation 
 mechanically, and without influencing our lives. And those persons who, unhappily, 
 believe grace to be indefectible, have tried to avoid this error by taking refuge in 
 an error still greater, and denying that the sacraments convey grace at all. 
 
 And still more mischievous is the notion of indefectible grace upon conduct. 
 It, practically, has lent in many and many a mistaken, but earnest, life, a fancied 
 licence to do what a man likes, since the future after death is assumed to be certain. 
 If grace is indefectible, probation, pioperly speaking, is at an end, because 
 free-will, properly speaking, is at an end. Nothing remains but a life which, like 
 that of a vegetable, obeys a force which is beyond its resistance. What is this but 
 fatalism, disguised, if you will, in Christian phrases, but fatalism as destructive of 
 the sense of moral responsibility as is the fatalism which coarsely tells us that we 
 can control neither our conduct nor our destiny, since we issue from the blind 
 forces of nature, which only indulge us for a passing moment with the illusion of 
 free-will, ere they bury us again in the folds of matter from which we seem to have 
 emerged 1 Cromwell, as he lay dying, asked a question which showed that, at the 
 near approach of death, this sad illusion seemed to his clear intellect to be what it 
 really is ; but a death-bed is not the place to pass in review an error which has been 
 hugged through life, and his advisers knew too well how to quiet him. 
 
 No, brethren, the grace of God does not make our final perseverance inevitable. 
 It makes it possible, probable, morally certain, if you will, but morally, and not 
 mechanically certain. God who has made us free respects the freedom which He 
 has given us. He does not crush it even by His own merciful gifts ; and grace no 
 more absolutely assures heaven than does natural will, or the force of habit, conquer 
 the road to it. 
 
 And this leads me to ask, What are the causes which make endurance to the 
 end more or less difficult in so very many Christian lives .' 
 
 There is, first of all, what our Lord calls " The persecution that ariseth because 
 of the Word." In some shape or other this is inevitable. In the text, no doubt, our 
 Lord is thinking, at any rate partly, of literal persecution, such as the first 
 Christians experienced at the hands of the Jews, and, subsequently, of the pagan 
 Roman empire. "They shall deliver you up," He says. " to be afflicted, and shall 
 kill you ; and ye shall be hated of all nations for My Name's sake ; and then shall 
 many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another." 
 There are persecutions and persecutions great and bloody persecutions, such as a 
 Nero or a Decius could inaugurate on an imposing scale : and, as wo know, petty 
 
 389
 
 FINAL PERSEVERANCE NOT INEVITABLE. 
 
 persecutions which are all that is permitted to the native ferocity of the persecu- 
 ting temper by the milder manners of a more civilised age. But persecution, what- 
 ever its scale, is a trial to perseverance. Persecution is, in any case, friction: and, 
 as we all know, friction, if only it be continued long enough, brings movement to a 
 standstill, until there be a new supply of the impelling force. Men who have 
 done much for Christ have given way at the last under the stress of relentless perse- 
 cution. And, perhaps, petty persecutions are more trying to perseverance, in some 
 ways, than great ones. Men who would not flinch from the axe or from the stake 
 will yield to the incessant worry of domestic or local tyranny to the persecutions 
 which make home wretched, or the office or the shop or the dormitory well-nigh 
 intolerable. Why do we pray in the church service that " the evils which the 
 craft and subtlety of the devil or man worketh against us be brought to nought, 
 and, by the providence of God's goodness, may be dispersed " ? It is that we, His 
 servants, " being hurt by no persecutions, may evermore give thanks unto Him in 
 His holy Church." In other words, it is because persecution involves a serious risk 
 to perseverance. 
 
 And then there are, as our Lord says, the false christs and the false prophets. 
 In those days it was an adventurer who traded on the religious enthusiasm of his 
 compatriots led them out to some desert or to some mountain side to enjoy for a 
 moment the delirium of an impossible delusion, and then, perhaps, to suffer the 
 punishment of a supposed political offence. In our days it is a sceptical friend ; 
 it is an article in a review ; it is the general atmosphere of the social circle in 
 which we live. Our faith is undermined by people who talk and write in the very 
 best English, and who have so much about them that is winning and agreeable that 
 we cannot believe what is really going on. Still, after a time, we find that we have 
 less hold on the unseen than we had ; that prayer is more difficult ; that conscience 
 is more sluggish ; that religious exertion of all kinds is more unwelcome ; and 
 this, I say, means that the soul's hold on the central realities is, to say the very 
 least, weakened, if that is, indeed, anything like a full and true account of wha't 
 has taken place. We cannot go on breathing a bad air, and be as we were when 
 we lived high up upon the mountain, unless we take very great precautions. Jfot 
 to take them under such circumstances as these is to be in a fair way to forfeit 
 perseverance. 
 
 And then there is the weariness which steals over thought and heart with the 
 lapse of time. Human faculties, after all, are finite. They spend themselves, and 
 they fall back into lassitude and exhaustion. When the apostles first followed our 
 Lord, they tasted the exquisite pleasure of a new spiritual sensation, fascinating, 
 exhilarating, overpowering in its matchless enjoyment. " We have found the 
 Messiah " included all that was meant by this divine experience. They could say 
 no more. There are moments, my brethren, in all lives which, from the nature of 
 the case, cannot be repeated. Such is the joy of the schoolboy who has just won 
 his first prize. Such is the joy of the young couple who have, in spite of many 
 obstacles, just been wedded. Such is the joy of the parent whose child has 
 recovered from a first and all but fatal illness. So, too, in the mental and moral 
 spheres, the first large and true view of intellectual truth lying out like a landscape 
 before the mind's eye, the first act of pure and real self-sacrifice these, too, bring, 
 each in its way, a pleasure too keen and too intense to last, our natural faculties being 
 what they are. We cannot sustain ourselves at these elevations. It is permitted 
 us to mount, but we pass our allotted moments, and then we descend. And so. 
 too, in the highest life of the soul, though here we Christians have divine grace 
 to help us, and the circumstances are not altogether parallel. Yet who that has 
 known it can ever, ever forget the soul's first distinctly felt vision and embrace of 
 the Christian creed, and of Him who is its centre and its subject ! Who can forget 
 that spring-time of the truest life when sacred words, learnt in boyhood, but not 
 yet really understood, blossomed out all at once into a vivid and overpowering mean- 
 ing, when the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the ascension, the per- 
 petual intercession, were first felt to be moments or acts in the life of a Friend much 
 nearer to us than the very nearest relatives, when the inestimable love of the 
 redemption, and the transcendent glories of the risen life of Jesus, and the operative 
 presence and power of the Spirit and of the sacraments in the church or body of 
 Christ, first meant for us what the apostle's words meant to the men who read, first 
 of all, the Epistle to the Ephesians? Those who have known these joys do not, 
 cannot forget them ; but they are joys which, in their first buoyancy and fresh- 
 ness, cannot, from the nature of the case, be repeated in this life. St. Paul, we 
 may be sure, himself never lived over again that which followed the scene on the 
 
 390
 
 FINAL PERSEVERANCE NOT INEVITABLE. 
 
 road to Damascus. St. Augustine never renewed the unique experience which he 
 has described in the most interesting chapter of his "Confessions." And thus it is 
 that, after these great experiences, there is I do not say a relapse, but a condition 
 of less keenness of insight, less tension of will, less warmth of affections, less con- 
 scious effort of intelligence and of sanctified passion ; and lookers-on say that the 
 excitement has passed, and that common sense has resumed its sway. And the 
 soul, too, knows that something has passed from it, inevitably, no doubt, and from 
 the nature of the case. And with this knowledge there comes depression ; and 
 this depression is, in its way, a trial, permitted, as we may believe, in order to 
 make our service of Gcd more unselfish than it would be if it were sustained 
 throughout life by an uninterrupted sense of ecstasy. But it is a trial under which 
 some men have failed. At such times of depression, the old life, the world, 
 unbelief, the old half-sleeping passions put in a plea for another hearing, and the 
 soul, perhaps, listens. And then it may be God forbid that I should say it is 
 the case it may be the case that all is lost, and that perseverance is forfeited. 
 
 And once more, there is the trifling with conscience, not necessarily in great mat- 
 ters, but in a number of little matters omission of morning or evening prayer, or 
 their curtailment ; neglect of a regular review of conscience; carelessness as" to the 
 objects upon which money is spent, and as to the proportion in which it is given to 
 works of religion and mercy; recklessness in intercourse with others, especially if 
 they are younger or less well-informed. These and like matters help forward a dull 
 and inoperative condition of conscience, which is itself preparatory to a great failure. 
 Nor may we ever forget that, if this is so, we are not really alone; and that 
 there are around us unseen malignant powers who are bent upon our ruin, if they 
 can only effect it. 
 
 There is a school of natural philosophers which maintains that in the world of 
 nature there are, properly speaking, no such things as what are called catastrophes 
 that what look like catastrophes to us are, in reality, only the result of a long 
 series of causes steadily working on until, at last, they find visible expression in the 
 earthquake or the hurricane. And so certainly it is, at least generally speaking, in 
 the moral and spiritual world. When a man is converted to God, to a true life of 
 faith and obedience, be sure that many an influence was obeyed, many a ray of 
 light welcomed, many an attraction of grace cherished and responded to, before the 
 decisive moment came. And a great fall from grace has its appropriate antecedents 
 too little acts of unfaithfulness petty disloyalties to light and truth. We do not 
 see the process ; but it goes forward none the less, and at last there comes the 
 tragic issue the breaking away from the realms of light of a Demas or of a Lam- 
 menais. The old saying that no man becomss very bad all of a sudden " Nemo 
 repente fuit turpissimus " applies to the life of faith as well as of conduct. When 
 a star falls from heaven, we may be sure that there hav e been subtle and complex 
 causes for some time at work, ere the catastrophe was possible. Oh, it is a fearful 
 tragedy in Christian eyes, when it happens this forfeiture of perseverance. When, 
 as in the first lesson just read, a Solomon deserts the true God for Baalim and Ash- 
 taroth, when we are reminded that it is true that the gray-haired saint may fall 
 at last, it is like being wrecked, not in mid-ocean, but almost at the harbour's 
 mouth, and within a measurable distance of safety and of home. To have gone on 
 for years, believing, hoping, loving, as a Christian should, to have lived for long a 
 life of which, at any rate at times, prayer was the breath, and conscience the motive 
 power, to have had, as it seems to us. all our delight in the saints that are in the 
 earth and upon such as excel in virtue, to have been admitted, as a Christian soul 
 can be admitted, to the intimate knowledge I might dare to say, to the very em- 
 brace, of Christ. to have passed years, perhaps, even among His body-guard and 
 chosen associates, and then to lose all faith, hope, love, the power of prayer, the 
 voice of conscience, the sense of the sacred friendship, the sense of the presence and 
 the communion which is above the world, to lose all, and to pass out, like the lost 
 apostle, into the darkness of the night, to pass out and not to return oh, it is a 
 tragedy! But it has happened again and again, in ancient days, and in our own. 
 It may happen that is the point to be kept steadily in vkw it may hapr.en to any 
 Christian who hears me. Oh, how can we hope to retain the grace the precious 
 grace of perseverance ? 
 
 Perseverance, my brethren, is likely to be secured by three things especially. 
 
 First, by a sense of constant dependence upon God, since, as a matter of fact, 
 we cannot subsist spiritually, or in any other war, except with His aid. It is well 
 to bear this constantly in mind. To be self-confident is, of itself, to be in danger, 
 since " God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble." To be
 
 FINAL PERSEVERANCE NOT INEVITABLE. 
 
 constantly mindful that the life of the soul depends on God, that His right hand 
 upholds the soul if it is upheld at all this is'to be on the road to perseverance. 
 
 And, next, by prayer for perseverance. We have to remember that persever- 
 ance is a distinct grace, justlike faith, or hope, or charity. It must, therefore, be sought 
 and won by prayer, just as these other graces, and, perhaps, by very importunate 
 prayer. It is a good rule to set apart one day in the week to prayer for particular 
 objects. And Saturday, if I may make the suggestion Saturday, as the day which is 
 often devoted by serious Christians to preparation for death is a very good day for 
 prayer for perseverance. Do not be discouraged if, so far as you can see, your 
 prayer does not seem to be answered all at once. God may be testing your 
 integrity of purpose. Remember Elisha's words to the king of Israel who had 
 not the faith that could rightly use the arrows of Israel's deliverance. In order 
 to win perseverance, prayer must persevere. It is after describing all the parts of 
 the Christian's armour the girdle of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the 
 sandals of preparation, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of 
 the Spirit that the apostle adds, " Praying always with all prayer and supplica- 
 tion in the spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance." That is the 
 most important point, practically speaking, of all. 
 
 And, lastly, perseverance is especially assisted by keeping the mind fixed as 
 much as possible on the end of life and on that which follows it. Only let us 
 reflect that death is as certain for each one of us as its time, its immediate cause, 
 its attendant circumstances, are matters of uncertainty, and we begin to see this 
 life and what belongs to it in its true aspect and proportions. We learn to sit 
 lightly to it, and to embark something less than the best half of our hearts in 
 its concerns and its interests. The shore may still be distant, but the sailor keeps 
 his eyes on it as he prajs for the skill and the strength to weather .the passing 
 storm. On those heights which are beyond the valley of death, the eyes of the 
 predestinate constantly rest, and the sight sustains them in times of trial, of 
 darkness, of despair, which were otherwise fatal. " I should utterly have fainted, 
 but that I believe verily to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." 
 The end, brethren, is indeed, well worth the effort ; and, since we are in the 
 bands of Infinite Love, the effort will be enduring if the end be kept steadily in 
 view. 
 
 392
 
 THE LAW PEEPARING FOE CHEIST. 
 
 jfcrmon 
 
 REV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D. 
 
 (Canon of St. Paul's,') 
 
 PREACHED IN 
 
 ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 19TH, 1880. 
 
 " Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that wo might be 
 justified by faith." GALATIASS iii. 24, 
 
 On the Sunday next before Christmas Day, we cannot do wrong 
 in thinking about some one of the agents or influences which 
 prepared the world for our Lord Jesus Christ. The whole people 
 and history of Israel was in a large sense a preparation for Him. He 
 was its climax ; He was its finished product ; and when He had 
 appeared Israel had done its real work in the world. Israel prepared 
 the world for Christ in many ways. All that was excellent and 
 saintly in its great men was a shadow of some aspect in the character 
 of Him that was to come. Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, 
 David, the great messengers who from age to age proclaimed God's 
 truth to Israel, the strong and heroic leaders who brought Israel 
 back from the darkness and from the chains of Babylon these 
 were all in their various ways types of the great Kedeemer. 
 But Israel made ready His path of suffering and of glory by two 
 means beyond all others. First, Israel was the people of prophecy ; 
 and prophecy amongst its many other achievements achieved this : 
 it " testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that 
 should follow." It told the world all about Him before He came ; 
 and men might have read, if they would, in the pages of the 
 prophets, what they read afterwards, expressed in other terms, 
 in the pages of the apostles and evangelists Christ's pre-existent 
 life, His birth of a virgin mother, the character and the effects of 
 His ministry, His profound humiliations, His agonising death, His 
 triumph, and His glory. Over all these books He Himself has 
 traced the motto, " These are they that testify of Me." 
 
 But Israel was also the people of the law. The legislation of 
 Sinai was one of seven distinctive glories which, in a passage of 
 critical importance, St. Paul ascribes to Israel ; and the law thus 
 given was like prophecy in this : it, too, was meant to lead to Christ. 
 It was a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ, that they might be 
 justified by faith. " The law" it is one of a group of words round 
 which the thought of St. Paul constantly moves ; and he uses it in 
 more senses than one. Hera he means by it generally the five books 
 of Moses to which the Jews commonly gave the name ; and more 
 particularly he means those parts of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, 
 and Deuteronomy, in which are contained the various rules which 
 No. 1,130 p. NEW SERIES.
 
 THE LAW PREPARING FOR CHRIST. 
 
 God gave to Moses for the moral, social, political, and religions or 
 ceremonial conduct of the people of Israel. This was the law in 
 which, as St. Paul said, the Jew of his day made his boast. He was 
 proud to belong to the race that had received it. This was the law, 
 the possession of which made Israel " a peculiar people," marking it 
 off by a deep-cut line of separation from all the other nations of the 
 world. This was the law which it was the business of every Israelite 
 to obey. In obeying it he would become just ; that is such as he 
 ought to be when measured by a higher than human standard, and 
 this legal righteousness it was the object, if he could it was the glory 
 of his life to acquire in the greatest possible degree of perfection. Of 
 this law, then, St. Paul says bluntly that its main purpose was not pre- 
 sent but prospective ; it was not, after all, to be so much prized on its 
 own account as for the sake of that to which it was to lead. It was 
 really like those slaves who were kept in well-to-do households in the 
 ancient world, first to teach the children of their masters roughly, or 
 as well as they could, and then to lead them down day by day to the 
 school of some neighbouring philosopher at whose hands they would 
 receive real instruction. This, then, was the business of the law. It 
 did the little it could do for the Jewish people as an elementary in- 
 structor, and then it had to take them by the hand and lead them to 
 the school of Jesus Christ, that great institute which he, the true 
 light of the world, had opened, that he might give in it the true, the 
 highest education to all the races of mankind. 
 
 St. Paul had a very strong reason for insisting on this aspect of 
 the law in his letter to the Galatian churches, for these churches had 
 quite recently been visited by certain teachers who made free and 
 unwarrantable use of the names of the great apostles, St. Peter and 
 St. James, and thus tried to persuade the Galatians that the Christian 
 church had not abandoned the ceremonial part of the Jewish law, 
 that, since it was practised more or less by the Christians of the 
 church of Jerusalem, it was binding upon converts from heathenism 
 all the world over, and that, if the Galatians meant to be genuine 
 Christians and not mere half Christians, they must lose no time in 
 complying with the requirements of the perfect Christian life. To 
 begin with, as they were converts from heathenism, they must forth- 
 with be circumcised ; and, when St. Paul wrote, the Galatians, though 
 they were already baptized into Christ, and had put on Christ, were 
 actually busying themselves about getting circumcised. It was too 
 much for the apostle; he can keep no terms with the Galatian 
 Christians; he exclaims, indignantly, "0, foolish Galatians, who hath 
 bewitched you that you should not obey the truth ? Behold, I, Paul, 
 say unto you that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you 
 nothing." But here, as always, St. Paul rests particular directions 
 upon broad and general truths. Why was circumcision so entirely 
 out of the question for a baptized Christian ? Because circumcision 
 was the shadow of the substance which the Christian man already 
 enjoyed ; because the law which prescribed circumcision had already 
 done its true work in the world and in history ; because the law was 
 meant to lead men to Christ that they might secure a real and not a 
 fictitious or outward righteousness. And Christ had come. He had 
 been incarnate ; He had been crucified ; He had risen ; He had 
 ascended to His throne of glory ; and the law had left mankind at 
 282
 
 THE LAW PREPARING FOR OHRIST. 
 
 the school of Christ. Where was the sense of leaving the feet of the 
 great instructor to rejoin ihe slave who had merely shown the way to 
 Him ? 
 
 Now, the question arises, How did the law lead men to Christ? The 
 law led men toChrist, first of all, by foreshadowing Him. This was true 
 especially of the ceremonial part of it which St. Paul, aswehave seen, had 
 more immediately in view when he wrote to the Galatians, although 
 the principle which he lays down applies to the whole law. Now, the 
 ceremonials of divine service which were prescribed to Israel in the 
 law were not ceremonies with no end beyond themselves. It may be 
 doubted whether there are any such things as purely meaningless 
 ceremonies, whether in civil or in religious life, since, human nature 
 being what it is, a ceremony is dropped as soon as it ceases to mean 
 something, and while it lasts it is valued more or less because it does 
 mean something, whether present, or past, or future. The cere- 
 monies of the Jewish law prescribed by such high authority, so 
 detailed, so elaborate in themselves, were not, we may be sure, there 
 for nothing'; and they meant much more than the general duty of 
 offering to God praise and sacrifice, since this might have been secured 
 by much simpler rites. What, for instance, was the full meaning of 
 the solemn and touching observance of the Jewish day of Atone- 
 ment ? Many a Jew must have asked himself that question ; some 
 may have nearly guessed the answer ; but every Christian knows what 
 the answer is when he has read the Epistle to the Hebrews. We 
 know that what passed in that old earthly sanctuary was from first 
 to last a shadow of the majestic self-oblation of the true High Priest 
 of Christendom, Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour. We know that 
 every action in the service had its counterpart in His self-presentation 
 as crucified before the majesty of the Father ; that, while it was in- 
 trinsically impossible that the blood of bulls and goats should take 
 away sin, it is equally certain that we Christians are sanctified by the 
 olfering of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all, and that " by one 
 offering he has perfected for ever them that arc sanctified." It may 
 be urged with justice that this aspect of the ceremonial law is plain 
 enough to us who look back on it all with the New Testament in our 
 hands, but that it can hardly have been plain to the Israelites 
 themselves. We have the key to the meaning of that old ritual. 
 The Jews knew little more than that their ritual meant something, 
 something that awaited them in the providence of God ; that it was 
 a shadow of good things to come ; but thus much at least they did 
 know, and this knowledge kept them on the look-out for what might 
 be in store for them. Each ceremony was felt to have some mean- 
 ing beyond the time then present, and so it fostered an expectant 
 habit of mind ; and, as the ages passed, these expectations thus created 
 converged more and more towards a coming Messiah, and in a sub- 
 ordinate bnt real way the ceremonial law did its part in leading the 
 nation to the school of Christ. 
 
 But secondly, and most effectively, the law led men to Christ by 
 creating in man's conscience a sense of want which Christ alone 
 could relieve. This was the work of the moral law, of every moral 
 precept in the books of Moses, but especially of those most sacred 
 and authoritative precepts which we know as the Ten Command- 
 ments. As a rule of life the law was elaborate and exacting ; and, if 
 
 283
 
 THE LAW PREPARING FOR CHRIST. 
 
 the righteousness which it was to confer was to be secured, nothing 
 less than exact obedience was necessary. The law was guarded by 
 those great sayings to which the Christian apostles appealed, " The 
 man that does these things shall live by them." " Cursed is every- 
 one that continueth not in all things that are written in the book of 
 the law to do them.'' " Whosoever shall keep the whole law and 
 yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all." Righteousness, then, 
 under the law depended upon exact obedience. But where were the 
 probabilities that this would be rendered by man in his old, unas- 
 sisted weakness ? What was the fact, obvious to all who looked 
 about them and saw what was passing in Jewish society and life ? 
 St. Paul prefers to answer this, to him, most painful question in the 
 inspired language of an earlier age. "As it is written,'' he says, 
 " there is none righteous, no, not one. They are all gone out of the 
 way ; they are altogether become unprofitable ; there is none that 
 doeth good, no, not one." And then, to obviate the objection that 
 this language was originally used by an ancient psalmist of the 
 enemies of Israel, St. Paul adds, " We know that what things soevci 
 the law saith" (here you Bee he means by the "law" the whole 
 canon of the Old Testament) " it saith to them who are under the 
 law that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may be- 
 come guilty before God." This was, indeed, the hard matter of 
 fact. The law was universally disobeyed : its true purpose was now 
 to discover human sin, of which, but for it, man would have been 
 unconscious. " By the law is the knowledge of sin." It was like a 
 torch carried into the dark cellars and crevices of human nature that 
 it might reveal the foul shapes that lurked there, and might rouse 
 man to long for a righteousness which it could not itself confer. 
 Nay, in the process of doing this the law sometimes aggravated the 
 very evil which it brought to light. The presence of a divine rule 
 which forbade the indulgence of human passions had the effect of 
 irritating these passions into new self-asserting activity. " I had 
 not known sin, but by the law : for I had not known lust, unless the 
 law had said, Thou shalt not covet." In the absence of the law the 
 sinful tendency had been inert ; without the law the sin was dead ; 
 "but when the commandment" (that is, a given precept of the 
 law) " came, sin revived, and I died." Not that the law was 
 answerable for this result; the law in itself was "holy, just, and 
 good." The cause lay in the profoundly sinful tendency of fallen 
 human nature, but the general result was the same an aggravated 
 sense of shortcoming. So far from furnishing man witB a real 
 righteousness so far from making him such as he should be, cor- 
 respondent to the true ideal of his nature, the law only inflicted on 
 every conscience that was not fatally benumbed a depressing and 
 overwhelming conviction that righteousness, at least in the way of 
 legal obedience, was a thing impossible. And this conviction of 
 itself prepared men for a righteousness which should be not 
 the product of human efforts, but a gift from heaven a righteous- 
 ness to be attained by the adhesion of faith to the perfect moral 
 Being, Jesus Christ, so that the believer's life becomes incorporate 
 with His, and man becomes such as he should be, or in other words, 
 is " justified by faith." 
 
 But, thirdly, the law led men to Christ by putting them under a 
 discipline which trained them for Him. And this is a point which 
 284
 
 THE LAW PREPARING FOR CHRIST. 
 
 requires, oven more than the preceding, your careful attention. Look 
 around you, my brethren, and ask yourselves, AVhat is the divine plan 
 for training, whether men or nations ? la it not this, to begin with 
 rule, and to end with principle, to begin with law and to end with 
 faith to begin with Moses and to end with Christ ? Take the case 
 of a study, say grammar. A boy begins with rules ; he learns them 
 by heart without seeing the reasons for them ; and he applies them. 
 His one business, first of all, is simply this, to follow the rule ; by- 
 and-bye he comes to see that the rules of grammar are not arbitrary 
 things made by the old schoolmasters out of their own heads, but 
 that these rules could not be other than they are, since they only 
 put into a practical and working shape the principles of language. 
 In other words, the boy ascends from rule to principle ; he does not 
 give up rule, but he rests it on the reason or principle which war- 
 rants it ; he obeys it not for the sake of obedience, but because in 
 view of his larger knowledge he cannot help doing so. Or take the 
 case of a nation in its earlier history. If it is to hold together it 
 it must have a strict and stern code of laws. All the earlier 
 national codes are of this character. The first object of a nation 
 and of its rulers is to preserve order. During these earlier ages of 
 its history a nation, is, if we may so say, at school ; but a time 
 comes when it reaches manhood. Does it then discard law, and dis- 
 solve through some process of revolution into sheer anarchy ? If it 
 is wise, most assuredly not. It retains law, probably in a milder 
 form, but it rests law more and more as time goes on upon the 
 public apprehension of the principles which warrant it. The prin- 
 ciples of its earlier laws pass into, and become identified with, the 
 public feeling. Public feeling does two-thirds of the work which 
 mere law did at earlier stages of the national life. In other words, 
 the nation has passed by a process of inevitable growth from the 
 reign of law to that of principle. Or take the growth of a man in 
 his apprehension, say of moral truth. What is its rule of develop- 
 ment ? The child learns from his mother that he must not tell a 
 lie, and that if he is found out he will be punished. Gradually the 
 habit of truthfulness is formed by rale by rule enforced by punish- 
 ment ; but a time comes when the mind of the boy has grown, and 
 when this rule is seen to rest on principle, the principle that the 
 recognition of truth is the very first condition of all true moral and 
 human life. When this point has been gained, the old rule, " Tell 
 no lies," does not, indeed, disappear, but it is no longer needed. 
 The man who has passed under the sway of principle does not wish 
 to tell a lie. He could not tell a lie without doing utter violence to 
 the whole of his better nature. The reasons against lying have with 
 him passed into a ruling instinct ; I had almost said, into a passion. 
 In other words he has been led by law or rule as by a servant of the 
 God who has arranged his education : he has been led to the school 
 of principle. 
 
 Well, my brethren, this is what happened on a great scale in God's 
 religious education of the world. St. Paul describes the condition 
 of the people of Israel as that of an heir to a great property, who 
 while he is a child practically lives the life of a servant, though he is 
 really lord or proprietor of the estate. He is " under tutors and 
 governors until the time appointed of the father/' God began with 
 rule. He gave the Mosaic law, and the moral parts of that law 
 
 285
 
 THE LAW PREPARING FOR CHRIST. 
 
 being also laws of God's own essential nature could not possibly be 
 abrogated ; but as rules of life the Ten Commandments were only a 
 preparation for something beyond them. In that old earlier revela- 
 tion God only said, " Do this : do not do that." In the later or 
 Christian revelation he did much more. He said in effect, " Join 
 yourselves by an act of adhesion of your whole moral nature to the 
 perfect moral Being ; " in other words, " Believe on the Lord Jesns 
 Christ." When you have done this, and He on His part has in His 
 appointed ways by his Spirit and His Sacraments infused into you 
 His divine life so that you are one with Him, you will not depend 
 any longer mainly upon rules of conduct. You will not disobey him. 
 You will feel that disobedience would be for you impossible. These 
 rules will have ceased to be outward rules by being absorbed into the 
 new life of principle. " How shall we who are dead to sin live any 
 longer therein ?" "They that are Christ's have crucified the flesh 
 with the affections and lusts." The whole question has been decided 
 on higher grounds, and thus we see the apostle's meaning, or part of 
 it, when he says, " That which the law could do, in that it was weak 
 through the flesh " that is, through the impotence of fallen human 
 nature to obey it, " God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful 
 flesh, and to atone for sin, condemned sin in the flesh,'' which in 
 His condescension He made His own. Why ? " That the righteous- 
 ness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the 
 flesh, but after the spirit." Such, then, is justification by faith. It 
 is so far from being moral anarchy that it is the absorption of 
 rule into the higher life of principle. In the experience of the soul 
 faith corresponds to the empire of principle in the growth of indi- 
 vidual chcracter and in the development of national life, while the 
 law answers to that elementary stage in which outward rules are 
 not yet absorbed into principle. 
 
 And this leads me to make one or two practical remarks in con- 
 clusion. Why do the children of excellent parents often turn out so 
 very badly ? Why is there any truth in the comparison of the sons 
 of clergymen to the sons of Pericles, or, alas, in some cases to the sons 
 of Eli ? Here we must avoid the danger of thinking to account for 
 all the instances by a single reason ; but is not the reason of some, if 
 not of many, of the failures about which I am thinking, this that 
 parents, in bringing up their children, forget the divine order, first 
 rule, then principle ; first Moses, then Jesus Christ ? Many a parent 
 seems to think that the inverse of this order is the road to educational 
 success. He says to himself that the severe education of children two 
 generations or one generation ago was a great mistake ; he will have 
 no rules for his children, and will try to supply them with fine, and 
 true, and elevating principles; and thus children are talked to now- 
 a-days about sentiments and feelings and general principles of 
 conduct which they do not understand, while they are allowed all the 
 while to have their own way, and there is no approach to discipline in 
 their early life. Recollect, the child's mind is concrete : it is not 
 abstract. It understands a plain rule enforced by a reward or by a 
 penalty. It does not understand a principle, and, if it has no prac- 
 tical rules put before it to obey, and is only dosed with principles or 
 what are said to be principles, it is not, depend upon it, educated at 
 all. The foolish parent thinks that the time for applying rule will 
 come when the boy is approaching manhood and finds himself 
 286
 
 THE LAW PREPARING FOR CHRIST. 
 
 surrounded by the temptations of that time. But the boy who has 
 never learned to obey a rule when he was six or eight years old will 
 not obey anything very easily, whether it be rule or principle, when 
 he is on the verge of twenty. No. Education must begin with 
 the discipline of the law tender discipline, if you will, but still real 
 discipline if it is to end safely in the freedom of the life of principle. 
 You cannot begin with Christ and go back to Moses in education or 
 anything else ; and a thoughtless sentimentalism which ventures on 
 the experiment is doomed beforehand to the most cruel of human 
 di sappointments. 
 
 And hero, too, we have a word for the guidance of churches. A 
 Christian church from the necessity of the case is based on faith ; 
 that is on principle. It represents by its existence the definitive 
 triumph of believing principle over mere outward Jewish rule ; it 
 does not discard rule : far from it ; but it provides for the good that 
 is to be achieved by rale by insisting always on the higher influence 
 of principle, and thus the true direction of the church's life would 
 seem to be adherence to principle combined with freedom as to all 
 that touches mere outward rule. In modern language Holy Scrip- 
 ture, the three great creeds which guard the faith, the essential 
 conditions of the means of grace that is the governing and 
 informing principles of the church's life should all of them be 
 defended to the very last extremity ; but as to matters of mere cere- 
 monial and the like, there should be, if we are followers of St. Paul, 
 as much freedom as is compatible with the very elementary require- 
 ments of order. Where the faith is held sincerely, the rules of out- 
 ward observance may be largely left to take care of themselves. The 
 margin of liberty within which devotional feeling at very different 
 stages of its growth finds its congenial expressions should be as wide 
 as possible. We can imagine, perhaps, a different condition of things 
 from this. We can imagine a church in which principle so to 
 calls the truths of faith is regarded as of comparatively little 
 moment, while rule as to strictly outward matters is treated as 
 vital. We can imagine a church which says to her ministers, 
 " Teach what you will as to the penalties which await the lost in the 
 life to come, even though the author of your faith has said, in the 
 plainest language, that these penalties last for ever ; say, if you like, 
 that your Bible is honey-combed with legendary and uncertain 
 matter, provided only that you do not say it too coarsely and too 
 provokingiy ; but beware, oh, beware, of the crime for which our 
 modern wisdom reserves its sternest condemnations the crime of 
 wearing a vestment too many, or a vestment too few, since this may 
 expose you to ruder penalties than any which are at the disposal of a 
 spiritual society." We can imagine, I say, a Christian church hold- 
 ing this language. My brethren, I correct myself: we can not 
 imagine it ; we can only suppose that if she should seem to speak 
 thus" some foreign power must for the moment have taken the place of 
 her own pastors, and be using language which they would fain repu- 
 diate if they could. Ah ! there are few men in ancient history to 
 whom more injustice has been done ay, in the pulpits of the Chris- 
 tian Church than Junius Gallio, pro-consul of Achaia, in 
 the year of our Lord 53, when St. Paul was conducting his grout 
 mission in Corinth. Gallio has been exhibited in thousands of 
 sermons as the master type of indifference to the great concerns of 
 
 287
 
 THE LAW PREPARING FOR CHRIST. 
 
 religion ; whereas, in point of fact, Gallio was a Roman magistrate of 
 the very highest character, who had a perfectly clear idea of the 
 subjects which fell properly within his jurisdiction. His well-known 
 brother, Seneca, the stoic philosopher, said of Gallio that he was 
 loved by everybody, even by .those who loved nobody else ; and Seneca 
 dedicated to him two of his most celebrated treatises in terms which 
 show us something of the high character of the man. Gallio, we all 
 know, refused to listen to the Jews when they dragged St. Paul 
 before his tribunal, on the ground that he was asked to interfere in 
 what seemed to him to be a question of words and names the pro- 
 found questions as we know which divided the faith of St. Paul and 
 the Christian church from the convictions of the neighbouring 
 Jewish synagogue. But let us suppose that Gallio, although a pagan, 
 had ; taken a different view of his duty that he had attempted to 
 decide not only the worth of St. Paul's theological position in opposi- 
 tion to the Jewish synagogue, but the various questions internal to 
 the Christian church, which St. Paul discusses in his First Epistle to 
 the Corinthians, rivalries between the disciples of Paul and Cephas 
 and Apollosj the penalty due to the incestuous Corinthian; the 
 advisability of marriage or of single life in Christians ; the lawfulness 
 of the use of meat offered in sacrifice to idols ; the dress of Christian 
 women in Christian churches; the behaviour of Christians at the 
 Holy Communion; or, graver far, the crowning question of the rela- 
 tion of those who denied the resurrection of the dead to the faith of 
 the apostolical Church. If we could imagine Gallio first studying 
 and then pronouncing on these questions, can we imagine how 
 St. Paul would have received his conclusions ? No, my brethren ; we 
 are here altogether in the region of the imaginary ; but this, at least, 
 is certain, that to lay great emphasis upon minute rules in the case of 
 an ancient Christian church is not in accordance with the divine 
 plan of education, whether in the church or in the world, and that 
 when this emphasis is laid, not by the Church herself but by some 
 other than a proper church authority, the divergence from the 
 divine plan is greatly aggravated, and the prospect of resulting con- 
 fusion is indefinitely increased. In churches, too, as in' education, 
 it is impossible, quite impossible, to go back from Christ to Moses. 
 
 But lastly, and above all, here we see what must be the main 
 effort of a Christian life. "We Christians are justified by faith by 
 taking our Lord at His word by believing what He has told us 
 about Himself by adhering with the whole strength of our inmost 
 life to Him to Him the perfect moral Being, Jesus Christ, our Lord 
 and God, incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended, for us men and for our 
 salvation. When this supreme act of adhesion, which we call faith, 
 is sincere, all else will must follow. The life of principle implies, 
 as a matter of course, all the results and many more of them all that 
 could be secured by the life of rule. United with Christ, by faith, we 
 share His righteousness; we are before the eyes of the All-Holy 
 what we should be, not through our own merits, but through His. 
 God grant that we may all know, with an increasing clearness, the 
 happiness of this vital union, the end of God's wisdom in the educa- 
 tion of each of us and of the world the condition which alone 
 enables us to look forward with peace and hope to the dread hour of 
 the judgment. 
 
 288
 
 "NOT WITH OBSERVATION." 
 
 REV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D., 
 
 (Canon of St. Paul's,) 
 
 PREACHED IN 
 
 ST, PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 OH SUNDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER STH, 1880. 
 
 " The kingdom of God cometh not with observation." Luke xvii. 20. 
 
 THIS was our Lord's reply to a question which the Pharisees put to 
 him as to when the kingdom of God should come. In asking this 
 question the Pharisees were the spokesmen of the great mass of 
 their countrymen : there was a general expectation of a good time 
 coming, of a time so good, so satisfying to man's best hopes, that 
 it would seem like a reign of God upon the earth. " The kingdom 
 of God." To the mind of the people at large that cherished expres- 
 sion probably did not convey any very definite meaning. The 
 phrase had come to them across the ages from psalmists and from 
 prophets. It had been repeated by father to son for many a long 
 generation ; but if any positive meaning was now popularly attached 
 to it, it was on the whole a meaning which most certainly was not 
 originally intended, My brethren, we all of ua read into our religious 
 language, if we use it sincerely at all, the wants and the circum- 
 stances of our own lives and our own age. We read our own meaning 
 into this language so often and so resolutely that what it was 
 meant to mean often becomes iu our eyes first of all obscure and 
 then improbable. And this is what had happened to the Jews of old. 
 They were, when our Lord came, a conquered people who had not 
 yet forgotten their days of freedom and of glory ; and so, in their 
 eyes, the kingdom of God seemed to be merely anew future for their 
 nation, when the sacred soil would be cleared of the presence of the 
 No. 1,126. L. NEW SERIES.
 
 ".NOT WITH OBSERVATION." 
 
 Roman invader, when the legionary and the tax-collector, and the 
 governors, the lictors and the eagles, would have disappeared all of them 
 in utter rout and confusion from the emancipated land, and when 
 Israel, in her restored unity and strength, would be again what she 
 once had been under David and Solomon, or something yet far more 
 glorious, 
 
 This was the kingdom of God of which the Pharisees were 
 thinking when they put their question to our blessed Lord. Having 
 this Idea of what the kingdom of God was to be, they asked him 
 when it would come ; and he read the true meaning of their ques- 
 tion as being, how would they know that it was coming ? They 
 thought, naturally and reasonably enough, that such a kingdom as 
 this, succeeding to, and being based on, a great political change, 
 could not come without some tokens of its approach some symp- 
 toms of social and revolutionary movement that would be at least 
 manifest to discerning eyes. How could the fabric of the Roman 
 power, even in a single province, be broken up and disappear ? How 
 could a new order of things be prepared to take its place without 
 some indications that could be read of what was owning ? When in 
 after years the great empire itself tottered to its fall, men traced 
 the presages of coming ruin long before it came. Long before the 
 Indian Mutiny of 1857 our English Government was warned that 
 mischief was in the air ; and the question of the Pharisees was in 
 accordance with all experience when it presumed that a great 
 change, such as they anticipated, could not take place without being 
 preceded by something that would announce it. 
 
 Supposing the Pharisees to be right in their idea of the kingdom 
 of God, their question then, or rather the drift of their question, 
 was reasonable enough ; but then they were wrong in their funda- 
 mental assumption. Our Lord first set aside their expectations as 
 to the coming of the kingdom. He then went on to hint in a few 
 words what in its essence it was. The kingdom of God, he said, 
 cometh not with observation ; its advance is not obvious to the 
 senses and the curiosity of men ; it moves onwards, it diffuses itself 
 without being perceived, without being commented upon ; and the 
 reason for this is that the kingdom is, in its essence, not a political 
 fabric such as the materialized and unspiritual fancy of the later 
 Jews, misled by a false patriotism, had conceived it to be, but a 
 spiritual world, touching this earth, indeed, by its contact with, and 
 its empire over, human souls, but reaching far, far away from the 
 sphere of sense, aye, to> the utmost confines of the world invisible. 
 Men wore not to say lo ! here, or lo ! there, for behold the kingdom 
 of God was within them. Its seat of power lay wholly beyond the 
 province and capacity of the eye and the ear : it lay in the hearts, the 
 consciences, the wills of men ; and, until the most secret processes of 
 the soul of man be displayed in sensuous forms, beneath the 
 light of day, the coming of such a kingdom as this must needs be 
 " not with observation." 
 
 Observe, the coming of the kingdom ; for when it had come it 
 could no longer, from the nature of the case, be thus wholly and 
 250
 
 " NOT WITH OBSERVATION." 
 
 altogether invisible. It was to consist of men in part of living 
 men ; and living men who act and speak as members of a common 
 society cannot but attract observation. The visible church is indeed 
 only a part, a very small part, of that vast kingdom of souls 
 which is ruled by God ; but when our Lord had given to this com- 
 pany of men a code of couduct in his sermon on the mount, and 
 had sketched its manner of advance and growth in a series of 
 parables, and had bequeathed it his best promises of support and 
 consolation as we have just now heard in his discourse in the upper 
 room, and when he had died and risen from death and ascended 
 into heaven, and had sent down his own eternal Spirit to quicken 
 and invigorate this new society with a superhuman life, and then by 
 the words and acts of his apostles had given to it its complete and 
 final form, so that to the end of time faithful men should know 
 what he, the Founder, had willed it to be, then, surely, it could not 
 escape observation ; but its coming that was without observation ; 
 it stole in upon the world as if it had been a breeze or an inspira- 
 tion. The Roman power stood unshaken in its strength and in its 
 pride ; there were no signs of its approaching dissolution ; but the 
 divine kingdom had also come ; it was even within some of those 
 who heard the announcement ; it had been welcomed to their very 
 hearts and minds ; but it had not attracted the attention of the 
 world. 
 
 " Not with observation.'' Let us trace this characteristic of the 
 coming of the kingdom of God at some of the most solemn moments 
 of history. Surely, brethren, never did the kingdom of God come 
 among men in a manner so direct, so blessed, and yet so awful, as 
 when he, the King of kings, the infinite and everlasting Being, 
 deigned in his unutterable condescension and love to robe himself 
 with a human body and a human soul in the womb of a virgin 
 mother, and thus in human form to hold high court among the 
 sons of men. Never did the King of heaven so come among us men 
 as when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea. Compared with 
 this stupendous event, the greatest catastrophes, the sublimest 
 triumphs, the most critical epochs in the world's whole history, 
 dwindle into insignificance. " God manifest in the flesh " was a 
 phenomenon the like of which had never yet been seen, and which 
 throws every other event in the annals of man utterly into the shade. 
 And what amount of public notice did it attract ? What were the 
 thoughts and interests of the mass of men in Palestine, think you, 
 on the day of the nativity ? The last news from Rome, the seat of 
 empire, the sayings and doings of the able but capricious statesman 
 who for a few years held in his hands the fate of the civilized world, 
 the last reports from the provinces, from the frontiers, from the 
 Rhine, from the Danube, from the Euphrates, the state and pros- 
 pects of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, the yield of the taxes in 
 this' province or in that, the misconduct of one provincial governor 
 or of another, or matters more local than these some phase of a long 
 controversy between the soldiers and the civilians, between Roman 
 officials and Jewish mobs, between this and that class of a subject 
 
 251
 
 ' " NOT WITH OBSERVATION." 
 
 population, the rivalries, the efforts, the failures, the successes, the 
 follies, the crimes, the misfortunes of a hundred contemporaries, the 
 usual staple of human thought and human talk, sometimes embracing 
 the wider interests of the race, more often concentrating itself 
 intensely on the pettiest details of daily private and domestic life, 
 this it was which, in those days, as in these, occupied the minds and 
 hearts of men. Aye, on that wonderful night, it was so even with 
 the villagers of Bethlehem ; they could find no room for the heavenly 
 visitant in their village hostelry ; they little heeded the manger 
 grotto outside where he, the Infinite, in human form, was laid along- 
 side of the ox and the ass. Truly, then, the kingdom of God had 
 come, but " not with observation." 
 
 Nor was it otherwise when this kingdom came some years after, 
 proclaimed by his own divine lips as the beautiful vision of a new 
 life and a new world, and taking possession, by gentle but resistless 
 persuasion, of the hearts and imaginations of the peasants of Galilee. 
 No one had noted the steps of its approach or the steps by which it 
 had succeeded. It passed like a secret contagion from soul to soul : 
 one brother brought another; this disciple engaged, apparently 
 without effort, the sympathies of that. Villages" districts, popula- 
 tions were won, they hardly knew why or how, by an invisible 
 charm which opened before their eyes the vision of a higher and 
 brighter world, and whispered that it was attainable. Such was our 
 Lord's presence in Galilee. There were, no doubt, a few decisive 
 words, some acts, too, which awed the multitudes into wonder and 
 into gratitude, but, on the whole, it was a profound and unexplained 
 stirring of the thoughts and hearts of men without anything to 
 challenge the notice of the world. It caused, as yet, but little anxiety 
 to the official chiefs of the Jewish religion in Jerusalem ; it was still 
 more unnoticed by the political and military authorities than some 
 new fanaticism among the Zulus would be in London to-day ; and 
 yet there it was, the kingdom of God upon earth, which truly thus had 
 come, and " not with observation." 
 
 And when he who was the centre and sun of this movement, Jesus 
 our Lord, had been crucified and had risen, and had ascended into 
 the heavens, and had by the labours of his apostles fully organized 
 and founded this kingdom as his own church, and had sped it on its 
 course with his blessing throughout the centuries, it still for many a 
 year continued to illustrate this its early and divine characteristic ; 
 it came among men " not with observation." It spread from one 
 place to another, from one class or profession to another ; it made 
 the intercourse of friends, and the activities of trade, and the dis- 
 cussions of the learned, and the currents of political life in their 
 various ways, its instruments and its messengers. It appeared no 
 one knew exactly when or how, in the camp, in the school, in the 
 court, in the senate. It was at once select and popular ; it was 
 rough and refined ; it appealed to the heart and the imagination ; 
 but it also could take the understanding captive. It had a word of 
 council and guidance for the studious and the thoughtful, as well as 
 a word of warning for the sinful and the indifferent, and a word of 
 252
 
 ' NOT WITH OBSERVATION." 
 
 sympathy for the suffering and the poor. A question has often been 
 asked, especially in very modern days, the difficulty in answering 
 which illustrates the point on which I am insisting, When and by 
 what means did the faith of Christ first reach the city of Rome ? 
 It might have been thought beforehand that the answer to that 
 question must be at once forthcoming, that, whatever else, was 
 obscure, there could be no difficulty in naming the agency by which 
 the capital of the ancient world received the faith which was to 
 have such a momentous influence on its later history. Yet, as a 
 matter of fact, the question does admit of no certain reply what- 
 ever. There are indeed popular answers enough ready to hand, but 
 they will not, any of them, bear investigation. Did that great 
 apostle whose name has been in later ages claimed by Rome as its 
 especial monopoly, as its crowning glory--did St. Peter introduce 
 Christianity into Rome ? The supposition is untenable, and for this 
 reason among others, that St. Peter could not have been at Rome 
 when St. Paul, some ten years before their common martyrdom, 
 wrote his Epistle to the Romans, in which St. Peter is never once, 
 even remotely, alluded to. St. Paul could not have violated his own 
 rule of not building on another man's foundations without once 
 acknowledging his obligations or his duties to an apostle who had, it 
 is supposed, preceded him. And St. Peter's real visit to Rome is in 
 all probability to be placed at a later date, not more than two or 
 three years before his death. Was St. Paul, then, the author of 
 Roman Christianity ? Was he the apostle who founded the Roman 
 church ? This, again, is impossible. St. Paul wrote to the Roman 
 church as a church already numerous and flourishing, but which he 
 had never yet had time even to visit. The names which are most 
 nearly associated with the earliest church in Rome, are those of the 
 private and undistinguished Christians, Aquila and Priscilla ; and 
 yet there is nothing that can be called evidence which goes to show 
 that they actually introduced the faith into the city of the Caesars. 
 In fact, the answer to this question is lost in the haze of the earliest 
 Christian history : it could only be given accurately there whei'e it is 
 recorded in the world above. Who they were who first named Christ 
 our Lord in the capital of the empire whether Christians flying from 
 Jerusalem after the death of St. Stephen, or baptized proselytes 
 returning to their native synagogue on the morrow of the Pentecost 
 this we know not; we never shall know in this world. There is 
 here abundant room for imaginative conjecture, and in the absence 
 of anything like real knowledge we may observe how remarkably 
 the origin of the Roman church itself illustrates the principle laid 
 down by our Lord, that "the kingdom of God cometh not with 
 observation." 
 
 Now contrast this characteristic of Christ's kingdom with what 
 we find elsewhere. No one would say that the religion of Mahomet 
 made its way m the world without observation. It burst upon 
 civilization as the war-cry of an invading host ; it was dictated at 
 the point of the scimitar to conquered populations as the alternative 
 to ruin or death. The history of its propagation throughout the
 
 "NOT WITH OBSERVATION. 
 
 eastern world was written in characters of blood and fire; the 
 frontier of its triumphs was precisely determined by the successes 
 of its warriors ; and it has receded in these last centuries in a degree 
 exactly corresponding to the progressive collapse of the barbarous 
 forces to which it was originally indebted for its earlier expansion. 
 The kingdom of God came not with observation, and we have seen 
 that when it had come it could not but be in some sense observed. 
 Since it was to consist of believing men, since it was to be, as St. 
 Paul said, " one body" as well as "one Spirit," since as an institution 
 with public officers and some territorial arrangements of its own, it 
 so far entered into the sphere of human life and sense. But a time 
 came when, we sorrowfully must admit, our Lord's words no longer 
 describe the manner in which his kingdom was always sought to be 
 advanced among men. Christians were truer to him when they 
 prayed and suffered in the catacombs than when Constantino had 
 reigned and they waited as courtiers in the ante-chambers of the 
 Csesars. And when, at a later date, amidst the general collapse of 
 the old society, the church remained the one stable institution, 
 standing erect in a world of ruins, her chief pastors became, in the 
 natural course and by the force of events though they styled them- 
 selves servants of the servants of God princes, ruling the bodies as 
 well as the souls of men, or they took their seats in earthly legis- 
 latures, and so their public action commingled with that of the 
 powers of this world, and attracted at least an equal share of human 
 observation. And then even Christian men brought themselves to 
 think that the kingdom of God could somehow be made to come 
 not merely with great observation, but even by the manipulation of 
 material force in the wake of conquering armies, at the dictates of 
 earthly magistrates, or in obedience to the sword, not of the Spirit, 
 but of the soldier or the policeman. And this gigantic and de- 
 grading misconception was undoubtedly due in its origin to an 
 intimacy between the divine kingdom and the powers of this world, 
 an intimacy of such a sort and character that the methods for 
 extending and guarding an earthly empire seem to be immediately 
 applicable to the extension and the protection of the kingdom of 
 Christ. The days of that old intimacy, as it would seem, are fast 
 passing away all over Christendom, and if, as we look back on them 
 we must regret the honour which our forefathers assigned to religion 
 among the affairs of men, we may reflect that the true strength of 
 Christianity lies not in the outward symbols of its empire, but in the 
 reality of its empire over hearts and wills,- that the kingdom of 
 God which came into the world " not with observation " does not 
 really need provisions of this sort for making it observed, and that a 
 future of the church which may seem to worldly eyes mere poverty and 
 failure may yet contain within itself the springs of a renovating moral 
 force a force intense and concentrated whereby to win back to the 
 fresh faith and love of the early ages the worn out and decay ing energies 
 of a jaded world. 
 
 And, as with the church, so with the soul, the law holds good that 
 the kingdom comes "not with observation." When are the first 
 254
 
 " NOT WITH OBSERVATION." 
 
 germs of the kingdom deposited in the soul ? It is when in the 
 name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, the 
 water of baptism is poured on an infant brow. This is what St. 
 Paul calls the " washing of regeneration ;" this is what our Lord him- 
 self had described as being " born of water and of the Spirit." We 
 see nothing that is not perfectly ordinary and commonplace a 
 clergyman, a font, the infant, the mother, the god-parents, the few 
 surrounding worshippers; but true Christian faith knows that he 
 is standing there, he who was crucified in weakness and who 
 reigns in power, present in his divine and resistless might to turn 
 what, but for him, would be an empty and a useless form into a 
 solemn act of most momentous import which is registered above, to 
 make the child who lies there so that it can offer no resistance to 
 his omnipotent grace a " member of Christ, a child of God, and an 
 inheritor of the kingdom of heaven." Truly, at a christening we 
 may well reflect that the kingdom of God comes " not with observa- 
 tion." And if in later years, as too generally is the case, the 
 precious grace thus given is lost and sinned away, and nothing but 
 the stump or socket of the divine gift remains without its in- 
 forming, spiritual, vital power, then another change is assuredly 
 necessary, which we call conversion. And what is conversion ? Is 
 it always a something that can be appraised and registered as having 
 happened at this exact hour of the clock, as having been attended 
 by such and such recognized symptoms, as announced to bystanders 
 by these or those conventional or indispensable ejaculations as 
 achieved and carried out among certain invariable and easily de- 
 scribed experiences ? Most assuredly not. A conversion may have 
 its vivid and memorable occasion, its striking, its visible incident. 
 A light from heaven above the brightness of the sun may at midday 
 during a country ride flash upon the soul of Saul of Tarsus ; a verse 
 of scripture, suddenly illuminated with new and unsuspected and 
 quite constraining meaning, may give a totally new direction to the 
 will and the genius of an Augustine ; but in truth the type of the 
 process of conversion is just as various as the souls of men. The one 
 thing that does not vary, since it is the very essence of that which 
 takes place, is a change, a deep and vital change, in the direction of 
 the will. Conversion is the substitution of God's will as the recog- 
 nized end and aim of life, for all other aims and ends whatever ; and 
 thus, human nature being what it is, conversion is as a rule a turning 
 " from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God," that 
 a man may receive forgiveness of his sins and an inheritance among 
 them that are sanctified. And this great change itself, most as- 
 suredly, " cometh not with observation." The after effects, indeed, 
 appear, the spirit of self-sacrifice, the unity of purpose which gives 
 meaning, solemnity, force to life, the fruits of the Spirit love, joy, 
 peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, in such measure as belongs 
 to the requirements of the individual character. Certainly, when 
 the kingdom of God has come into a soul the result may be traced 
 easily enough, but the kingdom of God cometh in this case, too, at 
 least, as a general rule, " not with observation." 
 
 255
 
 " NOT WITH OBSERVATION. 
 
 And so it is with all the more solemn and precious incidents in 
 the life of the spirit of man. They do not court observation, but 
 they elude, they shrink from it. Discussion, publicity, still more 
 recognition and applause, are nothing less than death to them . It is 
 only a shallow stream which catches the ear by its noisy ripples as 
 it forces its way over the pebbles that lie in its bed. Deep waters 
 always run still. Of the greatest lives that are lived in every 
 generation, little or nothing is often heard at the time, if, indeed, 
 anything is ever heard in this human world. The ruling motives in 
 a good Christian, constantly because instinctively acted on, are never 
 referred to. The most solemn voices that reach the soul are caught, 
 not in the excitement of a vast crowd in a lighted church, but in the 
 loneliness of sorrow, or in the silence of the midnight hour, when 
 God is felt to be about the bed, and spying out all our ways, or at an 
 early communion, when the soul hastens to lay its loest and freshest 
 eiforts of thought and will, unimpaired, untainted, as yet, by the 
 busy cares and intercourse of a working day, at the feet of its 
 adorable Redeemer. In these and many such-like matters it is ever 
 true that " the kingdom cometh not with observation." 
 
 But will it ever be thus? In its full solemnity and import the kingdom 
 of God will come to every man, as never before, in death and in judg- 
 ment. It will be brought home, as we say, to each of us then ; it will be 
 inflicted upon our earth-bound tempers, upon our palsied wills, upon 
 our dull and reluctant senses, with an importunity from which there 
 can be no escape. The approaches may even then, too, be gradual 
 and unperceived. Already death, without our knowing it, may be 
 preparing its stealthy march by the seeds of organic disease in a con- 
 stitution of proverbial and unsuspected soundness. And if, as we 
 heard in to-day's gospel, judgment will be heralded by signs in the 
 sun, and in the moon, and in the stars, and upon the earth by 
 distress of nations with perplexity, the meaning and import of these 
 tokens of the coming of the Son of man may well escape all who 
 are not expecting him. The fig-tree and all the trees, to use his own 
 illustration, may shoot forth without our knowing of our own selves 
 that the summer, the eternal summer, is nigh at hand. But at the 
 last, in the act of dying, in the presence of the manifested Judge, 
 the kingdom of God will be borne in upon every human spirit irre- 
 sistibly in all its blessedness or all its awe. " Every eye shall see 
 him, and they also which pierced him, and all the kingdoms of the 
 world shall wail because of him." 
 
 God grant that we may take to heart the solemn words of Christ 
 our Lord, certain that, if at this moment there is no token of his 
 coming upon which observation can fix with certainty, yet that the 
 long train of preparation is ever hastening forwards in the invisible 
 world, ever hastening forwards until at the predestined moment, as 
 a thief in the night, as a lightning-flash passing across the heavens, 
 he comes to judge us. 
 
 256
 
 JEHU. 
 
 ternum 
 
 By the Rev. H. P. LIDDON, D.D., 
 
 (Canon of St. Paul's,) 
 
 PREACHED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 29 TH, 1880. 
 
 " And he said, Come with me and see my zeal for the Lord." 2 KINGS x., 1C. 
 THE Bible is like the world in this that it contains pictures, not 
 merely of great saints and of extraordinary sinners, but also, and in 
 a very large proportion, of what we now call mixed characters ; and 
 thus it surely is true to life, since the majority of men are not eminently 
 holy, or outrageously wicked, but something between the two. In 
 the vast intermediate region of mixed characters there are, indeed, 
 gradations and varieties almost infinite in their complexity, so that, 
 while on the higher frontier of this region the admixture of evil is 
 sometimes inconsiderable,it is enormous almostoverpowering in the 
 opposite direction. Still, the great majority of men are mixed charac- 
 ters, and when you or I encounter a mixed character, whether de- 
 scribed in the Bible or in a modern biography or work of fiction, or 
 moving before us in the scenes of real life, we feel a kinship with it 
 which is easily explained, for it belongs to our own region of existence. 
 We see ourselves more or less reflected in it. Its good points encourage 
 us. Its deficiencies warn us all the more effectively because its general 
 level of attainment is like our own. But, even in daily experience, 
 it is, I apprehend, often easier to be interested in a mixed character 
 than to see exactly what lesson, what warning, it is meant to convey. 
 Jehu, the founder of the fifth dynasty of the kings of Israel, 
 interests us, partly by his career and achievements, but much more 
 by the problem of his character. As a boy, Jehu was attached to 
 the body-guard of king Ahab. He rode behind his royal master on 
 the road from Samaria to Jezreel, when the prophet Elijah suddenly 
 appeared and denounced God's final vengeance against the murderers 
 of Naboth. Under Ahab's successor Jehu became a soldier of dis- 
 tinction. The reckless fury with which he drove his war-chariot 
 proved that he had no lack of nerve or of muscle ; but he must have 
 had credit for other and higher qualities as well, since we Jind him, 
 while still a young man, commanding the army which was besieg- 
 ing Ramoth-Gilead in the Syrian svar ; and it was during this siege 
 that an occurrence took place which formed the turning-point of his 
 career. So far as we know, the great prophet, Elijah, never saw 
 Jehu, except when he met him in Ahab's company after the murder 
 of Naboth, on the Jezreel road ; but Jehu filled a great place in the 
 prophetic forecast of Elijah. In the vision on lloreb, Jehu is named 
 as the future king of Israel who is to execute the penal judgments of 
 God, although Elijah never himself obeyed the command that was 
 then given to anoint Jehu to this office. But the command, once 
 given, was cherished as sacred in the prophetic order, and it was 
 carried out by the direction of Elisha during this very siege of 
 Ramoth-Gilead. One day, while the leading officers of the besieging 
 No. 1,123. i NEW SERIES.
 
 JEHU. 
 
 army were sitting together, a wild-looking young man entered and 
 insisted on a private interview with Jehu. After some hesitation 
 Jehu followed him, and then the young prophet poured the sacred 
 anointing oil which he had ready at hand on the head of the future 
 king, and told him in the Lord's name that he was to destroy the 
 whole family of Ahab, and then, having delivered his message, 
 rushed from the house and fled. Jehu returned to the assembled 
 officers, who saw at once from his appearance that something of 
 grave import had passed between the general and his strange 
 visitor. Jehu tried at first to baffle their enquiries. At last he was 
 obliged to tell them what the young prophet had said and done. The 
 officers and, as it seems, the whole army greeted him with enthusiasm. 
 The officers placed him, as if on a throne, at the top of the stairs 
 which led from the central court of the guard-house to its roof; they 
 carpeted the ground beneath his feet with their military cloaks ; 
 and the trumpets sounded a royal salute. So far as the camp was 
 concerned, the revolution was complete. It was no longer with Jehu 
 a question of taking Ramoth-Gilead, but of how to carry out the 
 stern duties which were laid on him by the message of the prophet. 
 All communications between the army and the royal city of Jezreel 
 were at once stopped. Jehu himself set off for Jezreel at full speed 
 with his old friend and companion in arms, Bidkar, and with a 
 detachment of cavalry. 
 
 And here we come to the two terrible and stern achievements 
 which are associated with Jehu's name in sacred history. Of these 
 two, the first is the destruction of the entire family of Ahab. Xot 
 until Jehu had reached the gates of Jezreel was alarm taken by the 
 reigning family. Jehu first slew with his own hand the king of Israel, 
 Jehoram ; and then, while his followers pursued and killed the flying 
 king of Judah, he himself carried out the prophet's sentence on 
 Jezreel ; and then there followed a work of extermination which, even 
 at this distance of time, if we represent it to our imaginations, we 
 read with a shudder. All the remaining relatives of Ahab in Jezreel, 
 all the officers of the court, all the priests of the Tyrian Ashtaroth, 
 were slaughtered. Seventy princes of the royal house were being 
 educated in Samaria. Jehu warned their guardians of the danger of 
 resisting him ; and their beads were forthwith piled in two heaps on 
 either side of the gate of Jezreel. Jehu proceeded to Samaria. On 
 his way he met forty-two sons and nephews of the King of Judah, 
 who, all unconscious of what had happened, were on their way to visit 
 their relations in Jezreel. They were all forthwith put to the sword ; 
 and, when he had reached Samaria,Jehu's achievement was complete. 
 The family of Ahab was, with the important exception of queen 
 Athaliah, of Judah, for all practical purposes' destroyed. 
 
 Jehu was on his way from Jezreel to Samaria, in order to carry out 
 his second achievement, the destruction of the worship of Baal which 
 had been imported from Phoenicia. This worship was really offered 
 to the productive powers of nature personified as deity. It was thus 
 a literal substitution of the crer.ture for the Creator ; and, in practice, 
 it was attended by impurities that were all its own. Jehu would 
 have had his own reasons for disliking it one religious, one military, 
 one political. As an Israelite, he viewed it as an alien and idolatrous 
 creed. As a soldier, he knew that it enervated the manhood of the 
 country. As a statesman, he connected it with the mischievous in- 
 226
 
 JEHU. 
 
 fluence of the family of Ahab. But to overthrow the Baal-worship 
 was no easy matter. It had the sympathies of the majority of the 
 people. Some y^ars before, only seven thousand in Israel had not 
 bowed the knee to the famous image of Baal in Samaria. At this 
 time Samaria was the centre of the Baal worship. In Samaria was 
 the great temple which Ahab had built, and which was resorted to 
 from all parts of the country ; and, accordingly, it was at Samaria 
 that Jehu determined to strike a decisive blow. Jehu was on his 
 way to Samaria when he met the Arabian ascetic, Jehonadab, the son 
 of Rechab. Jehonadab was already a public character, and Jehu, 
 after ascertaining that he sympathised with himself, lifted him into 
 his war-chariot, exclaiming, " Come with me, and see my zeal for 
 the Lord." 
 
 In the bloody scene that followed, Jehu acted with the same union 
 of secrecy and decision that had marked his conduct in destroying 
 the royal family of Ahab. He appeared in Samaria as an ardent 
 patron of the popular worship. " Ahab," he said, " served Baal a 
 little,* but Jehu shall serve him much." He announced a public 
 festival in which the worship of Baal was to be newly inaugurated. 
 There were splendid vestments, costly sacrifices, a vast assembly 
 which filled the great temple from end to end. King Jehu himself 
 officiated. He offered the chief sacrifice to Baal, and the enthusiasm 
 of the people was at its height. After ascertaining that no worshippers 
 of the true God had mingled, from curiosity, in the great multitude, 
 a signal was given to eighty armed men, and the entire congregation 
 of idolaters was put to the sword. The sanctuary of the temple 
 was invaded by the soldiery ; the great stone image of Baal was 
 dragged out and destroyed ; the wooden pillars dedicated to the inferior 
 gods around were, one after another, burnt ; and the shrine of the 
 Phoenician divinity was deliberately devoted to public uses which 
 effectually destroyed the idea of any sanctity whntever attaching to 
 it. The worship of the Phoenician Baal in Israel never recovered 
 from this crushing blow. 
 
 This was Jehu's zeal for the Lord which Jehonadab was to witness 
 and did witness. Let us endeavour, if we may, to form a religious 
 estimate of its worth. 
 
 What is zeal ? It is conviction in a practical and working form. It 
 is the business-like side of love, whether of God or of man. " Zeal," 
 says Aquinas, speaking roughly "zeal is the redoubled energy, love." 
 Zeal, being an ardent love of God, is shown in desire to promote the 
 love of God, the worship of God, the praise of God, the glory of 
 God, wherever this is possible. But zeal also has an eye to everything 
 that runs counter to Go/Ts will and to his glory. It rebukes vice ; 
 it combats error ; it doc.s all that it may to counteract and to remove 
 the influences which are detrimental to the cause of God in the 
 world at large and in the hearts of individual men. If we open the 
 lUble we have not far to look in order to read the burning words 
 of a true and pure zeal for God. Thus the psalmist whose words 
 received in our Lord's time their highest fulfilment, " The zeal of 
 thy house hath eaten me,and the rebukes of them that rebuke thee have 
 fallen upon me." In other words, " The dishonours and the affronts 
 which have been oil'ered to thee I have felt to be, and have taken as, 
 my own." And again, " My zeal hath even consumed me, because 
 my enemies have forgotten thy words." Or again, (< It grieveth me 
 
 227
 
 JEHU. 
 
 when I see the transgressors, because they keep not thy law." And 
 thus Elij ah on Horeb, t( I am very zealous for the Lord God of 
 Hosts, because the children of Israel have forsaken the covenant." 
 And thus our divine Lord, <f I am come to send a fire upon the 
 earth ; and what will I but that it be already kindled ? " Or take 
 up St. Paul's Epistles. He is writing to the Philippians : " This I 
 pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge 
 and in all judgment, that ye may recognize things that are excellent, 
 that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day of Christ's 
 coming, being filled with the fruits of righteousness which come by 
 Jesus Christ, unto the glory and praise of God." Or he is writing to 
 the Thessalonians. " We might," he says, " have been burdensome 
 to you as the apostles of Christ, but we were gentle among 1 you even 
 as a nurse cherisheth her children ; so, being affectionately desirous 
 of you, we were willing to have imparted unto you, not the gospel of 
 God only, but also our own souls, because ye were dear unto us." 
 Or to the Judaizing Galatians he exclaims, with passionate affection, 
 " My little children of whom I travail again in birth until Christ be 
 formed in you." Or he protests to the Romans, in speaking of the 
 rejection of Christianity by the mass of the Jews, " I have great 
 heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart, for I could wish that my- 
 self were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according 
 to the flesh." And so St. James, when he is encouraging those who 
 labour for souls, " If any do err from the truth, and one convert him, 
 let him know that he which converteth a sinner from the error of his 
 ways shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins." 
 These are but samples of the language of zeal which is to be found in 
 the Bible. The circumstances under which it was uttered were widely 
 different. The immediate objects in view were often as distinct as the 
 distinctness of two revelations, or the lapse of a thousand years, could 
 make them ; but under each revelation and in all time the spirit of 
 zeal is the same, however its form may vary. We sometimes hear men 
 speak as if zeal were only a Jewish virtue, and as if in Christendom 
 it had been replaced by some milder and, it must be confessed, less 
 effective substitute, such, for instance, I suppose, as religious sentiment. 
 But, as we have seen, the Bible gives no sort of countenance to a 
 notion like this, and, indeed, it is utterly opposed to the reason of the 
 case. If a very partial revelation, such as that of Sinai, in which God's 
 avful law was revealed without the alleviations of the great doctrinef 
 of redemption and grace, could yet stir the hearts of men to live as 
 did the author of the 119th psalm, and to die as did the Maccabees, 
 what ought not the gospel to achieve in which life and immortality 
 are fairly and fully brought to light, in which Jesus Christ, our Lord 
 and God, incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended, interceding, forms a 
 bridge between earth and heaven, in which the heart of God is un- 
 veiled to the heart of man in the death of God's sinless Son, and man 
 is rendered capable of companionship with angels through the gift of 
 a new nature which, " after God, is created in righteousness and true 
 holiness." 
 
 Surely, when this glorious creed is believed, it must, at least at 
 times, set the human heart on fire. It must produce missionaries, 
 apostles, confessors, and martyrs. It must inspire men with a courage 
 equal to the needs of areligion that only binds up the wounds of human 
 nature on condition of telling it the truth, and that, in the last resort, 
 228
 
 JEHU. 
 
 seeks nothing nothing with entire fervour but the smile of God, 
 and fears nothing nothing but his displeasure. 
 
 But, if zeal is not especially a Jewish virtue, the form which it 
 took in Jehu's case was eminently Jewish. It expressed itself in a 
 fearful destruction cf human life. On this account some persons 
 might be disposed to say that it was not zeal for the Lord at all. 
 But they forget that God's work may take one form in one age or 
 set of circumstances, and another in another, that the moral 
 standard of the Pentateuch is not inconsistent with, but is only lower 
 than, that of the gospels, that the acts of a good Jew, face to face 
 with the enemies of his religion, must not be judged of by the 
 standard which is present to the soul of a good Christian, since the 
 Jew belongs to an earlier stage in the religious education of the 
 world than the Christian. Our Lord warned hie apostles against 
 the temptation to propagate or to defend his kingdom by the sword ; 
 but the law of Moses punished idolatry with death, and Jehu was 
 acting in obedience to the idea of duty to which he had been 
 trained. There is nothing to be said on Christian grounds for 
 such a massacre as that of St. Bartholomew in the name of the Lord, 
 or for the brutalities which Cromwell practised on professedly 
 religious gi-ounds at Drogheda and at Wexford ; but, when Jehu 
 destroyed the Baal-worshippers in Samaria, the law of love had not 
 yet been revealed in all its beauty, nor had men yet learnt that the 
 Holy Spirit is a better guide into all truth than the weapons of 
 carnal warfare. 
 
 Jehu's zeal, then, may have been a zeal for the Lord notwith- 
 standing the slaughter to which it led ; but what are we to say 
 of the stratagem by which the slaughter of the Baal-worshippers was 
 actually effected ? Jehu compassed his purpose by affecting to 
 patronize, where he meant to slay and to exterminate. How is this 
 compatible, we may well ask, with any real anxiety to do high 
 service to the God of truth ? And here it is necessary to remember 
 that the ruder and less informed conscience of mankind is always 
 less careful about the choice of means than man's riper and more 
 enlightened conscience. Jehu was satisfied that it was a duty, on 
 religious grounds especially, to destroy the Baal-worshippers, who 
 were numerous and powerful. As a soldier, Jehu would have 
 thought everything fair in war, and he was, he thought, at war with 
 the Baal worship and with all that it represented and implied. 
 Jacob, in centuries before, had been right in seeking the birthright, 
 though he was wrong in the means by which he sought it. Jael had 
 been blessed for destroying Sisera, though not for abusing the duties 
 of hospitality. A more instructed conscience than was Jehu's would 
 have shrunk from proclaiming a festival for Baal with the object 
 of destroying his worshippers. But Jehu's zeal for the Lord is 
 not altogether impaired because he did not know that a rightful act 
 must be carried out by rightful means inordertobe well pleasing to God. 
 We must, in justice, here distinguish between the absolute standard 
 of right, and that relative standard which was present to the mind 
 of Jehu ; and, if we do this, we may well venture to think that this 
 net, in itself, although impossible for us, and the means by which he 
 achieved it, although still more impossible, were not for a man in his 
 age and circumstances incompatible with a true zeal for the Lord. 
 
 But there are features in Jehu's zeal two especially which seem 
 
 229
 
 JEHU. 
 
 to show that it can not have been so genuine and healthy as we 
 could wish. It was spoiled, first of all, by ostentation. Jehu 
 desired Jehonadab to come and see what he could do for the Lord. 
 It has been suggested that Jehu's motive was of a different character 
 that, in asking Jehonadab to go with him, he was anxious to get 
 the sanction of a personage who was widely respected, in an enter- 
 prise which could not but expose him to obloquy. But of this there 
 is no evidence whatever. Jehu was a member of the sacred 
 commonwealth of Israel, with its unique revelation, with its sacred 
 law, with its authoritative and, as Jehu himself had good reason to 
 know, active prophetic order. What need was there for applying 
 for religious countenance and sanction to an Arab chief, however 
 distinguished by high character or ascetic attainments ? On the 
 other hand, Jehonadab, with his nomad life and wide intercourse with 
 men of all classes and minds, was just the kind of person whom, in 
 a primitive age, a vain man would have endeavoured to interest in 
 his own proceedings with a view to securing or enlarging their 
 notoriety. Jehu's invitation to Jehonadab was equivalent to that 
 of a man now-a-days who should write a paragraph on the subject 
 of his own performances, and insert it in a newspaper. " Come with 
 me, and see my zeal for the Lord," was certainly the language of 
 ostentation ; and ostentation, mark you, is fatal fatal to the purity, 
 if not to the force, of zeal. A man who is acting simply for God 
 does not care to say more about his action than he can possibly 
 help. A man whose ruling motive is a pure intention to serve 
 God, so far as his knowledge of God's will may enable him, will be 
 very careful not to drag it out on every occasion into the light of 
 day, or, indeed, on any one occasion that he can rightly avoid doing 
 so. A true and pure religious motive is like a delicate flower that 
 will not bear exposure. To place it where all the world may sing- 
 its praises is to doom it to be scorched by the sun, or to be bitten 
 by the frost. Its true, its safe home is in the recesses of the soul, 
 where he sees and does justice to it, whatever it be, whose approval 
 is alone really worth having. Jehu's zeal for the Lord became 
 something else than pure zeal as soon as Jehonadab was asked to 
 inspect and to admire it. It was zeal for the Lord, still, no doubt, 
 but dashed by a zeal for Jehu's own credit and reputation. God's 
 approval was still valuable, but so were the approval and admiration 
 of Jehonadab. Oh, how much of our zeal is of this miserable mixed 
 character ; and what does he must he think about it who has a 
 first and a unique claim on the energies of the soui 1 
 
 And Jehu's zeal was spoiled, secondly, by inconsistency. And by 
 " inconsistency " I mean, not the inconsistency of weakness which, 
 certainly, there is no kind of reason for ever attributing to Jehu ; 
 but the inconsistency of want of principle. Baal-worship was not the 
 only kind of idolatry that reared its head then in the land of Israel. 
 There was the worship of the calves which had been instituted by 
 Jeroboam from a political motive that of providing a religious 
 attraction to the ten separated tribes an attraction powerful enough 
 to prevent their attending the authorized worship of God in 
 Jerusalem at the great festivals. This older idolatry was not less 
 inconsistent with the honour and the will of God, than was the 
 newer Baal or nature- worship that had been introduced more recently 
 from Phoenicia ; and a man whose highest motive in destroying the 
 230
 
 JEHU. 
 
 Baal-worship had been zeal for God's honour would not have left 
 this older and, in some respects, more actively mischievous form of 
 error untouched. But we are told that " from the sins of Jeroboam, 
 the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, Jehu departed not from 
 after them, to wit, the golden calves that were in Bethel, and that 
 were in Dan," and, again, that " Jehu took no heed to walk in the 
 law of the Lord God of Israel with all his heart, for he departed not 
 from the sins of Jeroboam" (that is from the established calf- worship) 
 " which made Israel to sin." 
 
 Can we see a reason for this difference of Jehu's attitude towards 
 the Baal-worship in Samaria and the calf- worship at Bethel? Surely 
 we can. The Baal-worship was bound up with the dynasty of Ahab 
 Avho had so largely patronized it. It thus had an influence politically 
 hostile to Jehu, and he had reasons, as a statesman, for fearing and 
 disliking it. But the calf-worship recalled a dynasty which had long 
 disappeared, and therefore it excited no political apprehensions. On 
 the contrary, there were political reasons for maintaining it which 
 would have weighed with a man who was prepared to sacrifice his 
 religion to his politics. It was useful to Jehu in maintaining the 
 separateness of the kingdom of Israel against the religious attractions 
 and claims of Judah ; and Jehu was as anxious as any of his pre- 
 decessors to do this, and comparatively indifferent to the idolatry and 
 the schism which was upheld in doing it. Is Jehu quite singular in 
 this ? Has he no followers at the present day ? Do we not some- 
 times witness a devotion to the cause of Christ and his gospel and his 
 church, which goes to a certain point and is then mysteriously arrested, 
 as if by an unseen hand ; which achieves one form of goodness and 
 shrinks from or disavows another ; which stamps out one form of evil 
 and tolerates or encourages another ? The motive of the inconsistency 
 may lie deep beneath the surface, but there it is ; and it destroys the 
 religious value of the little that is done. A true zeal for God does 
 not draw arbitrary frontiers like this, to the range of its efforts. It 
 stays not its hand till all that can be done is done is done for him. 
 
 The moral which many persons have drawn from Jehu's career is 
 that which was expressed in the epigram of the French statesman who, 
 let us remember, was also an apostate bishop, "Above all things, no 
 zeal !" Possibly Talleyrand may have meant, by " zeal," mere ad- 
 ministrative fussiness, for he knew the practical worth of single- 
 hearted devotion, at least in other men, to a political cause. But this 
 is certain, that a religion which does not move zeal is already dead in 
 the hearts of men. And zeal is not to be discredited by the false or 
 imperfect samples of the virtue which may meet us in our experience 
 of the world. If Jehu's zeal is open to criticism, we have nothing to 
 say on this score against Elijah's ; and Jehu's zeal, though spoilt by 
 his vanity and by his inconsistency, was better infinitely better 
 than sheer indifference. To try to do something for God ; even by 
 fits and starts even amid the triumphant importunity of selfish 
 motives, which are constantly daubing our little efforts with their 
 earthly stains is far, far better than to fold our hands and to do 
 nothing for him, while secretly investing what is but the indolence of 
 pure selfishness with the attributes of some fancied superiority to the 
 petty activities of sectarian enterprise. 
 
 No, the lessons which Jehu's case does really teach us are most 
 important. One is that great results are constantly achieved by God 
 
 231
 
 JEHU. 
 
 through the means of very imperfect instruments. Jehu's work, stern 
 as it was in the carrying out, was, in its results, a great work, though 
 Jehu was not in the moral and religious sense by any means a great 
 man. His work was done in spite of his being what he was. It was 
 a greater thing to Israel and to the world for which it was achieved 
 than it was to himself, the workman. So it has constantly been since. 
 Great truths have been vindicated, great causes promoted, great re- 
 forms carried out, by men whose characters, upon close examination, 
 prove to be very defective, indeed to be impaired by ambition, by 
 vanity, by unscrupulousness, it may be, by worse faults than these. 
 Never mind. The work is not their work, but God's. They are but 
 instruments in his hands, just as are the elements of the natural world ; 
 and their short comings no more discredit the value of what has been 
 carried out through their agency than the poverty of his materials is 
 fatal to the character or to the performances of a great artist, who, 
 indeed, shows his power in conquering his disadvantages, and in ren- 
 dering with perfect fidelity upon the canvas, or into the marble, the 
 ideas which have taken possession of his soul. 
 
 And Jehu teaches us, too, the risk of attempting to carry out public 
 works, of a religious or moral character, on a small scale or a great, with- 
 out some previous discipline of the heart and life. He had great public 
 duties thrust upon him before he was ready for them in respect of per- 
 sonal self-discipline. How often is this the case, too, in our day. Men 
 find themselves taking part in philanthropic or religious efforts, attend- 
 ing public meetings, perhaps making speeches, writing letters, articles, 
 manifestoes, before they have learnt really to pray, or to keep their 
 consciences, by God's grace, in moderate order, or to try to live by 
 some sort of Christian rule. The consequence is that they, sooner or 
 later, commit themselves. They compromise the very cause which 
 they are anxious to maintain, or their earnestness seems to come to 
 a sudden standstill. Then the world rubs its hands, and says that this 
 is just what it always expected, and that gusts of enthusiasm do much 
 more harm than good. The truth is that many a man in this position 
 has, like Jehu, sincerely wished to do his little something for a good 
 object, but he has begun at the wrong end. Public efforts for good 
 cannot take the place of the care of the Christian workman's own soul. 
 
 " Thou, to wax fierce in the cause of the Lord, 
 To fret and to pierce with the heavenly sword 
 Thou warmest and smitest, yet Christ must atone 
 For a soul that thou smitest thine own." 
 
 And, above all, let us be sure that a zeal for the Lord must be worthy 
 of the name. It must not be at bottom, or even largely, a zeal for 
 somebody or something else a zeal for self. A pure intention to 
 glorify God is the soul of the little useful work which any of us may be 
 permitted to do in this short life. The absence of this steady purpose 
 is a fatal flaw, even in careers which leave their mark upon nations 
 and upon centuries, and which fire the imaginations of millions of men. 
 The presence of this intention ennobles work on the very humblest 
 scale, and associates it with the deeds of those who stand among the 
 very foremost in the realms of light. Such zeal and energy as Jehu's 
 is, beyond dispute, able to record itself in large characters on the 
 page of history ; but in the kingdom of souls it were better to be the 
 poor widow who, all unperceived, as she thought, dropped her mite 
 into the treasury, and won the blessing of the eternal Christ. 
 232
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 REV. H. P. LID DON, D. D., 
 
 (Canon of $t, Paul's,) 
 
 PREACHED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER, 7, 1879. 
 
 " Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new cove- 
 nant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah. Not 
 according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I 
 took them by the band to bring them out of the land of Egypt, which My 
 covenant they break, although I was an husband unto them, saith the Lord. 
 But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel ; 
 after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, 
 and write it in their hearts ; and will be their God, and they shall be My 
 people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every 
 man his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know Me, from 
 the least of them unto the greatest of them saith' the Lord, for I will for- 
 give their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." JEB. xxxi., 
 ;jl 34. 
 
 Jerusalem had been taken by the Assyrian army, and the 
 prophet Jeremiah, with a band of other captives, had been carried 
 in chains to Raman, where the Assyrian general, Nebuzar-adan, 
 had fixed his head-quarters. In those dark hours, when the 
 prophet was leaving a ruined home and was passing into the 
 keeping of a pagan despot, all may well have seemed lost to a 
 merely human forecast the independence of Israel as a people 
 ay, and the prospect of Israel's religion, too. In those dark hours, 
 God, who so often sets his bow in the cloud of some earthly sorrow, 
 spoke to Jeremiah in visions which lit up his inward thoughts with 
 the light which comes from another world. To this period of his 
 life belong the 30th and 31st chapters of his book, and they con- 
 tain a group of prophecies written down, we are told, by divine com- 
 mand, and all of them intended to relieve the darkness of the first 
 days of captivity by the anticipation of better times beyond. Tho 
 ultimate restoration of the people to their home in Palestine, the an- 
 nouncement of the second David, the picture of Rachel weepiug 
 over her tomb at Ramah for her captive descendants, and relieved 
 by the sure promise of their deliverance, and, lastly, the great pro- 
 clamation of the new covenant these form a group of consolatory 
 prophecies, each one of which is a perfect composition in itself, 
 No. 1095 o NEW SERIES.
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 while all are directed to promote a common object. And of these, 
 the last, the prophecy which I have just read as my text, is the most 
 important the prophecy of the new covenant. I say, my brethren, 
 it is the most important, for this prophecy is singled out to occupy 
 a place of great prominence in the New Testament. When the 
 writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews is engaged in showing that the 
 old priesthood of the law was done away at Christ's coming, because 
 Christ was the true priest for ever after the order of Melchizedec, 
 whom the Old Testament itself had led men to expect, he enforces 
 his argument by observing- that the Jewish priesthood and the old 
 covenant of God with Israel must stand or fall together as parts of 
 one religious whole, and that, therefore, the Jewish priesthood 
 must have been abolished because the old covenant to which it be- 
 longed was, according to the Jewish prophet, to give way to a new 
 and a better covenant. And thus it is that the passage before us 
 is lifted by the apostolic writings into a prominence which is alto- 
 gether unique ; and it will supply us, I trust, with some useful 
 thoughts for advent, when Christians are thinking of the prepara- 
 tion which God made for Christianit)* before Christ came, and of 
 what was said about it by the prophets who were inspired to pre- 
 pare the world for the advent of the Redeemer and for those new 
 relations between earth and heaven which he was to introduce. 
 
 Here, then, we observe, first of all, that the Christian religion is 
 described as a new covenant. "Behold, the days come, saith 
 the Lord, that I will make a new covenant." This covenant would 
 be new, for it had had predecessors. God is said to have made a 
 covenant with Noah when he promised that a judgment like the 
 flood should not be repeated ; and with Abraham when he pro- 
 mised Canaan to his descendants for an everlasting possession, and 
 imposed the condition of circumcision. But by the phrase " the old 
 covenant " is meant especially the covenant which God made with 
 Israel as a people when Moses descended from Mount Sinai. The 
 writing termed the Book of the Covenant comprised the ten com- 
 mandments, and the body of laws which are recorded in the 21st 
 and two following chapters of the Book of Exodus. These were 
 the conditions imposed by God, when he entered into covenant re- 
 lations with Israel ; and the solemn act by which this covenant was 
 first inaugurated is described in the 24th chapter of Exodus. 
 Gathered at the base of the holy mountain, before an altar resting 
 on twelve pillars, in honour of the twelve tribes, the people waited, 
 silent and awe-struck, while twelve delegates for as yet there was 
 no constituted priesthood offered such sacrifices as yet were pos- 
 sible, and while the law-giver sprinkled the blood of the victims on 
 the assembled multitude. That ceremony had a latent meaning, 
 unperceived at the time, which many centuries afterwards was to be 
 drawn out into the light, under apostolic direction. But the solemn 
 character of the transaction was then and there profoundly felt, and 
 at later periods of Israel's history this covenant was again and 
 again renewed as by Joshua, at Shechem, and by King Asa, at 
 Jerusalem, and by Jehoiada, the priest, in the temple, and by the 
 priesthood and people together, under' Hezekiah, and under the 
 auspices of Ezra and Nehemiah in later days still, after the great 
 
 m
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 captivity. It was renewed, because it was continually broken. It 
 was a divine work, and yet, through man's perverseness, it was a 
 continuous failure. And hence the words " not according to the 
 covenant that I made with their fathers in the days that I led them 
 by the hand vto bring them out of the land of Egypt ; which cove- 
 nant they brake, although I was a husband unto them, saith the 
 Lord." 
 
 The " new covenant." It is a phrase which sounds somewhat 
 strange to the ears of Christians, who have been accustomed all 
 their life to talk of the " New Testament." A covenant is a com- 
 pact or agreement, and it implies something like equal rights be- 
 tween those who are parties to it. Monarchs make covenants or 
 treaties with monarchs, nations with nations. One private person 
 signs a deed of agreement with another. Laban made a covenant 
 with Jacob, with a heap of stones to attest its reality in after times. 
 The Gibeonites made a covenant with Israel : the men of Jabesh 
 in their dire extremity proposed, but in vain, to make a covenant 
 with Nahash the Ammonite king". In all such covenants a certain 
 equality of relations between the contracting parties is assumed : 
 each party acquires rights ; each accepts liabilities. Even when, aa 
 sometimes happens, the government of a great power enters into 
 contract with a house of business, or with an individual, this is be- 
 cause the firm or the person in question is, for the purpose of the 
 contract, on terms of equality with the negotiating Government, 
 as having at disposal some means of rendering it a signal service, 
 which, for the moment, throws all other considerations into the 
 background. And this general equality between parties to a cove- 
 nant may be further illustrated by the case of the most sacred of all 
 possible human contracts the marriage tie that marriage tie 
 which, by the law of God, once made, can be dissolved only by 
 death, and in which it is the glory of the Christian law I do not 
 speak of human legislation in Christian times to have secured to 
 the contracting parties equal rights. It is, then, a little startling 
 to find this same word employed to describe a relation between the 
 infinite and eternal God and the creature of his hand. He wants 
 nothing, and he has everything to give. Man needs everything, and 
 can do nothing that will increase a blessedness that is already in- 
 finite, or enhance a power which, as it is, knows no bounds. But 
 here are covenants between God and man, covenants in which 
 there seems no place for reciprocity, covenants in which indul- 
 gence or endowment is all on one side, and acknowledgment or, 
 rather, failure, all on the other, covenants in naming which lan- 
 guage seems to forfeit its wonted meaning, and to betray us into 
 misconceptions which bring, to say the least, bewilderment and 
 confusion. And yet, in reality, when God speaks of making a 
 covenant with man, he is only giving one more instance of that law 
 of condescension of which the highest results appeared when he, 
 the Infinite, took on him a human form, when he, the Eternal, 
 entered as a man into fellowship with the children of time. God 
 covenanting with Abraham is a prelude to God lying as an infant 
 in the manger of Bethlehem, or dyirig as a criminal on the cross of 
 Calvary. Certainly, when he makes a covenant with his creatures, 
 
 3
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 he puts himself and them into a now position ; he makes the most of 
 them ; he makes, if we dare to say it, the least of himself ; he gives 
 promises and blessings of vast import ; he exacts some duty which 
 he is pleased to treat as an equivalent. Abraham must practise 
 and enforce circumcision : Israel must keep the law, the precepts of 
 Sinia. Covenants are thus a part of the varied machinery of the 
 divine condescension. By them God might seem to treat man as 
 parents sometimes treat their children, placing them for some 
 festive occasion in a position of supposed equality with themselves, 
 investing them with attributes and with an importance which only 
 belong to the years of manhood and to a position which, from the 
 nature of the case, is entirely beyond their own. A covenant, then, 
 is a contract, or compact, and the question cannot but occur to us 
 how a covenant which God makes with his people should come to 
 be called, as it is called, a testament ; for the words " covenant " 
 and "testament'' represent in our English Bibles a single word in 
 each of the original languages, and this circumstance has been made 
 the ground of attack upon the Bible, as if the sacred writers were 
 playing tricks with words, or were employing an instrument of 
 which they only half understood the value. Some of my hearers 
 will understand what I mean in what I am going to say : and 
 I must bespeak for a few minutes the charitable patience of the 
 rest. 
 
 A testament, then, is a will. It has this in common with a 
 covenant, that it is a kind of settlement ; but it differs from a 
 covenant or a contract in relation to our human concerns in that, 
 while a covenant or contract is a transaction between the living, a 
 will or testament connects the living with the intentions of the 
 dead. "Where a testament is, says the apostolic writer, " there must 
 of necessity be the death of the testator, for a testament is of force 
 after men are dead, otherwise it is of no strength at all while the 
 testator liveth." And yet the two words, " covenant " and " testa- 
 ment '' are, as has been stated, used in our English Bible to trans- 
 late a single word in the originals, which includes both meanings. 
 And this two-fold rendering of a single word is not merely allow- 
 able : it is necessary. The Hebrew word originally means nothing 
 more than a contract or covenant. A disposition of property made 
 by a man in his lifetime, to have effect only after his death, was a 
 proceeding foreign to the life of ancient Israel ; and there is no 
 word in the old Hebrew language which will express it. But the 
 Greek word which, in the New Testament, stands for the Hebrew 
 word " covenant,'' means originally a testamentary disposition or 
 will a very familiar idea to the Greek world. The Greek-speaking 
 Jews of Alexandria, who, some two hundred years or more before 
 our Lord, turned the Old Testament, bit by bit, from Hebrew into 
 Greek as it was wanted for use in the services of their synagogues, 
 and then made out of these fragments that great version which we 
 to-day call the Septuagint, used the Greek word for " will " to 
 translate the Hebrew word for "covenant," because they observed 
 that the old covenants of God with the patriarchs and with Israel 
 did involve actual bequests, such as was the possession of Canaan, 
 which could only be inherited in a distant future. And thus the 
 4
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 Hebrew word meaning- a contract was strained, if you please, by its 
 actual use to mean a testament ; and the Greek word meaning 
 primarily, although not exclusively, a will, acquired by its associa- 
 tions the use of a covenant or contract. He who by his providence 
 controls the course of human events and the currents of human 
 thought does also, most assuredly, shape human speech so that it 
 may do his work, and it is his doing, and not any chance irregu- 
 larity, that the original word in the New Testament has thus come 
 to mean both covenant and testament, for that which it was intended 
 to describe answered to both meanings. Religion, as such, and the 
 religion of the gospel especially, is at once a compact with God and 
 a bequest from God. The gospel, I say, is a compact or covenant, be- 
 cause its blessings are conditionally bestowed. They must be met 
 by faith, hope, love, repentance. And it is also a will or testament 
 more obviously than was the Mosaic covenant, for it was made by 
 our divine Lord when his death was in full view, and when he, who 
 alone could use such words without folly or without blasphemy, took 
 the cup into his blessed hands, and when, after he had given thanks, 
 he gave it to his followers, saying, " Drink ye all of this, for this is 
 my blood of the New Testament, which is being poured out for you 
 and for many, for the remission of sins.' 1 And yet this very testa- 
 ment is so conditioned as to be a covenant, too, and the solemn 
 words to which I hare just referred were but an echo in an after 
 age of the saying in the prophet, "Behold, I make a new 
 covenant." 
 
 Of this new covenant in the gospel there were according to 
 Jeremiah to be three characteristics. We cannot suppose that he 
 is giving us an exhaustive description. He selects these three 
 points because they form a vivid and easily understood contrast be- 
 tween the new covenant and the old, between Christianity and 
 Judaism. 
 
 First, then, in those who have a real part in the new covenant, 
 the law of God was not to be simply or chiefly an outward rnle ; it 
 was to be an inward principle. The ordinary Israelite thought of 
 the divine law as of something outside him. True, he had to con- 
 form to do it, to submit to it, to obey it as he could ' and, as St. 
 Paul says, he made his boast in it, sina he felt that it gave him 
 national and religious prestige to belong to forefathers who had re- 
 ceived it from heaven. But he shrank from its exacting require- 
 ments ; he shrank from its stern warnings ; he kept it in his 
 imagination reverentl} r , but at a distance. It was, as he rejoiced to 
 proclaim, traced by the finger of God ; but then it was laid up in 
 the sacred ark, or in later ages it was hidden so said the best tra- 
 ditions in some mysterious cave, ever since the Chaldean capture 
 of the Temple. The Jew was proud of it as the chief glory of a 
 religion whose requirements he scarcely attempted to fulfil. Of 
 course, there were exceptions in anciens Israel, such as that most 
 spiritual of the later poets who, in the dark night of the captivity 
 poured forth frem his fervid soul the 119th Psalm one long cele- 
 bration of the beauty and power of the divine law as manifested in 
 the life and as ruling the affections of a sincere Israelite. But, 
 as a rule, the law was prized and disobeyed disobeyed like some 
 
 5
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 great family name which is valued as a social passport, while its 
 attendant obligations to lead a noble life are generally disregarded. 
 With the new covenant it was to be otherwise. . " This is the 
 covenant which I will make in those days, saith the Lord ; I will 
 put my law in their inward parts, and write it upon their hearts." 
 The law was to be no longer an outward rule condemning the in- 
 ward life, or even rousing the spirit of rebellion : it was to be au 
 inward principle, not running counter to the will, but shaping it, 
 and claiming obedience, not from fear but from love, ay, from 
 love heightened to enthusiasm. In the Christian's thoughts, as 
 St. Paul says, it was to be written, not on tables of stone, but on 
 the fleshly tables of the heart. It was to present itself, not as a 
 summons from without the soul, but as an impulse from within the 
 soul ; not as declaring that which had to be done or to be foregone, 
 but as describing that which it was already a joy to forego or to 
 do. In short a new power, the spirit of Jesus Christ, giving 
 Christians a new nature the nature of Jesus Christ would be 
 within the soul and would effect the change. What the law of 
 Moses could not do in that it was weak through the weakness of 
 human nature, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful 
 human nature, and for human nature, condemned sin in human 
 nature, that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us 
 who walk not after the law of human nature, but after the Spirit. 
 The language of the 119th Psalm should be that of every Christian 
 who has a true inward share in the new covenant," The law of 
 thy mouth is dearer unto me than thousands of gold and silver : 
 thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage. 
 Lord, what love have I unto thy law ! All the day long is my 
 study in it." 
 
 And a second token of a part in the new covenant is the growth 
 of the soul in the knowledge of divine truth. In ancient Israel, as 
 now, men learned what they could about God from human teachers, 
 but the truths which they learned, though inculcated with great in- 
 dustry, were, in the majority of cases, not really mastered, because 
 there was no accompanying process of interpretation and adjust- 
 ment from within. It wna to be otherwise in the future. "And 
 they shall no more teach every man his neighbour, and every man 
 his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for all shall know me, from the 
 least of them unto the greatest of them.'' In the new covenant, the 
 divine teacher, without dispensing with such human instruments as 
 were needed, would do the most important part of the work him- 
 self. He would make truth plain to the soul, and would enamour 
 the soul of the beauty of truth by such instruction as is beyond the 
 reach of human argument and human language, since it belongs 
 altogether to the world of spirit. " Ye have an unction from the 
 Holy One," and St. John, to his readers, "and ye know all things." 
 "Listen not," cries St. Augustine, "too eagerly to the outward 
 words: the true Master sits within." 
 
 And this explains a fact which has been frequently observed, 
 namely, how often the apprehension of religious truth is found to be 
 out of all proportion to the natural abilities or cultivation or acquire- 
 ments of persons who really apprehend it. Not seldom do the very 
 6
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 poor who can hardly read at all, but who have made the most of 
 such Christian instruction as God has placed in their way, show by 
 some stray observation how high and how deep their thoughts do 
 really reach about divine things, how eminent is their position in 
 that invisible school of Christ in which precedence is assigned not 
 to natural acuteness, but to spiritual illumination, how little the 
 unseen teacher is dependent upon circumstances on which we men 
 in our ignorance set so much store, in order to perfect his work. 
 
 And a third characteristic of the new covenant was to be the for- 
 giveness of sins. " I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remem- 
 ber their sin no more." This, although it is stated last, is really a 
 precedent condition of the other two. While sins are unforgiven 
 there can be no writing of the moral law upon the heart of man, 
 and no illumination of the soul of man in the secrets of divine 
 truth, for these prerogatives imply that the soul is inhabited by a 
 dirine tenant, that Christ, the hope of glory, is in Christians, bo- 
 cause his Spirit has made and still keeps open a home for him in 
 the will and the intellect of the regenerate soul. But this trans- 
 cendent privilege is the very wildest of baseless dreams, if, indeed. 
 it be the case that the sins of the past are unforgiven. And in the 
 average Jew they were unforgiven. The sacrifices of atonement 
 under the Jewish law provided some legal or external pardon : they 
 could not put away moral guilt. It is not possible that the blood 
 of bulls and goats should put away sin. They were shadows of a 
 real atonement to be offered once for all by the perfect representa- 
 tive of our race. His death was to be the highest expression of a 
 perfectly obedient will. His blood was the symbol of his death, 
 and, as instinct with his life, was to have a propitiatory virtue to 
 the end of time. "In whom we have redemption through his 
 blood, even forgiveness of sins" this is the motto which Christian 
 faith traces above the crucified, since all the avenues of pardon hero 
 below the one baptism for the remission of sins, the "power and 
 commandment given to God's ministers to declare and to pronounce 
 to his people, being penitent, the absolution and remission of their 
 sins,'' the pardoning virtue of sorrow, pressed to the heart by faith 
 and love, the humbling, trembling hope whispered within that all 
 has at last been blotted out these draw their power altogether 
 from the great sacrifice on Calvary. " This is a true saying, and 
 worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to 
 save sinners ; " and this salvation of his would begin with pardon ; 
 and this pardon in its plenary completeness is the crowning 
 triumph of the new covenant between God and man. 
 
 Here, then, we seem to have already rnai'ked out for us some con- 
 siderations which may be turned to practical account this advent. 
 What is our share individually in the blessings of the new cove- 
 nant ? Are we conscious that we do, in any true sense, love the 
 law of God, because it is his law, and that amid weakness we obey 
 it, because obedience is welcome to us because disobedience would 
 be painful ? Or is our Christian rule of life like the Israelites' law 
 of old, written, so far as we are concerned, only in our Bibles and 
 our Prayer-books, but not incorporated with the substance of our 
 soul's life? Can we trace, as time goes on, any progrcssivo rrowth in
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 
 the knowledge of God of his attributes of power, of wisdom, of 
 of love of his revealed will of his relations with ourselves of 
 his inconceivable tenderness and condescension in redemption and 
 in grace? Or is it the case with us that, while our understandings 
 have been growing in strength and in capacity in all other direc- 
 tions and for all other purposes, our knowledge of the infinite and 
 eternal Being is just what it was ten or twenty or thirty years ago, 
 if indeed it be not something less, because no inward teacher has 
 been welcomed by us to graft on our hearts the truths which have 
 fallen on our outward ear ? Are we rejoicing in the sense of God's 
 pardoning love, in Jesus Christ, extended to us, though most un- 
 worthy, not only in baptism, but also again and again for many later 
 transgressions of the divine law ? Or have we not yet learned 
 what true repentance means repentance without which pardon is 
 for ever impossible ? By these questions we may test the reality of 
 of our share in the new covenant. And here, perhaps, brethren, 
 some who hear me will say to themselves that they like to think of 
 themselves as living under the New Testament, and that they con- 
 ceive of the New Testament as containing a legacy of unstinted 
 benevolence to which no conditions whatever are attached. Doubt- 
 less the gospel, a testament or will, does ensure to successive 
 generations of Christians a splendid patrimony. Under its terms 
 we inherit the infinite merits of the Redeemer, the sanctifying 
 power of the Spirit, the grace and virtue of the sacraments, the 
 instruction and encouragement of the Holy Scriptures, ay, and a 
 right of access at all times " into the Holiest by the blood of 
 Jesus through a new and living way which he has consecrated," 
 and which is open to faith vthile time shall last. Doubtless the 
 gospel is a will, and we Christians are the legatees in whose favour 
 it is drawn ; but it is also a will to which conditions are attached 
 such conditions as practically to make it a contract and a covenant. 
 Do not let us oh, do not let us for the world deceive ourselves ! 
 Those exhilarating promises of a law written on the heart, of the 
 communication of truth by an invisible teacher, of the plenary for- 
 giveness of all our sins, imply accompanying engagements and 
 duties. They imply faith, hope, love ; they imply a straightforward 
 desire to make the best of religious opportunities ; they imply re- 
 nunciation of our spiritual enemies, belief in the articles of the 
 Christian faith, obedience to God's holy will and commandments 
 the three terms of the great engagement which was promised and 
 vowed in our separate names when we first entered into covenant 
 with Christ. We cannot do ill in sifting this matter, each for him- 
 self, this advent. Religion, it has been finely said, rests on a sense of 
 gratitude balanced by a sense of enduring responsibility. By all 
 means let us hail in the New Testament mercies which should stir 
 our undying gratitude ; but let us not forget that the New Testa- 
 ment is also the new covenant, and that we do well to think what 
 that title involvos in respect of our responsibility, " and so much 
 the more as we see the day approaching*"
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS 
 
 AND 
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 mnmui 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D., 
 
 (Canon of St. Pa/id's,) 
 
 PREACHED IX 
 
 ST, PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 On Sunday afternoons, December, 21st & 28th, 1879, 
 
 F. DAVIS, (late J. PAUL), Penny Pulpit Office, Chapter House Court, 
 St, Paul's, E.G. 
 
 Nos. 1,100-1 L. NEW SERIES.
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 
 
 Preached on Sunday Afternoon, December 2lst, 1879. 
 
 " Thomas said unto them, Except I shall see in His hands the print of the 
 nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand 
 into His side, I will not believe." John xx. 25. 
 
 If there is one characteristic more than another by which the 
 Bible account of the great servants of God differs from most bio- 
 graphies of good men in modern times, it is the fearless truthful 
 ness with which the Bible describes the failings of its heroes. 
 Generally speaking, a modern biographer is afraid to be perfectly 
 explicit when he has to notice some less favourable side of a life, or 
 character on which he is engaged. He says to himself that 
 his first duty is to be loyal to his subject, and that he can 
 not afford to play with topics which would imperil the feeling 
 of respect or admiration which it is his object to produce. He 
 leaves it to the critics to pick holes in the man whom he * is 
 describing, and so he touches weaknesses or faults with a gentle and a 
 sparing hand, and throws all his strength into the description of 
 what is plainly excellent and admirable. Too possibly, in the event, 
 he defeats his real purpose after all, and men say that they came 
 wanting to have a history, and have been put off with a panegyric. 
 But with the Bible it is otherwise. The Bible enumerates with a 
 dry simplicity the failings, no less than the virtues, of the saints the 
 falsehood of the patriarch, Jacob the murder and adultery of 
 David, the man after God's own heart the cowardice and temporary 
 apostacy of St. Peter even the impatience, as it would seem, at 
 least on one occasion, of our Lord's own blessed mother. These are 
 described in the sacred text without emphasis, but also without 
 shrinking when they have to take their place in the order of the 
 narrative. One only life is there in the whole of scripture in which 
 no trace of imperfection is really discoverable his life who, though 
 he was " made sin for us," yet " knew no sin that we might be made 
 the righteousness of God in him." As scripture guides us Christians 
 42
 
 THE INCBEDULITY OP THOMAS. 
 
 to adore the sinless manhood of the divine Redeemer, it puts into 
 our mouths, generation after generation, the confession in which we 
 all of us without exception must join, " All we like sheep have 
 gone astray : we have turned every one to his own way ; and the 
 Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." And thus it is that in 
 to-day's gospel the great apostle St. Thomas, who now reigns with 
 Jesus Christ our Lord in glory, comes before us as illustrating, not a 
 virtue, but a grave failure, and on an occasion of critical importance. 
 That the doubt of St. Thomas was overruled, as the church says in 
 the collect, to " the more confirmation of the faith '* does not affectits 
 intrinsic character. And St. Thomas to-day is only our example, not 
 as the apostolic doubter, but as the apostle who shows us how faith 
 may be reinvigorated how doubt may be surmounted or dispelled. 
 
 And thus, indeed, in the church's year this apostle's festival fitly 
 guards the approach to Christmas, since, at the cradle of the divine 
 child of Bethlehem, faith must learn, as .did St. Thomas in the upper 
 chamber, to confess the divinity which is veiled beneath a human 
 form, and to exclaim from the heart when it contemplates the 
 Saviour in his infancy, as in his risen glory. " My Lord and my 
 God." St. Thomas, you will remember, was not with the ten apostles 
 on the evening of the day of the resurrection when Jesus appeared 
 in their midst and blessed them and showed them His hands and 
 His side. And when they told Thomas what had happened, he 
 refused to believe unless he, too, could himself test the reality of 
 that which they reported. " Except I shall see in Christ's hands the 
 print of the nails and put my finger into the print of the nails and 
 thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe." 
 
 And here it may be asked, first of all, what is there to object to in 
 this declaration ? Is not this, it may be said, the language of a man 
 who is anxious to ground his most serious convictions on a solid 
 foundation who in a matter of such urgency will not be content 
 with second-hand information, but insist upon personal investigation 
 of, and contact with, the fact on which his faith is to rest ? May it 
 not be argued that by a singluar anticipation Thomas has here caught 
 something of the positive spirit of the modern world that he is 
 anxious, above all things, to escape illusions and to arrive at truth 
 by experimental methods that truth is sometimes obliged to be 
 peremptory and exacting if she is to be equal to herself, and that 
 the fingers of Thomas thrust not irreverently into the wounds of the 
 risen Christ are the fitting symbol of the spirit of enquiry, which is 
 not, therefore, irreligious, because it is the sworn enemy of all the 
 forms of easy credulity ? This is what may be said, and the answer 
 is as follows. 
 
 The declaration of Thomas that he will not believe except he can 
 have bodily contact with the wounds which show that the Christ 
 who is risen is the very Christ who was crucified involves an 
 unwarrantable demand upon the providence of God. Why is a man 
 
 43
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 
 
 to refuse to believe a truth which he has, mark you, already good 
 reasons for thinking highly probable, and which comes to him 
 attested by persons whom he is bound in reason and charity to 
 trust, unless he can have it warranted by another and a distinct 
 form of proof? Thomas does not say that he cannot believe if he 
 does not touch the wounds of Christ : he says that he shall or will 
 not. He betrays, by the very form of his words, his consciousness of 
 the truth that his believing or not is, to a certain extent, at any rate, 
 in his own power, and that he is thus making a sort of bargain with 
 God, and is asking for better terms than he has before him. God, 
 he thinks, might have done more for him if he was to believe in the 
 resurrection of Christ ; and until he is satisfied he means to withhold 
 belief. He sees, as he thinks, how much better the matter might 
 have been ordered, just as Naaman thought that Abana and Pharpar 
 would wash him from his leprosy better than all the waters of 
 Israel, just as the rich man in hell thought that if one from the 
 dead went to his brethren they would really repent. And he who 
 prescribed the Jordan to the Syrian leper for the cure of his leprosy, 
 and the teaching of Moses and the prophets to the brethren of 
 Dives as furnishing sufficient incentives to repentance he also 
 ordered, by his providence, that Thomas should hear of Christ's 
 resurrection from apostles who had seen the risen Christ, instead of 
 seeing him with them. Not to accept the report of the apostles as 
 sufficient was to challenge the wisdom of a divine appointment ; and 
 for this reason, if for no other, the unbelief of St. Thomas is 
 implicitly censured by our Lord. It may be argued that the causes 
 which determine conviction are not in a man's own power, that 
 ihey belong to the world of intellectual truth, and could not be 
 other than they are. And it may be further urged that the evidence 
 of sight is better, any day, than the evidence of heresay, and that 
 Thomas was right in saying that, if he was to believe in his Master's 
 resurrection, he must not merely hear that Christ had risen; he 
 must see him with his eyes, and feel him with his hands. 
 
 Here, it is plain, we are very nearly on the ground which was 
 taken up by Hume in that celebrated argument against miracles 
 which was so much discussed by our grandfathers at the close of the 
 last and the beginning of the present centuries. Hume maintained 
 that belief is founded upon and regulated by experience, and that, 
 while we often experience testimony to be false, we never witness a 
 departure from the order of nature. Therefore, Hume argues, it is 
 more in accordance with experience that men should deceive us when 
 they report a miracle than that nature should be irregular; and 
 there is, accordingly, a balance of presumption against miracles so 
 strong as to outweigh the strongest testimony in their favor. This 
 argument is even now, from time to time, reproduced with unimpor- 
 tant variations ; and it may detain us for a few minutes, both as 
 lying in the path of our subject, and as having an intrinsic impor- 
 tance besides. 
 44
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 
 
 Hume affirms that the credibility of a fact or a statement must 
 be decided by its accordance with the established order of nature, 
 and by this standard only. This would be true enough if there 
 were certainly known to be no being in existence above and beyond 
 nature if nature really included all existing powers and beings. 
 But if there is a being in existence higher than what we call nature, 
 and indeed its author, of whose mind and character we have inde- 
 pendent knowledge, then occurrences which, like miracles, are out of 
 agreement with the order of nature may yet be credible if they can 
 be shown to agree with the known attributes and purpose of this 
 being. An event, whether it be natural or miraculous, at once be- 
 comes credible when a sufficient reason is assigned for it ; and suffi- 
 cient reason is assigned for a miracle when it is shown to be in 
 harmony with the character and purpose of the Being who has 
 created what we call nature, even though it should involve an inno- 
 vation upon his usual methods of working in other words, upon 
 nature itself. For to those who believe in the existence of God 
 and Hume himself was a serious theist the idea of an order of 
 nature ought not, in reason, to be considered sufficient to destroy the 
 antecedent possibility of miracle, much less to overrule trustworthy 
 testimony that a miracle has actually been worked. 
 
 And, secondly, Hume's argument proves too much for his purpose. 
 If the strongest testimony to a miracle ought to be rejected because 
 human testimony has sometimes deceived us, while we have never 
 observed a failure in the order of nature, then the testimony of our 
 senses to a miracle ought also to be rejected, because our senses, too, 
 have, as we cannot deny, at least, sometimes, deceived us. In other 
 words, we ought not to believe a miracle if we saw it worked before 
 our own eyes. If the order of nature, as it is called, forbids us to 
 trust the report of an honest eye-wituess about a miracle, it may 
 forbid us to trust the report of our own eyes ; but then if we can 
 not trust the witness of our senses about a miracle, how do we know 
 anything really about the invariability of the order of nature itself ? 
 This very idea of a settled order of nature is itself the product of a 
 continuous exercise of the senses of many generations of men ; and 
 if the senses are to be credited when they report an order which is 
 the rule of nature, they do not deserve less credit when they report 
 the miraculous exception. Though they may at times give us false 
 report, it is upon the whole, we are well assured, reasonable to 
 believe them, and, in like manner, though the testimony of other 
 men may be sometimes false, it may also be, at least, as trustworthy 
 as the evidence of our own senses. Whether it is so, or not, in a given 
 case must be held to depend upon the moral character of the witness 
 upon his opportunities of observation and of apprehending and 
 describing- clearly what he sees. If he tells us that he has seen a 
 miracle, and if his character and conduct are in keeping with the 
 requirements of the statement, then his testimony proves, at any 
 rate, to begin with, the conviction of his own mind ; and this con- 
 
 45
 
 TSE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 
 
 viction is itself a fact which must be explained in some way or other ; 
 and if it can be accounted for in no other way than by supposing 
 that the alleged miracle was real, then it is not merely reasonable 
 it is strictly necessary in reason to believe the miracle upon testi- 
 mony, the claims of the order of nature notwithstanding. 
 
 And this brings us to St. Thomas protesting to the disciples who 
 had seen Jesus risen that he would not believe the resurrection till 
 he had seen and touched the risen Redeemer "Why should he refuse 
 credence to the report of his colleagues? St. Thomas certainly 
 would not have held that there was any order of nature which could 
 bar the possibility of miracle, since he believed in an omnipotent and 
 living God, and would not have shrunk, like the deists of the last 
 century, from what is involved in this belief ; but he would not 
 believe the startling report that his crucified Master had left his 
 grave. He refused to believe it, not because the resurrection was a- 
 momentous miracle, but because he could not take it from others 
 upon trust. And yet there were not wanting grave reasons for his 
 believing the ten apostles, the two disciples, and the three women who 
 said that they had seen the Lord. Had not Christ said that he 
 would rise from the dead ? Had he not appealed to the old Jewish 
 scriptures, and given his resurrection as a sign of the truth of his 
 mission ? If a miracle was ever to be looked for, was it not to be 
 expected here ? If God who had made the order of nature so 
 generally invariable might be expected to interfere with it for the 
 highest of all purposes that we can conceive, this surely was an occa- 
 sion for his doing so. Had Thomas enjoyed those months those 
 years of high companionship with Jesus without perceiving in him 
 that which, to say the very least, might well warrant interference on 
 his behalf, and on behalf of his cause and work, with the accustomed 
 laws of God in nature ; and was it reasonable or reverent to reject 
 the assurance of his brethren that such an interference had taken 
 place? 
 
 It may, indeed, be asked why Thomas should not have been 
 permitted to see Jesus Christ after his resurrection as the other 
 apostles saw him. Had he done so, no question would have been 
 raised no hesitation experienced. And, in like manner, men ask 
 why the evidence for Christianity is not greater than it is is not, as 
 some would wish to put it, so strong, so compulsory, that the mind 
 could not set it aside without conscious absurdity. The truth is, that 
 the evidence for religion is just what it is, and no more, in order to 
 satisfy reason, rightly informed and disciplined, and yet to leave 
 room for faith. If we could not help believing in Christianity, there 
 would be no room for faith. We should accept the creed, in that 
 case, by exactly the same mental act as that by which we accept the 
 conclusion of a problem in Euclid. As reasonable beings, we should 
 have no choice about it, and our act would imply nothing whatever 
 as to the condition of our affections or our wills. God has made the 
 evidence of Christianity less than mathematical because he willed to 
 46
 
 INCREDULITY OP THOMAS. 
 
 make i'aith a test, not merely or chiefly of the goodness of our under- 
 standings, but also of the condition of our hearts and wills. These 
 do contribute to the complex act of faith, while they have nothing to 
 do with the pure action of reason. " With the heart," says the 
 apostle, " man believeth unto righteousness ; " and because faith is 
 thus a criterion of the state of our affections, and of the direction and 
 straightforwardness of our wills, it is represented in the New Testa- 
 ment as a cause of our justification before God. It could not be this 
 if it were a mere act of the understanding ; and, because it is much 
 more than an act of the understanding, the evidence for Christianity 
 is so adjusted as to leave room for the play of those other elements 
 which enter into it. 
 
 But if the unbelief of St. Thomas is instructive, his recovery of 
 faith is still more instructive. When Thomas laid down conditions 
 under which alone belief in his risen Lord would be possible, our 
 Lord, in his astonishing love and condescension, was pleased to take 
 the apostle at his word. A week after the day of the resurrection, 
 Jesus appeared among the assembled apostles, when Thomas was 
 with them. Thomas had said, " I will not believe ; " and now he 
 saw. He saw that form, those features, on which he had gazed in 
 bygone times with such reverent love. He heard that voice with 
 whose accents he was so familiar, and which he had for the moment 
 deemed to be silent for ever in the grave. And he was thrilled we 
 may be sure of it through and through. To have seen his risen 
 Master at all would have been of itself overwhelming. To have 
 seen him after denying that he was risen after resisting the witness 
 of others to his having kept his word this must have passed all 
 word and thought. And when, instead of reproaching him, Jesus 
 accepted his terms, and bade him "Reach hither thy finger and 
 behold my hands, and reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my 
 side, and be not faithless but believing," what an agony of confusion 
 and self-reproach must not have taken possession of the apostles's 
 soul ! Thomas he might have resisted, even yet. Conviction was not 
 forced upon him. Had his will been set on resistance, there were 
 ingenious reasons for resisting close at hand. But, in truth, the sight 
 of Jesus was enough. He had no heart to hold out against the 
 presence against the appeal of the most merciful. So far as we are 
 told, he did not reach out his fingers towards the hands and the side 
 of Christ, but as there was now no room for faith, properly speaking, 
 in the resurrection, since the risen Jesus was there an object of 
 sight, his faith fixed on the divine person that was veiled beneath 
 the human form before him, and he cried in a transport of adoration, 
 " My Lord and my God." 
 
 We may have known men who in Thomas's place would have 
 acted otherwise ; for a return to faith is often rendered difficult, if 
 not impossible, by a subtle form of pride not the coarse self-asser- 
 tion which outrages good taste, if it does not shock the moral sense, 
 but the quiet vice which mimics a healthy self-respect and which 
 
 47
 
 THE INCREDULITY OP THOMAS. 
 
 actually led the Jews or, most of them, to reject Jesus Christ. This 
 is the foe of reviving faith, for such pride aims commonly at two 
 results personal distinction, and freedom from public criticism. A 
 believer, as such, can hardly be very distinguished. His faith places 
 him on a level with millions who share it with poor simple folk 
 who make no pretence to being wiser than their neighbours, still 
 less, wiser than the Bible or wiser than the church ; but an unbeliever 
 may imagine himself I do not here say with what degree of justice 
 to see a great deal farther than the mass of people around him. 
 He piques himself on being superior to their prejudices, and of living 
 habitually in higher spheres of thought ; and, therefore, when 
 Christianity, as God's message to the human race, visibly commends 
 itself to, and takes possession of, multitudes of men, that of itself 
 is a reason with him for rejecting it. And if he has already rejected 
 it, this reason becomes very strong indeed, for the conceit of singu- 
 larity, so to term it, is reinforced by the pride of consistency. If he 
 returns to faith, he reflects that he will have to admit to himself and 
 to others that he was wrong in supposing himself more far-sighted 
 than others, and this admission will cost him too much. Thomas 
 certainly had to own to himself that his demand to see and touch the 
 wounds of Christ, was, in itself, unwarrantable ; but in that sacred 
 presence there was no room for self. He surrendered at discretion. 
 And much more do grosser vices hold back the soul from a return to 
 faith. A man who is yielding to them willingly can not afford to treat 
 the evidence for Christianity with intellectual justice. The gospel 
 reproves and condemns him. It dashes his cup of pleasure with 
 bitterness. He knows that he has no part in its promises. He can- 
 not mistake the import of its warnings, so far as he is concerned. 
 He has, therefore a strong motive for wishing it to be untrue ; and in 
 these matters the will generally contrives to make the understanding 
 do its good pleasure, so that infidel reasoning which affects to be a disin- 
 terested effort of the pure intelligence, is sometimes I am far from say- 
 ing always is sometimes prompted and dictated by some lower form 
 of desire. Besides this, vicious habits blunt the spiritual perceptions 
 of the soul. They eat out its finer sensibilities. They are fatal to 
 its capacity for detecting moral beauty ; and this puts one of the 
 most striking Christian evidences that which is based on the con- 
 summate perfections of our Lord's human character at once out of 
 reach ; and thus men have come to regard the most tender and at- 
 tractive mysteries of the Christian creed with something even ap- 
 proaching to disgust, and they catch eagerly at misrepresentations of 
 its import, and they welcome with both hands objections to the 
 reasoning by which it is defended, and they busily repeat jests at its 
 expense. Into such a soul, we are told, wisdom will not enter, nor 
 dwell in a body that is subject to sin. No such condition would 
 have deterred St. Thomas, but it is far too common not to be noticed 
 here. 
 48
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 
 
 There are, of course, other causes which may keep men from faith 
 causes for which God, we may trust, confidently, in his justice and 
 in his mercy, will make due allowance. Such are an unhappy edu- 
 cation, perhaps, by unbelieving parents or guardians, or intimacy in 
 after life with unbelievers of great mental ability, or a constitutional 
 frivolity of judgment, and, not unfrequently though this is little 
 suspected not unfrequently a morbidly active imagination which can 
 not acquiesce in the idea of fixed and unalterable truth. Not least 
 among these causes, too, is unconscious ignorance. Men who reject 
 Christianity are often ignorant of what the case for Christianity really 
 is. They have been familiar with the Christian language with the 
 language of the Bible, it may be for years, and they mistake this 
 familiarity with the text for real knowledge. They do not reflect 
 upon it. They do not see its harmonies its ample moral self- justifi- 
 cation its depths beyond depths of inter-connected truth. Living, 
 as they do, upon the surface, they arc impressed by the apparent 
 difficulties which hang about it, and they ask to put their hands 
 into the print of the nails, if they are to receive it. He who stood 
 before the eyes of Thomas waits by his grace to appear in the centre 
 of their souls ; but whether they will adore him if he does is the 
 anxious question. Doubt of the truth of Christianity is more com- 
 mon than it was five-and-twenty years ago ; and there are writers and 
 speakers who would fain persuade themselves and others that, far 
 from being a misfortune, such doubt is a healthy and interesting con- 
 dition of mind. We often hear quoted those lines of the laureate, 
 
 " There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
 Believe me, than in half the creeds." 
 
 Doubt is treated as a sympton of intellectual activity, while faith 
 is assumed to mean stagnation of mind. Doubt is described as 
 mental life, faith almost as mental death, doubt as the herald of 
 progress, faith as the symptom of nnenquiring adherence to the 
 errors of the past. No, brethren, this is not the language of whatever 
 is best and most thoughtful among us. In the early years of man- 
 hood, when spirits are buoyant and health is unimpaired, when, as 
 yet, no dark shadow has fallen across the path of life, and the sun 
 shines so brightly that it seems as if it might shine on for ever, it is 
 possible to sing in these lyrical strains the apotheosis of doubt. But 
 pass a few years of life till the first great gap has been made by 
 death in the home circle, and the first great heartache has settled ou 
 the soul, till some sharp shock of illness has laid bare the frailty of 
 the tenure by which we hold to life,and has opened out before the mind's 
 eye the depths beyond depths of that eternity which stretches away 
 beyond the tomb ; and ask yourselves then whether it is better that 
 the hand which lays hold on the unseen on the promises of the 
 eternal God, on the work of the crucified Saviour, on the grace of 
 his Spirit and of his sacraments should quiver, should tremble, than
 
 THE INCREDULITY OF THOMAS. 
 
 that it should grasp its object with a firm and masterful and un- 
 yielding hold. No, brethren, doubt is not health : it is disease. 
 Doubt is not strength : it is weakness. It is moral weakness, and it 
 is religious weakness, moral weakness because it shivers or paralyzes 
 those great convictions which impel man to act virtuously, and which 
 sustain him during the stress and pain of action. No man acts upon 
 a motive which one half of his mind accepts, while the other ques- 
 tions or rejects it. As St. James says, a man with two souls, or 
 minds, is unstable in all his ways. He can not make up his mind : 
 he has, in truth, no one mind to make up ; and, while he is balancing 
 helplessly between the conflicting views which in their equipoise 
 produce the doubt, the time for decisive action has already passed and 
 nothing has been done. 
 
 Doubt, then, is moral weakness. Much more, it is religious weak- 
 ness. Religion is only possible when the soul lays hold upon one on 
 whom it depends and to whom it is and feels itself to be bound by 
 the double tie of love and submission. But when the soul's grasp of 
 the perfect Being is weakened, loosened, if not forfeited, by doubt, 
 then religion correspondingly dies away, and the soul sinks down from 
 the high contemplation of that which is above it into those thick 
 folds of material nature which await its fall, and which, when it has 
 fallen, complete its degradation. Faith, believe me, is the leverage 
 of our nature. Doubt shatters the lever. Do not let us waste com- 
 pliments upon what is, after all, a disease and weakness of our 
 mental constitution, like those savages, forsooth, who make a fetish 
 of the animals or the reptiles from whose ravages they suffer. Let 
 us resist; let us conquer it; and if we quote those lines of the 
 laureate already referred to, and which, to speak the truth, are 
 perhaps not altogether without a touch of paradox, let us remember 
 that his friend and hero, if he passed through the pain of doubt, yet 
 fought his doubts and gathered strength. 
 
 " He would not make his judgment blind, 
 
 But faced the spectres of the mind, 
 And laid them. Thus he came at length 
 To find a stronger faith his own." 
 
 As you leave this cathedral, you will see, or you would have 
 seen in the north-west chapel, if the light had sufficed, a painted 
 window which represents the subject of to-day the incredulity 
 of St. Thomas. That window has been erected within the last year 
 to the memory of the late Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. Mansel : and, as it 
 has seemed to me, Dean Mansel claims a special place in the thoughts 
 and prayers of those who knelt beside him of old in this, his cathe- 
 dral, on St. Thomas's day. Each of us, my brethren, has his 
 appointed work in life, and in the church of God ; and the achieve- 
 ment by which Dean Mansel is best known to the educated world is 
 his application of the principles of the so termed " philosophy of the 
 50
 
 THE INCREDULITY OP THOMAS. 
 
 unconditioned ' to the solution of some difficulties supposed to lie 
 against the claims of revelation. That particular enterprise, brilliant 
 as it was, roused at the time a storm of controversy, and the discus- 
 sions to which it gave rise have not yet quite died away; nor, 
 indeed, considering the enduring interest of the subject for serious 
 thinkers, are they likely to do so. But his greatest work was wider 
 far than this ; and we may dare to say that it was of more certain 
 and more absolute value. No man, probably, in this generation, had 
 explored more perfectly the capacities of the human mind, considered 
 as a reasoning instrument, than had Dean Mansel. No man, certainly v 
 knew better how to turn it to account, for, as we still read him, there 
 is a combination of strength and delicacy in his method of handling 
 an argument which marks him as one of the princes of the world of 
 thought. And yet the truth which he felt most keenly, and which 
 he laboured in a hundred ways to impress on those around him, was 
 the truth of the very limited range of our mental powers when dealing 
 with the vast subjects that surround us with the heights and depths, 
 the immeasurable and eternal things, which form the subject matter 
 of religion. He had no patience as a reasoner with the preposterous 
 demands for unattainable kinds of proof in these awful regions, or 
 with the puny and self-confldent logic which essays to scale almost 
 to storm the very throne of Christ, only because it has not yet dis- 
 covered the measure of its prowess ; and for himself he could enter 
 the courts of the kingdom of heaven, because he had learnt that the 
 temper of a little child was not less dictated by the highest reason 
 than by the truest religious sense. Eight years and a half have pas- 
 sed since he was laid in his grave since he entered into that life 
 where nothing is left for faith to do, where souls gaze incessantly on 
 faith's everlasting object, and where, one by one, each of us in his 
 turn, we shall follow him ; and, perhaps, in that distant and endless 
 world, some of us will thank him beneath the throne -of Christ for 
 showing us, in this our earthly pilgrimage, that they who have not 
 seen and yet have believed have learnt what is due to a true esti- 
 mate of the powers of human reason as well as to the authority of 
 the voice of God.
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 Preached on Sunday Afternoon, December 28th, 1879. 
 
 " All things come of thee, and of thine own have we given thee.'' 
 1 Chron. xxix. 14. 
 
 This was King David's confession in the hymn of praise which he 
 offered not long before his death, when the chief of the fathers, and the 
 princes of the tribes of Israel had, at his instance, offered of their 
 wealth towards the temple which Solomon was to build. David him- 
 self set the example. He gave with princely munificence, or, as he 
 himself says, with all his might, for he remembered that the work- 
 was great, and the palace was not for man but for the Lord God ; 
 and when he had thus done what he could, he could, he knew, appeal 
 with a clear conscience, and with an unfaltering voice, to his subjects; 
 and they in their turn, and according to their measure, were equal to 
 the occasion. They gave gold, silver, brass, iron, in abundance, and 
 all who had precious stones in their keeping gave them to the trea- 
 sure of the house of the Lord. There was, in fact, as it seemed, an 
 enthusiasm abroad for making personal sacrifices a contagious 
 rapture which had spread from the monarch among his subjects, and 
 had taken possession of all hearts and wills, and men were tasting the 
 exquisite moral delight which is inseparable from a real act of sacri- 
 fice when it is made for an object of which the judgment unreservedly 
 approves. "The people rejoiced for that they offered willingly, 
 because with perfect heart they offered willingly unto the Lord, and 
 David the king also rejoiced with great joy ; '' and in his joy, David, 
 as was his wont in all strong movements of thought and feeling, 
 betook himself to God poured out the grand hymn of which the 
 leading thought is expressed in the words " All things come of thee, 
 and of thine own have give i thee." 
 
 Now these words plainly express a truth which rises high above 
 the occasion to which they immediately refer. All the blessings of 
 this life, they tell us, are God's gifts ; and here is a motive for 
 generous gifts, namely, that, give God what we may, it is already 
 his own. "All things come of thee.'' 
 52
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 Here is the religious estimate of the world and of lives, the 
 estimate which is formed wherever religion, properly speaking, exists 
 at all. From the religious point of view, no other idea of the rela- 
 tion between the world and God is possible. There is no room for 
 religion if the universe is conceived of as existing somehow without 
 the agency of God, or if God is conceived of as being identified with, 
 and as practically buried beneath, the folds of his own universe. It 
 is only with God the maker of all things, visible and invisible with 
 God as utterly distinct in his uncreated and eternal essence from the 
 work of his hands that the human soul can enter into that bond of 
 dependence and service which we call religion. Day by day, in his 
 inmost, heart, a religious man looks up : away from himself, away 
 from the creatures around him, he looks up to the one self-existent 
 being whose power and wisdom and goodness know no bounds who 
 ever has been who ever will be what he is now; and he exclaims 
 " All things come of thee." Of God it comes that anything besides 
 God exists at all. God was free to create or to live on, as he had 
 lived on for an eternity, unsurrounded by creatures. Of God it comes 
 that whatsoever exists exists as it exists, and not in some other mode 
 or manner of existence. God was not obliged by any constraining 
 necessity to create this particular universe in which we live, and these 
 actual creatures which inhabit it in the forms, numbers, kinds, 
 varieties, which we see around us. Xo independent agency could force 
 his hand and make him obey its behests. No pre-existing or rather 
 co-existing material imposed upon his activity conditions of working 
 which he could not but obey. Of him it comes that in this marvel- 
 lous universe that which is most like himself as a spiritual essence 
 takes precedence of that which is less like, so that matter is subordin- 
 ated to spirit so that the physical world exists for the sake of the 
 moral so that man is invested with dominion over the works of God's 
 hands, and all things are put in subjection under his feet. All things 
 come of him their existence and the modes and the purpose of their 
 existence ; and whether he fashions his handiwork at a single stroke, 
 or slowly brings it to perfection through the measured movements 
 of almost incalculable periods of time, it is always he who furnishes 
 the material he who gives the impact he who presides with an 
 absolute control at each stage of the prolonged development he who 
 supplies the last touch of strength or beauty to the highest or the 
 fairest in earth or heaven, " All thing come of thee." 
 
 But this, the only possible religious estimate of the relation bet- 
 ween the universe and God, is not morally fruitful for you and me 
 does not issue in anything practical, until we work it out in detail. 
 And if, my brethren, this detail is somewhat commonplace, it cannot 
 be helped. It shares this quality, after all, with the highest truths 
 which are not, if commonplace, less likely on that account to be dis- 
 regarded. " All things come of thee.'" 
 
 This is true, first of all, of that which was in David's mind of 
 material possessions of property. Property is both originally, and 
 
 53
 
 &OD THE SOUBCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 as long as we hold it, the gift of God. We speak of a man's making 
 his fortune ; and no doubt industrious habits, attention to the wants 
 and tastes of the times and to the conditions under which they can 
 be easily satisfied, prudence, caution, and the like, are qualities 
 which do largely contribute towards success of this kind. I say 
 they contribute to it : they cannot command it. In every prosperous 
 life there is an element which defies calculation, an element of un- 
 locked for occurrence of favouring circumstances, of happy oppor- 
 tunity, which by presenting itself makes all the difference in the 
 world. From the lack of it, careers, which at the outset^ seemed 
 full of promise, end in failure and in poverty, while men from whom 
 little might have been expected are almost carried forward into suc- 
 cess by some tide in affairs which has presented itself to them at a 
 critical moment. This element of opportunity is strictly beyond our 
 own control ; and whence, whence comes it ? We veil the reality 
 from our eyes and from the eyes of others when we speak of " acci- 
 dent/' and " chance," and " luck.'' No serious believer in God can 
 allow that these phantoms of the brain have any real existence 
 whatever. They are mere blinds of our own making which we let 
 down when we want to 'keep the light of God's countenance from 
 shining in at the windows of the soul. If a war, or a commercial 
 depression, or a failure of crops, or a sudden activity of some form 
 of foreign industry, which, as we have seen, has proved fatal to the 
 enterprise of others, did not occur at the period of our lives when it 
 must have brought us disappointment or ruin, this is not luck or 
 chance. It is his will and doing, out of whose bounty, and by the 
 employment of whose gifts, we make our fortune, if we make it at all. 
 But perhaps wealth has come to us from those who have won it 
 and left it to us ; OB we have long since toiled for it, and have re- 
 tired from the strain and the vicissitudes of business, and now we 
 are independent, and all that that fascinating word implies inde- 
 pendent of the freaks of fortune, as we call them, independent of 
 the assistance and goodwill of our fellow creatures, independent, 
 so far as our income goes (as we think, if we do not say it) of him 
 who gave it us. Are we thus independent ? Is our property so 
 secure that nothing can touch it that we seem to hold it not from 
 God, but from the well understood and solid guarantees which arc 
 furnished by modern civilization ? Surely, brethren, it is a mistake 
 to think that the security of property has become greater as civili- 
 zation has advanced. In early days when a man kept his stock of 
 wealth in his strong box, and buried it under the floor of an outhouse 
 at the approach of an invader, the wealth, I admit, was not very 
 productive, but, at least, it was not exposed to the risks which 
 might which would await it now. The immense development 
 and organization of credit reposing upon an extension and com- 
 plexity of business of which our ancestors never dreamt has made 
 money do much more work than it did of yore, but at the greater 
 risk of its possessor. The vast operations which require the contri- 
 54
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OP ALL THINGS. 
 
 butions of numberless small fortunes in order to be carried out at 
 all, and which encourage these contributions by remunerative rates 
 of interest, are themselves exposed to the shock of occurrences wholly 
 beyond the control of those who direct, and much more beyond the 
 control of those who contribute to sustain them. Never before in the 
 history of the world was the property of millions of persons so ex- 
 posed to the destructive action of causes which in other days would 
 only have assailed the fortunes of the few. Never was the truth that 
 riches make to themselves wings and flee away written more plainly 
 upon the very face of life ; never was it more certain, for all who have 
 eyes to see and ears to hear, that the retention -of wealth is not less 
 the work of God than its original acquisition. " All things come of 
 thee.'' How true is this of health, the preciousness of which 
 we only know when we have lost or are losing it. While 
 health lasts in its full vigour, it is often apt to produce 
 no less forgetfulness of God than riches. A man feels the 
 full flush and glow of life. He is buoyant with the spirits that are 
 produced by a sense of the harmony and the vigour of the various 
 functions of the body. The very relish of the gift seems to insure 
 its perpetuity. Imagination cannot so far forecast the future as to 
 conceive of its withdrawal. And then this man walks out into the 
 street, and he buys a book which tells him how to prolong health 
 into later life by temperate habits and by observing the rules which 
 protect the body against the foes of health ; and, in order to en- 
 courage him, the book tells him that his health is in his own power. 
 So, to a certain extent, it is, but only to a certain extent. The 
 secret of its collapse may be altogether beyond him. A tubercle 
 may already be forming in his lung ; an artery may be on the point 
 of giving way near his brain; and health and life are forfeited. 
 Considering the complexity, the delicacy, of the bodily organs oftho 
 nerves, the fibres, the muscles, the arteries, upon whose vigour and 
 harmony health depends, the wonder is not that we should lose it, 
 but that we should so long retain it. Those who believe that God 
 keeps his own world cannot fail to trace his hand in that wide 
 region 0f contingent circumstances by which health is so powerfully 
 affected, and over which man himself has no kind of control. 
 Health, too, is God's gift, and it is retained at his good pleasure. 
 
 " All things come of thee.'' So it is with the powers of the 
 mind. God gives them, and we hold them so long as he pleases, and 
 no longer. Not a few men of great mental powers have appeared to 
 forget that mind is a gift at all. They know how much they them- 
 selves have done by study to develop and enrich their intellects. 
 They are so conscious of wielding a force before which other men 
 bow down and do homage that they cannot bring themselves to 
 think that there is one being in existence to whom they owe it alL 
 and who might at any moment withdraw it. And yet those to 
 whom God has given these higher endowments are not seldom 
 reminded that they hold them upon sufferance, by this one fact 
 
 55
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 among others that they cannot certainly exercise them at will. 
 How little is the exercise of the mental powers within our control 
 at least during large portions of our lives. Some years, per- 
 haps, have passed since we made a particular subject our own by 
 study, by reflection, by conversation with others. We laid it by, as 
 if it were a permanent acquisition occupying a shelf in our minds 
 from which it might be taken down and examined and reproduced 
 at pleasure. And an occasion presents itself when we find ourselves 
 obliged to draw on this stock of long since acquired thought and 
 knowledge, when lo, we discover that we retain little more than the 
 skeleton of our old possession. The main facts are there still. The 
 outline is there. But all that gave it vividness and life has passed 
 away, and we try in vain to recover the warmth and coloring, the 
 abundant and detailed interest, which once stirred our thoughts and 
 imaginations in regard to it. So, too, with the exercise of faculties 
 which may have seemed in by-gone years completely at our com- 
 mand. Bishop Wilberforce used to say, ready as he generally was, 
 that there were times when it caused him almost physical suffering 
 to speak to order on a given subject. The subject was there, and a 
 moderate amount of industry would master its details, but how so 
 to deal with it as to kindle the responsive sympathy of others how 
 to speak from the soul when, for the moment, the soul is speechless 
 how to be vigorous, when everything within the mind is flabby 
 and tame how to move forward with ease and force, when every 
 thought has to be extracted by a violent mechanical effort that was 
 the question. There are days when we feel that the higher and 
 more original powers of the mind are just as little within our con- 
 trol as the weather ; and the sense of this may well suggest from 
 whom indeed we hold them and how precariously. Nor is this all. 
 The day may come to the wisest, to the most thoughtful, to the 
 most brilliant of men, when life will not yet have been forfeited, 
 but when all that can be called mind will have ceased to live when 
 the bright glance of intelligence will have been replaced by a 
 vacant stare, when the lips upon which, in old days, men 
 waited for the utterance of wisdom and reflection, produce nothing 
 that is coherent or even sensible when here and there,at least,one flash 
 of the old fire illumines for a moment the darkness of the ruin, only 
 o make it more bitterly felt. Few of us can have lived for 
 many years without seeing how the giver of high intellect may 
 completely withdraw his gift without feeling when we are con- 
 fronted by these distressing and overwhelming catastrophes how 
 completely from day to day we depend on him for its retention. 
 
 " All things come of thee." Need it be said that this es- 
 pecially applies to those powers by which our souls are raised 
 to a higher level than unassisted nature knows of and are 
 enabled to hold communion with the Being who made us. Grace, 
 which proceeds, as the word implies, from God's bounty, is 
 itself much more than mere favour such as results in no 
 56
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 form of active assistance. Such a cooncession as that is un- 
 worthy of God. Grace is an operative, impelling, controlling force, 
 by which the understanding is enlightened to see spiritual truth by 
 which the affections are warmed to embrace beauty by which the 
 will is braced and strengthed to do what the illuminated conscience 
 may prescribe. Grace is in its essence a divine presence in the regene- 
 rate man the presence of the new man Christ Jesus, who " after 
 God is created in righteousness and true holiness." And the least in 
 the kingdom of heaven is greater than the greatest of the ancient 
 saints, because this great gift of an inward presence has been conferred 
 on him through the bounty of the Redeemer and the ministrations.of 
 the Spirit in the church of Christ. Insight into great and solemn 
 truths the power of prayer the resourcefulness and the activities of 
 benevolence the sense of belonging already to an invisible world in 
 which the soul breathes freely as in its true and eternal home these 
 are but some of the prerogatives of the life of grace. It comes from 
 God, and when this is for a moment forgotten, how grave may be the 
 ruin ! Through this foregetfulness, again and again in the Christian 
 church Lucifer has repeated his fall from heaven. The soul's eye has 
 been withdrawn from the giver has centred on itself, the recipient, 
 ni if the rightful owner of an inalienable endowment ; and lo ! the 
 gift has been withdrawn. The eye that was clear-sighted sees noth- 
 ing clearly nothing as it really is. The arm that was so powerful 
 is paralyzed. Heaven which was the soul's home before its time is a 
 dark canopy spreading over life ; and all that drags man down and 
 that degrades him has reasserted its sway over a spirit that but now 
 was the companion of angels and lived as if it were of the lineage of 
 the saints. Yes," every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, 
 and cometh down from the Father of lights." And this great truth 
 should express itself in the spirit of sacrifice resting on the conviction 
 that whatever we give to God is already his. And the spirit of sacri- 
 fice is engaged constantly in twofold activity. It is either consenting 
 with humble resignation, if not with glad acquiescence, to that which 
 God exacts, or it is making some effort of its own to acknowledge the 
 debt of which it is never unconscious. And each of these forms of 
 sacrifice is suggested to us to-day. It is a day which, year by year, 
 is devoted by the church to the memory of the children who were 
 slain by King Herod when he was endeavouring to destroy the infant 
 Christ. The Feast of the Holy Innocents stands third of the three 
 festivals which follow in the church calendar immediately on the 
 birthday of our divine lledcemer; and these three days, it has often 
 Leen noticed, represent three different kinds of martyrdom. St. 
 Stephen was a martyr in will and in deed ; St. John the Evangelist, 
 a martyr in will, but not in deed ; the holy innocents in deed, but not 
 in will. 
 
 It may be said that this last can only be termed martyrdom by a 
 forced use of language, since, properly speaking, it is essential that 
 the witness to truth which the martyr bears should be a voluntary 
 
 ."'7
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 wilness, but at least the holy innocents did forfeit their lives for the 
 sake of Jesus Christ ; and God, we may be sure, accepted the sacri- 
 ficed, and has given them a place of honour and of light in the 
 kingdom of his Son for whom they died. But it is observable that 
 the evangelist turns our attention to the mothers of these slaughtered 
 babes, when they remind him of their ancestress, Rachel, as Jeremiah 
 had pictured her weeping from her tomb in Ramah over her unhappy 
 descendants, as they were being led past it in chains on their way to 
 Babylon, and weeping now again in Bethlehem, as it seems, over the 
 victims of the rage and jealousy of the Idumean king. Yes, these 
 mothers were called to. sacrifice. They had to resign themselves to 
 that which costs flesh and blood one of its most painful efforts. 
 Types they were of numberless mothers in Christendom whose infants 
 God takes from their arms into his everlasting keeping of some, I 
 have reason to think, who are here to-day. What can a mother whose 
 heart is broken by the loss of a child in whom all her hopes were 
 centred do, but pray that she may enter into the spirit of David's 
 words, " This infant, Father of heaven was thine thine by crea- 
 tion thine in a deeper and more perfect sense by union with thy Son 
 in baptism, and at thy bidding I give it back to thee. It must be 
 better that thou shouldest recall thine own since thou so wiliest it." 
 And probably not a few who hear me have been called on to give up 
 at the bidding of God during this past year something that was, in 
 whatever way, dear to them. You may have suffered by one of those 
 great collapses of credit by which the past year-and-a-half will be 
 unhappily remembered. You may have exchanged plenty and ease 
 for poverty and discomforts of which you had had no previous 
 experience. Or you have for the first time experienced what is meant 
 by the loss of health the changed aspect of life the weariness by 
 day and by night the haunting sense of some approaching collapse 
 the dread of a dark and uncertain failure ; and perhaps, bad health 
 has brought with it, among other things, a consciousness of impaired 
 mental powers, just when they would be so welcome as a kind of set-off 
 against physical weakness. Or some great hope centring in some 
 object of care or affection, cherished for many years, cherished under 
 difficulties, cling to in spite of appearances, and, as it seemed, perhaps 
 quite lately, likely to be realized, has now at last disappeared from 
 sight, and has to be abandoned for ever. Or some friend or relation 
 upon whose presence all the brightness and comfort of your life 
 depended has been called away into the kingdom of the dead. The 
 forms of sacrifice to which God invites us are indeed almost as various 
 as our several characters. The essential thing is to remember that 
 in each one of them he is recalling in part or wholly his own gifts, 
 and bidding us learn ever more to say from the heart, 
 " If thou should'st call me to resign 
 "What most I prize, it ne'er was mine ; 
 I only yield thee what is thine. 
 
 Thy will be done." 
 
 58
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 "Of thine own have we given thee." Besides the sacrifice of 
 resignation, there is the sacrifice of effort. We are still, and until 
 next Thursday, keeping the great festival of the birth of Christ. 
 What was that birth but the first act of the greatest sacrifice that 
 ever went up from earth to heaven of the one sacrifice that deserves 
 the name, by which all others are measured, in which all others, find 
 their consecration ? That sacrifice was finished on the cross of Cal- 
 vary ; but in the intention of the divine victim it began before he 
 manifested himself in the world of sense. " When he is coming into 
 the world he saith, The meat offering and the burnt offering thou 
 wouldest not, but a body hast thoa prepared me. Burnt offerings and 
 sacrifices for sin hast thou not required. Then said I, Lo I come to 
 do thy will, Lord." "A body hast thou prepared me.'' The 
 manhood of our Lord his body and his human soul was created 
 by God when he, the Son of God, became incarnate through 
 being conceived of the Holy Ghost. He folded this stainless 
 nature round his eternal person, and then he led it forth to 
 sacrifice, and his earthly life was a long series of sacrificial 
 efforts which ended in a death of agony and shame. When he 
 lay in the manger, this sacrificial work had already begun. When 
 he hung dying upon the cross, it was being completed. In those 
 last moments of agony and shame he was controlling the forces that 
 seemed to be mastering him. He was a priest upon his cross, and 
 withal he was the victim. He was, as his apostle says, through the 
 eternal Spirit offering himself immaculate to God. His life was not 
 wrung out of him, but, when the due moment had arrived, he himself 
 pronounced its dismissal. He gave it up to him whose it was. 
 " Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." 
 
 And this is the second great department of Christian effort a 
 willingness to make voluntary sacrifices on the ground that we are 
 giving God his own. A willingness to make such sacrifices is the 
 true test of life in a church. It is the true test of life in a Christian. 
 No act, no amount of activity, which does not involve sacrifice 
 proves that a church is really living. No amount of interest in 
 religion unaccompanied by the mark of sacrifice proves the life 
 of a soul. Willingness, at least, to do something which costs 
 effort, (and the more secretly the better) willingness to undergo 
 something which imposes pain (and the more secretly the better) 
 these are the fundamental tests of a true Christian life, providing, as 
 they do, that the spirit of the church or of the man in which they 
 are found is at one with the spirit of the divine Redeemer. 
 
 To-day we should look back upon the year which is past with this 
 view, and ask ourselves whether we have forgone some gain or honour, 
 or given up some wealth, or embraced of our free will some annoyance, 
 for his sake to whom we owe our life in nature and in grace; and if 
 across this tract of time we can see nothing that has on it the ennobl- 
 ing stamp of sacrifice, then let us resolve here and now to do or to 
 
 59
 
 GOD THE SOURCE OF ALL THINGS. 
 
 endure something which shall, if it may be, whatever it be really 
 worth, cost us much. No natural gifts, no successes, no warm 
 feelings, no congratulations of friends, no certificates of distinc- 
 tion, mental or moral, can really ennoble a life which lacks 
 this one indispensable patent of true nobility. "We shall not 
 be long at a loss how to obtain it if we are serious. Love 
 is inventive, and love is the parent of all sacrifice that deserves the 
 name. No doubt, on the last Sunday in the year, there is much else 
 to claim a place in thought. Few men are so light-hearted, so 
 frivolous, as to be wholly insensible to what is meant by the close of 
 another of these periods of time which form a considerable 
 portion in the longest span of human life. Few men can help pausing 
 and looking around them, and feeling the solemnity of events, public 
 as well as private, when we measure them by a quickened sense of 
 the lapse of time. The danger is, dear brethren, lest, with such abun- 
 dant materials for thought as the closing year suggests, nothing 
 practical should issue from our reflections lest after entertaining 
 ourselves with a retrospective reverie we should forthwith be and do a 
 fortnight hence exactly as before. The close of a year is a solemn 
 call to recognise the great truth which David confesses that life and 
 all that surrounds and all that belongs to it comes from God and is 
 due to God, and that every true life must be salted with the spirit of 
 sacrifice, at one while expressing itself in voluntary effort at another 
 in humble resignation. For this great purpose life is still our own, 
 but we know not how much or how little of it may yet remain to us. 
 The hours are passing. They are put down. " Pcmmt et imputctntvr." 
 As they pass, let us try to remember that, like all else, they too, each 
 one of them, come from the eternal being, and that, in consecrating 
 them to him, we are only giving Him that which is his own. 
 
 60
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES. 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 BY THE 
 
 EEV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D., 
 
 (Canon of St. Paul's,) 
 
 PREACHED IN 
 
 ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 On SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 28th, 1878. 
 
 Londwn: F. DAVIS, (late J. PAUL), i, Chapter House Court, North 
 Side of St. Paul's ; and Paternoster Row 
 
 No. 1,047 M. NEW SERIES.
 
 " And lie said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live ? And I answered, O Lord God 
 thou knowest." Ezekiel xxxvii, 3. 
 
 THOSE who have read the prophet Ezekiel and he is, perhaps, less read 
 than any other book in the Old Testament will remember this vision of the 
 dry bones. Like many other visions, before and since, it was partly shaped 
 by the circumstances of the times. The horrors of the Chaldean invasion, 
 which had resulted in the carrying away of the Jewish people into Babylon, 
 were still fresh in the memories of men. In many a valley, on many a hill 
 side, in southern Palestine, the track of the invading army as it advanced and 
 retired would have been marked by the bones of the unoffending but slaughtered 
 peasantry. In his work on Nineveh, written some years ago, Mr. Layard has 
 described such a scene in Armenia an upland valley covered by the bones of 
 a Christian population which had been plundered and murdered by the Kurds. 
 Such a scene may well have suggested to Ezekiel the background of the vision 
 which the prophetic spirit so shaped as to express a truth which Israel needed 
 to know. Ezekiel, wrapt in a spiritual ecstasy, was set down in the midst of 
 a valley that was full of bones. He was caused to pass by them round about. 
 He marked their great number : he marked their dryness. They were the 
 bones of a multitude of men who had been slain long since. He was asked 
 by the divine being with whom he was the while in close communion, ' Son 
 of man, can these bones live?" Ezekiel knew that nothing was impossible 
 with God. He knew, too, that what was possible might be forbidden by 
 necessities, by laws, of which he knew nothing, and he reverently answered, 
 ' O Lord God, thou knowest." And forthwith he was made the instrument 
 through which the question which had been put to him was answered. 
 '< He said unto me, prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry 
 bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God unto these 
 bones Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live ; and I 
 will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you 
 with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live ; and ye shall know that I 
 am the Lord." And then Ezekiel continues " So I prophesied as I was 
 commanded ; and as I prophesied there was a noise, and behold a shaking, 
 and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo ! the 
 sinews and flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above; but 
 there was no breath in them." That was the first stage of the revival. It was 
 still incomplete. Something more was needed something which the prophet 
 goes on to describe. " Then said he unto me, prophesy unto the breath," or 
 spirit : " prophesy, Son of Man, and say to the spirit, come from the four 
 162
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BOXES. 
 
 winds, O spirit, and breathe upon these slain that they may live." And then 
 he continues, " So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came 
 into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great 
 army. That was the second stage of the revival. And it is followed by an 
 explanation of the purpose of the vision. But let us at this point ask our- 
 selves the question What are we to understand by the dry bones of the vision 
 of Ezekiel ? 
 
 The dry bones of Ezekiel's vision are, doubtless, to begin with, the bones 
 of human bodies bones from which the flesh had been either stripped or 
 decayed away through exposure to the air. Ezekiel beholds a shaking a 
 coming together of these bones. He sees them again clothed with flesh and 
 sinews, and, finally, the breath comes into them and they live. They stand 
 on their feet. 
 
 This is plainly the picture of a resurrection not, indeed, of the general 
 resurrection, because what Ezekiel saw was, clearly, limited and local, but, 
 at the same time, it is a sample of what will occur at the general resurrection. 
 And on this ground the passage is read by the church as a proper lesson on 
 Easter Tuesday. It may be urged that this representation is presently ex- 
 plained to refer to something quite distinct namely, the restoration of the 
 Jewish people from Babylon, and, therefore, that what passed before the pro- 
 phet's eyes need not have been regarded by him as more than an imaginary or 
 even impossible occurrence intended to symbolize the coming event. But, if 
 this were the case, the vision, it must be said, was very ill adapted for its pro. 
 posed purpose. The idea of a restoration from Babylon was, humanly speak- 
 ing was, politically speaking sufficiently improbable already without 
 heightening this existing improbability by what is thus supposed to have been 
 a greater improbability still. Men do not learn to accept difficult or un- 
 familiar truth through the assistance of truth still more unfamiliar still more 
 difficult. The fact is that the form of Ezekiel's vision and the popular use 
 which Ezekiel made of it shows that at this date the idea of the resurrection 
 of the body cannot have been a strange one to religious Jews. Had it been 
 so, Ezekiel's vision would have been turned against himself. The restoration 
 from the captivity would have been thought more improbable than ever, if 
 the measure of its probability was to be found in a doctrine unheard of as yet 
 by the people of revelation. We know, in fact, from their own scriptures, 
 that the Jews had had, for many a century, glimpses, more or less distinct, of 
 this truth. Long ago the mother of Samuel could sing that the Lord 
 bringeth down to the grave and bringeth up ; and Job could be sure that 
 though worms destroyed his body yet in his flesh he would see God ; and 
 David, speaking for a higher being than himself, yet knows that God will not 
 leave the soul in hell or suffer his Holy One to see corruption ; and Daniel, 
 Ezekiel's contemporary, or nearly so, foresees that many of them that sleep in 
 the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame 
 and everlasting contempt. And later on the courageous mother of the seven 
 Maccabean martyrs cries to her dying son "The creator of the world who 
 formed all the generations of man, and found out the beginning of all things 
 will also in his mercy give you life and breath again if you regard not your- 
 selves for his law's sake." Undoubtedly, there was among the Jews a certain 
 belief in the resurrection of the body, a belief which this very vision must have 
 at once represented and confirmed. Men shrink from admitting the idea 
 that there will be a resurrection of the dead, on the ground, mainly, that it 
 involves an exertion of divine power to which nothing exactly corresponds 
 within the range of every day experience. Whether it is quite wise to make 
 the range of our experience a measure of what God can do may be more than 
 questionable. But, at least, the doctrine of the resurrection of all men from 
 
 163
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES. 
 
 the dead involves no greater difficulty for a thoughtful man than that which 
 he already encounters if he believes seriously in God at all, for belief in God 
 involves, as a necessary part of itself, a belief in the creation of the universe 
 out of nothing. However you may multiply the centuries during which man 
 is supposed to have existed on the surface of this planet however vast may 
 be the tracts of time which you may demand as theoretically necessary to fill 
 up the interval between some primary chaos and man's first appearance on the 
 scene say what you will about the date of the solar system or of the fixed 
 stars, or of the presumable history of their evolution still n the last resort, 
 in the rear of all these theories amid which the scientific imagination may run 
 such splendid riot, the -question of questions awaits you. It can not be 
 ignored ; it can not be eluded How did the original matter out of which all 
 that we see around us itself take shape ? How did this originally come to be ? 
 That is the question into which all others ultimately resolve themselves, and 
 upon the answer which is given to it depends no less an issue than belief or 
 disbelief in the existence of God ; for if you say that original, unformed, un- 
 evolved matter always existed, then you deny the existence of the being whom 
 we call God. God he is nothing if he is not the alone everlasting, if he 
 is not the source of all else that is, if he is not in his essence altogether 
 spiritual, immaterial. If there existed from everlasting side by side with 
 God, a something which you call matter which was not himself which was 
 in its essence distinct from himself which did not owe its existence to him, 
 and which, as being itself presumably eternal, contradicts the first law 
 of his being as the source of all that is besides himself, then God the creator 
 of all things has no existence. But if, having on independent grounds a clear 
 and strong belief in God, you deny, as you must deny, the eternity of matter, 
 then you must trace the origin of the raw material out of which this universe 
 has been fashioned, in whatever way, back to God. How did it come from 
 him ? If it escaped from him and what would be this escape of matter 
 from the immaterial if it escaped from him without, or against, his will, 
 then he is no longer master not merely in his creation but of himself. Being 
 God he must have summoned it into being by a free act of his free will. 
 There was nothing out of which to frame it, and therefore he must have sum- 
 moned it out of nothing. There was vacancy, and he bade the rude elements 
 of matter to begin to be. It was something to fashion man out of the exist- 
 ing dust of the earth, but to give existence to the dust of the earth when, as 
 yet, there was nothing, was an infinitely higher exercise of power. Think, 
 my brethren, what this means creation out of nothing that act with which 
 every thinking and sincere believer in God must necessarily credit him, and 
 then' compare it with the relatively puny difficulties which we are told ought 
 to arrest the hand of the great creator on the day of the general resurrection. 
 It is not for us to trace his methods of procedure by audacious guesses, or to 
 say how he will restore to each human body such of its proper materials as 
 may have drifted away into subtle connections with other forms ; but this I 
 take it as certain to any reasonable man that no difficulties about the resur- 
 rection of the body can seriously suspend our belief in it, if we do believe 
 already in God as really God, that is as the creator, and believe further 
 that he has told us that he will one day raise the bodies of all men from 
 the dead. 
 
 Ezekiel's vision, then, may remind us of what Christ our Lord has taught 
 us again and again in his own words of the resurrection of the body ; but its 
 teaching by no means ends with this, for the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision 
 may well represent the lifeless condition of societies of men at particular 
 times in their history the condition of nations, of churches, of less important 
 institutions. Indeed, Ezekiel, as we have seen, was left in no kind of doubt 
 
 164
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BOKES. 
 
 about the divinely intended mission of his vision. The dry bones were a 
 picture of what the Jewish nation believed itself to be as a consequence of the 
 captivity in Babylon. All that was left of it could be best compared to the 
 bones of the Jews who had been massacred by the Chaldean invader, and which 
 bleached on the hill sides of Palestine, " He said unto me, Son *f Man, these 
 bones are the house of Israel. Behold, they say, our bones are dried, and our 
 hope is lost. As for us we are cut off." Certainly, in the captivity little was 
 left to Israel beyond a skeleton of its former self. There were the sacred 
 books ; there were royal descendants of the race of David ; there were priests ; 
 there were prophets ; there was the old Hebrew and sacred language not 
 yet wholly corrupted into Chaldean ; there were the precious and loved tradi- 
 tions of the past great days of Jerusalem. These were the dry bones of what 
 had been Israel. There was nothing to connect them. They lay on the soil 
 of heathenism. They lay apart from each other as if quite unconnected : 
 nay, rather for the form of the representation changes as the explanation 
 succeeds the vision they now lay buried beneath the soil beneath the thick 
 layer of Pagan life, of Pagan worship, of Pagan oppression, of Pagan vice, 
 which buried them out of sight. To the captive people, Babylon was not 
 merely a valley of dry bones a social and political neighbourhood which was 
 fatal to the corporate life of Israel as the people of revelation : Babylon was 
 a grave. And, accordingly, the prophet was desired to address his country- 
 men " Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, O my people, I will open your 
 graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and will bring you 
 into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have 
 opened your graves, O my people, and caused you to come up out of your 
 graves.'' And this is what really did happen at the restoration of the Jews 
 from Babylon. Each of the promises in Ezekiel's vision was fulfilled. First, 
 the divine breath came upon the bones and they lived. The remains of the 
 past of Israel its sacred books, its priests, its prophets, its laws, its great 
 traditions, its splendid hopes these once more moved in the soul of the 
 nation. As if with the motion of reviving life, they came together. They 
 were readjusted into an harmonious whole. They received the clothing of 
 bone and sinew which originally belonged to them. And the nation thus 
 reconstructed in the days of its captivity was lifted, by the divine power, when 
 the moment came, out of the grave, and restored to the upper air of its 
 ancient home in Palestine. It was a wonderful restoration, almost, if not 
 altogether, unique in history. We see it in progress in such a psalm as the 
 ii9th, which, doubtless, belongs to this very period, and which exhibits the 
 upward struggles of a sincere and dutiful soul at the first dawn of the 
 national restoration ; and we read of its completion in the books of Ezra and 
 Nehemiah. It was completed when the temple, the centre of the spiritual 
 and national life, was fully rebuilt, and when the old life of the people in its 
 completeness was thus renewed upon the spot which had been the home of 
 their fathers from generation to generation. 
 
 And something of the same kind has been seen in portions of the Christian 
 church. As a whole we know the church of Christ can not fail ; the gates 
 of hell shall not prevail against it ; but particular churches may fail in very- 
 different degrees. National churches, provincial churches, local churches 
 these, like the seven churches in Asia, which stand as a warning for all the 
 ages of Christendom, may experience very varying degrees of corruption, of 
 ruin, and of the moral insensibility which precedes death. So it was with the 
 church of Rome, so long ago, even, as in the tenth century. Those who 
 know the history of that century know that .no man could ever have violated 
 the spirit and the law of Christ more flagrantly than did the rulers of the 
 Roman church in that dark and miserable age, and yet this age was suc- 
 
 165
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES. 
 
 ceeded by a striking moral and religious restoration. And so it has been, 
 although in a somewhat different sense, with the Church of England, and 
 more than once since the Reformation. During the past week we may have 
 seen in the public prints accounts of the completion of a new college at one 
 of our universities, which has been erected on a more splendid scale than any- 
 thing of the kind in England, for, at least, two hundred years. What has 
 been the motive for this enterprise ? This college bears the name of a quiet 
 country clergyman whom, during his lifetime, nobody in authority thought 
 worthy of patronage or notice. After a short career at his university he died 
 at a country parsonage. And it may well be asked, What was the work 
 which has earned for him, at the hands of his fellow-churchmen, this unpre- 
 cedented distinction after his death ? The answer is that, when John Keble 
 entered on the work of his life, the Church of England was, to a consider- 
 able extent, in a condition which answered to Ezekiel's vision of the valley 
 of dry bones. She had succeeded to a splendid inheritance, but she under- 
 stood her privileges very imperfectly. By large numbers of her people, the 
 higher, nobler sides of the Christian life its pathos, its awfulness, its risks, 
 its strength, its capacities for heroism, its capacities for sacrifice, its secret 
 powers derived from communion with the unseen, its magnificent prospects 
 which dwarf down into insignificance all that merely meets the eye of sense 
 this had been forgotten. For them the kingdom of heaven had come to be 
 almost as one of the kingdoms of this world. The episcopate was merely 
 the form of church government approved of by the state in this part of the 
 empire. The sacraments were old ceremonies pleasing to the religious senti- 
 ment, but very far indeed from being necessary to salvation. The Bible was 
 a venerable book the most venerable of books but nobody knew exactly 
 what criticism would presently say of it ; and, as for the prayer-book, it was 
 described as a human compilation just three hundred years old. Think of 
 the case of a soul which might hope, from the echoes of the gospel resounding 
 down the centuries, that a home had been found for it on earth a home in 
 which its sorrows might be consoled and its aspirations encouraged, and then 
 wending its way into a church which had so largely forgotten its first love 
 as this ! There are those still living who can say what has happened to such 
 souls in that dreary period ; but it was the high privilege of the man whom 
 we are thinking of, more, perhaps, than of any other man, to bring the 
 remedy. Not from any position which of itself commanded attention, but as 
 relying on the native force and beauty and majesty of truth, he published a 
 collection of poems, unwillingly enough, which has had more effect than a 
 thousand volumes of more pretentious character. No one could think less 
 highly of the " Christian Year "than did its humble-minded author, and it 
 was in the judgment of very competent judges inferior as poetry to other 
 works of his pen. It was merely fugitive. It was careless of finish and of 
 symmetry. It was indistinct. It was hard to be understood by those who 
 had not the key to understand it. It was eminently a book which was 
 not made, but which grew and was marked with the rude irregularities 
 of growth as distinct from the polish and the finish of mere manufacture. 
 But underneath its language above and beyond its literary faults whatever 
 they were there was a subtle, fine, penetrative, I may dare to say a divine, 
 spirit, which belonged to religious genius of the very highest order, and 
 which has renewed the faith of the Church of England. It breathed through 
 this book upon the dry bones around it. It clothed once more the chief 
 pastors of the church in the garb of apostles. It traced beneath the form 
 of the sacraments the inward grace which unites with Christ. It supplied a 
 point of view for reading the sacred scriptures intelligently, and yet as an in- 
 spired whole, and with a constant sense of their profound, their unfathomable 
 166
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES. 
 
 meaning. It lighted up the prayer-book as a beautiful relic of the best work 
 of the primitive church, upon which the sixteenth century, while removing 
 blemishes and corruptions, has, after all, only lightly laid its hand. It did 
 this after such a fashion that at last we understand it. Even yet we are too 
 near the date of the publication of this book to take an accurate measure of 
 all that it has done for the English church, but we can see enough to be sure 
 that through it breathed the breath of heaven by which dying churches are 
 renewed, by which the dry bones of past ages of faith and love are again 
 clothed upon with the substance of life. 
 
 And some of us may have noted a little resurrection in some institution, 
 neither as divine as a church nor yet so broad, so inclusive, as a nation in a 
 school, a college, a hospital, a charitable guild, a company. It is the crea- 
 tion it is the relic of a distant age. It is magnificent in its picturesqueness. 
 It lacks, alas ! nothing but life. It treasures up statutes which are no longer 
 observed. It observes ceremonies and customs which have lost their mean- 
 ing. It stoutly upholds a phraseology and livery which tell of a past time, 
 and of which the object has been forgotten. On certain days in the year its 
 members meet. They go through the accustomed usages. They signalize 
 their meeting, it may be, by a splendid banquet by commanding oratory ; 
 but in their heart of hearts they know well that they are meeting in a valley 
 of dry bones. The old rules, usages, phrases, dresses these are scattered 
 around them like the bones in the valley of Ezekiel's vision. The life which 
 once animated and clothed them has long since perished away. They lie 
 apart without connection with each other without attempt at arrangement 
 without the decencies of order ; and the question is " Who shall bring them 
 together ? Who shall restore to them movement and power ? " Who shall 
 clothe them with flesh and blood, and make them once more what they were 
 meant to be ?" And on such occasions there are always those who would 
 cry with a modern prophet of despair 
 
 " Poor fragments of a broken world 
 
 Whereon men pitch'd their tent, 
 Why were ye, too, to death not hurl'd, 
 
 When your world's day was spent ? 
 That glow of central fire is done, 
 
 Which, with its fusing flame, 
 Knit all your hearts and kept in one ; 
 
 But ye ye are the same." 
 
 But we can think, it may be, of cases where a nobler spirit than this has 
 prevailed where a man has appeared, who, instead of contemptuously sweep- 
 ing away what the past has left, sets himself to gather, to arrange, to com- 
 bine if it may be, to reconstruct sets himself above all to invoke that divine 
 Spirit of life and grace who alone can restore life to the dead and inaugurate 
 a moral and social resurrection. Before he began his work the thought came 
 to him too ' Can these bones live ?" But believing that resurrection is the 
 will of God, the author of life, whether moral or physical, he went forward. 
 It was enough for him to say, " O Lord, thou knowest.'' And he heard, not 
 long after, the divine command, " Son of man prophesy unto the breath, and 
 say, O breath, come unto these bones that they may live." 
 
 And, lastly, the diy bones of Ezekiel's vision may be discovered, and that 
 not seldom, within the human soul. When a soul has lost its hold on truth 
 or grace when it has ceased to believe, or ceased to love, all the traces of 
 what it once has been do not forthwith disappear. There are survivals of 
 the old believing life fragments of the skeleton of the old convictions bits of 
 stray logic which once guarded a creed phrases which expressed the feeling 
 
 167
 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES. 
 
 which once winged a prayer. There may remain on in the arid desolation a 
 very valley full of dry bones of aspirations which have no goal ; of opinions 
 which have no real basis no practical consequences ; of friendships which are 
 felt to be hollow, but which are still kept up ; of habits which have lost all 
 meaning but which it is hard to surrender. Not seldom may we meet 
 with writers and with talkers, with historians, with poets, whose language 
 shows that they have once known what it is to believe, but for whom a living 
 faith has perished utterly, and left behind it only these dried up relics of 
 its former life. Such a case it may be, partially at least, that of some who 
 hear me such a case must suggest the solemn question, can these bones live ? 
 Can these phrases, these forms, these habits, these associations which once 
 were part of a spirit's life can they ever again become what they were ? Is 
 it worth while to treasure them ? Were it not better were it not more 
 sincere to have done with them altogether to disavow what we no longer 
 mean to abandon habits of devotion which have become for us only forms 
 to break with practices of piety, of benevolence, which are only due now to 
 the surviving impetus of habit ? Why should the soul be thus acharnel house 
 of the past ? Why not clear it out and begin afresh with some such new life 
 as may yet be possible ? Brethren, it is better, believe me, to respect the dry 
 bones though they are only dry bones. They have their value in that they 
 witness to a loving past. They have their value in that they point on to a 
 possible restoration in the future. On them, too, the breath of God may 
 light. Into them may yet be infused a new quickening force. It is easy 
 enough to decry religious habit as only habit as motiveless, soulless, unac- 
 cepted service. Doubtless, habit which is only habit is not life, but it is better, 
 I dare to say, than nothing at all better if not in itself, yet, surely for the sake 
 of that which it may lead on to. A man may have ceased to mean his prayers. 
 His prayers may now be but the dry bones of that warm and living com- 
 munion which he once held with God ; but do not let him, on that account, 
 give them up. Do not let him break with the little that remains of what once 
 was life. It is easy to decry habit, but habit may be the scaffolding which 
 saves us from a great fall. Habit may be the arch which bridges over a chasm 
 that yawns between one height and another on our upward road. Habit 
 without motive is sufficiently unsatisfactory, but habit is better, better far, 
 than nothing. 
 
 Some of us it may be, surveying shrivelled the elements of our religious life 
 cannot avoid the question which is borne in upon us from heaven "Can these 
 bones live ?'' They seem to us in our best moments so hopelessly dislocated, 
 so dry, so dead, and to this question the answer always must be, " O Lord 
 God, thou knowest." Yes, he does know. He sees, as he saw of old into 
 the grave of Lazarus he sees, as he saw into the tomb of the Lord Jesus so 
 into the secrets of a soul of whose faith and love only these dry bones 
 remains ; and he knows that life is again possible ay, that it is much 
 more than possible. The word of his power may again clothe with form and 
 with flesh. The breath of his spirit may again impart animation, warmth, 
 movement, growth. The quickening power of Christ's resurrection, from 
 which all recovery, whether moral or social or physical, must go forth 
 this may assert itself victoriously in that desert soul, so that like as Christ 
 was raised from the dead in the glory of -the Father even so this soul 
 should walk in newness of life. 
 
 168
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT CONVINCING THE WOULD. 
 A SERMON 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D., 
 
 (Canon of St. Paul's), 
 PREACHED IN 
 
 St. Paul's Cathedral, on Sunday Afternoon, April 29, 1877, 
 
 " And when He is come He will reprove the world of sin, and of right- 
 eousness, and of judgment." John xvi., 8. 
 
 In to-day's Gospel our Lord is speaking-, just before His own 
 death, of the work of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, who was to 
 descend upon the apostles when He Himself had ascended into 
 Heaven. " If I depart,'' says our Lord, " I will send Him unto 
 you ; and when He is come He will reprove (or convince) the 
 world." And this passage is chosen for to-day's Gospel, because 
 Whitsuntide is now drawing on, and it is time to begin to think 
 what blessings we owe to the coming of the Holy Spirit, that we 
 may the better enter, heart and soul, into the joy of the Whitsun 
 festival. Observe here that the Holy Spirit is to do a certain work 
 on or for the world. And by " the world," in passages like this, is 
 meant, of course, not the world of nature not even the entire 
 human race, but mankind so far as mankind is generally opposed 
 to the mind of God. The word "world," in this sense, is not merely 
 a description ; it is an implied condemnation. It means human 
 life, so far as it is in opposition to the' life of Jesus Christ and His 
 true disciples. See how this opposition runs through our Lord's 
 sayings about the world, " Ye," He says to His disciples, " are not 
 of the world, even as I am not of the world.'' ' If ye were of the 
 world, the world would love his own, but because ye are not of 
 the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the 
 world hateth you." Or, again, in His prayer to the Father 
 " I pray not for the world, but for them whom Thou hast given Me 
 that they may be Thine." Again, to the disciples " Peace, I leave 
 with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth 
 give I unto you." Again, speaking of the crucifixion, "Ye shall 
 weep and lament, but the world shall rejoice." Again, with refer- 
 ence to the Comforter " The Spirit of truth whom the world can 
 not receive, because it seeth Him not neither knoweth Him, but ye, 
 My disciples, know Him, for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in 
 you." Observe how much our Lord says to the disciples about 
 the blessings which they would receive from the coming of the 
 Comforter. With them the Comforter, whom the world cannot re- 
 ceive, is to abide for ever. Jesus Himself will send the Comforter 
 to them from the Father. The Comforter will teach them all 
 things. The Comforter will bring- all the past sayings of Christ 
 to their remembrance. He never will testify to the world of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. He will take of the words and works of Christ, 
 and show the true meaning of them to them. He will guide them 
 into all the truth. He will show them the things to come. Thus 
 the disciples were clearly within the circuit of His direct and effective 
 action. And yet it appears that He had something- to do for those 
 
 No. 948. N XEW SERIES.
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT CONVINCING THE WORLD. 
 
 outside. He was not going- to leave the world utterly to itself be- 
 cause it could not receive Him, because it neither saw nor knew 
 Him. He would not, indeed, shed on it His higher gifts of pro- 
 phecy, illumination, guidance into all the truth. He would not be 
 in the world an abiding presence. He would hover around it, 
 teaching it just what it could bear, reproving it by the new and 
 awakened convictions which He would create in it reproving it by 
 convincing it that sin, righteousness, and judgment, which it had 
 vaguely talked about for ages, were solemn realities. " He shall 
 convince'' not without reproof that is the sense of the word 
 " He shall convince the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of 
 judgment." 
 
 Now see here, first of all, the work of the Holy Spirit upon the 
 Jewish world of the age of the apostles. It is natural to ask to 
 what particular sin to what righteousness to what judgment 
 was our Lord immediately referring ? This question is answered 
 by His own words which follow closely afterwards. " Of sin, because 
 (or in that) they believe not on Me; of righteousness in that I go 
 to the B'ather and ye see Me no more ; of judgment, in that the 
 prince of this world is judged." The Jewish world of that genera- 
 tion had to be convinced of one particular sin the sin of not be- 
 lieving in our Lord Jesus Christ : " of sin, in that they believe not on 
 Me." Unbelief then at any rate, such unbelief as that of the 
 Jews who heard and saw our Lord is sin according to his own 
 estimate. It is not merely a variety of mental persuasion differing 
 only from faith in that it rejects that which faith accepts. It is not 
 merely an act of the mind : it is an act of the will, and an act of an 
 intrinsically perverse character. It is not a misfortune like a fever 
 caught in an infected house, or an accident incurred when travelling 
 by the railway. We cannot help these things. They come upon 
 us from without, and we are their victims. But a man can help 
 believing what he does believe can help disbelieving what he does 
 not believe, at any rate, within large limits. That is, he is origin- 
 ally responsible for being in the state of mind which, in the event, 
 rejects or accepts the truths of faith. Faith, according to our 
 Lord's teaching, is a test of a man's moral charater. Faith, like 
 unbelief, is as much, or rather more, a moral than a mental act. 
 We believe partly, at any rate that which our moral nature 
 makes us wish to believe. We disbelieve partly, at any rate 
 that which, as we foresee, will involve unwelcome results for us, 
 being morally such as we are. The Jews had overwhelming 
 evidence before them to show that Jesus Christ was the Messiah 
 promised in their own prophets ; but they did not wish to believe 
 in a teacher who had made them dissatisfied with themselves, and 
 was likely to make them still more so ; and accordingly they did 
 not believe in Him. Their wills were able more than able to 
 overmaster their understandings, and so our Lord's teaching and 
 works went for nothing with them, or rather, only enhanced their 
 guilt. " If," He said, " I had not come and spoken to them, they 
 had not had sin, but now they have no cloak for their sin. If I had 
 not done among them the works which none other man did, they 
 had not had sin ; but now have they both seen and hated both 
 Me and My Father.'' 
 
 Here, then, we see the destined work of the Holy Ghost in the 
 Jewish world of that generation. He did not add to the proof 
 which was there to warrant faith in the claim of Christ, He moved 
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 THE HOLY SPIRIT CONVINCING THE WORLD. 
 
 as a softening- influence upon the hard wills and hearts of the Jewish 
 people. He suggested to them a doubt whether they really had 
 been simply wishing- to g-et at the truth whether they had dealt 
 quite fairly with the appeal to their own history and Scriptures 
 which had just been made to them. This influence of the Spirit was 
 very far indeed from being- irresistible. The majority of the people 
 still treated it as they had treated the voice and the presence of 
 Christ : they set it aside. But with some it was otherwise with 
 Apollos, with Gamaliel, with Aquila and Priscilla, with the band of 
 converts whom St. Paul calls the " remnant according- to the elec- 
 tion of grace." Nay, on the day of Pentecost itself, when the Holy 
 Spirit had just descended on the apostles, St. Peter, first among them 
 in place, but hitherto, at any rate, weakest and last in purpose, so 
 convinced those of his countrymen, who listened to him, of the 
 greatness of their sins against the love of God manifested in the 
 divine Redeemer, that " they were pricked in their heart, and said 
 unto Peter, and the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what 
 shall we do?" The words which they heard with their outward 
 ears were seconded by the whispers of the inward teacher, and 
 men whose hands were yet red with the blood of the crucifixion 
 melted into tears of penitence and faith. 
 
 And the Jewish world of that generation had to be con- 
 vinced of righteousness, the righteousness of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ Himself. " He shall convince the world of righteous- 
 ness, because I go to the Father, and ye see Me no more." 
 The Jews knew what righteousness was, but they had persis- 
 tently asserted that our Lord was not righteous. On the contrary, 
 they said that He was a sinner, and that God would not hear 
 His prayers. They explained His miracles by saying- that He 
 was in league with Beelzebub. They denounced, as blasphemy, 
 His claim to be what He really was ; and, when He was put to a 
 shameful death, they regarded this as a proof vouchsafed from 
 heaven that they had been right all along. " Cursed is every one 
 that hangeth on a tree." That was the title which they read on 
 His cross as confirming their own estimate of Him. 
 
 It is very difficult to shake a bitter prejudice like this, especially 
 when it has assumed anything like national proportions. It is 
 proof against argument, proof against entreaty, proof against all 
 the ordinary methods of persuasion, proof against any purely 
 human influence, when it has been strengthened and embittered 
 by long controversy. True, Jesus Christ had risen from His grave 
 in vindication of His claims and of His character ; but our every 
 day experience may teach us that a fact, however clearly attested, 
 has no sort of influence on persons who have made up their minds 
 not to accept a consequence which necessarily follows from it. The 
 Jews had closed their eyes to the consequence of Christ's life, and 
 they had no difficulty in inventing explanations to dispose of an un- 
 welcome event like His resurrection, followed by His ascension into 
 heaven. 
 
 " I g-o to the Father," He said, " and ye see Me no more.'* 
 This was nevertheless the fact upon which the Spirit, whispering to 
 the hearts of thousands of Jews, would persistently dwell. That 
 mysterious, triumphant departure of Jesus Christ, the real character 
 of which could be falsified by no accumulation of vulgar reports 
 what did it mean ? Did it not recall all that had preceded it the 
 words such as never man spake the acts, each of them the best 
 
 307
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT CONVINCING THE WORLD. 
 
 possible at the moment, each of them without a flaw the one life 
 on earth, in which the will of the Father had been perfectly mir- 
 rored ? Was it not, after all, in harmony with such a life as this ? 
 The past rose up before them in memory. The Holy Spirit breathed 
 upon the memory of the past, set it in its true light discovered its 
 drift, its meaning. They still saw what they had seen before, but 
 they saw it with new eyes. And thus Christ was Justified or recog- 
 nized as righteous in the Spirit, and believed on in the world after 
 He had been received up into glory. Here, again, there was no com- 
 pulsion. The Spirit would not save the Jewish world from its worst 
 prejudices against its will. Men might, if they would numbers 
 did go on asserting, with passionate vehemence intended to silence 
 the insurgent questions within them, their persuasion of the un- 
 righteousness of Jesus ; but the Holy Spirit had His triumphs never- 
 theless. He was at work in the hearts of that very assembly 
 which listened to Stephen which condemned him to death for pro- 
 claiming the Just One, of whom they had been now the betrayers 
 and murderers. It was this rising but unwelcome conviction 
 of the real righteousness of the Crucified, brought home to 
 them by the silent Divine Teacher who seconded the words 
 which fell on their ears, that cut the judges of Stephen to 
 the heart. It was this which sowed the seed that grew 
 up in the soul of Saul of Tarsus, and that changed him from being, 
 in his own words, a blasphemer and a persecutor, into a doctor of 
 the nations in faith and verity. And, for St. Paul, his Master's lofty 
 righteousness was not merely or chiefly a glory of his Master's 
 character ; it was a treasure which he, too, reaching out for it the 
 hand of faith, might himself claim. Taught by the Spirit he learned 
 to despise his own righteousness, which was of the law that poor 
 measure of obedience which was all that he could compass without 
 the grace of Christ and to prize this higher and perfect righteous- 
 ness of his Lord as a robe which should cover his own deficiencies 
 as a gift which should renew his being from within. " Not having 
 mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is 
 through the faith of Christ the righteousness which is of God by 
 faith." 
 
 And once more. The Jewish world of that day had to be con- 
 vinced of the reality of judgment. The Jews admitted it in words, 
 just as they were very familiar with the language of their scriptures 
 about sin, about righteousness ; but they did not believe that they 
 would be judged that God was judging them. The judgments on 
 which they loved to dwell were God's great judgments on the 
 enemies of Israel in bygone centuries on Pharaoh, on Agag, on 
 Nebuchadnezzar Judgment was with them a matter of historical 
 interest : perhaps it was a matter of national pride. They did not 
 think of it as an impending or a present thing for which it behoved 
 them to be prepared. Certainly there were signs in the heaven 
 above and in the earth beneath signs in the world of thought and 
 in the world of politics which might have been read even by un- 
 observant eyes as protending coming change and disaster. But to 
 these warnings the eyes at the Jewish world were closed. As we 
 know from the proceedings at our Lord's trial, they resented any 
 expression, although misunderstood, which seemed to them to imply 
 that their temple was not to last for ever. They had no doubt at 
 all that what was really before them was a time, not of judgment, 
 but of splendid and abundant triumph. 
 
 308 '
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT CONVINCING THE WORLD. 
 
 Now, the- Holy Spirit was to convince the Jewish world, or those 
 members of it who admitted of conviction, of the reality of future 
 judgment, in that the prince of this world was judged. The unseen 
 personal spirit of evil, who had the power of death, was judged by 
 God when death was conquered by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 
 Satan had done his utmost at the birth of Christ, at the temptation 
 of Christ, at each step in our Lord's ministry, at the closing scenes 
 of the Passion, to frustrate the work of the divine Redeemer among 
 men. Satan, from the first, struggled to rid himself of an enemy 
 who threatened the independence and integrity of his own kingdom 
 of unrighteousness. And therefore he entered into the heart of the 
 traitor Judas ; and therefore he stirred up the chief priests and 
 Pharisees against our Lord ; and therefore he roused the passions 
 of the people to cry, " Crucify Him ! Crucify Him ! " " This is your 
 hour," said our Lord, " and the power of darkness." But at 
 the resurrection, Satan, like lightning, fell from the heaven of 
 empire. Jesus Christ went upon the lion and the adder : the young 
 lion and the dragon He trod under His feet. All the social combin- 
 ations, all the pedantic speculations, all the passionate resolves, 
 which had for the moment triumphed on Calvary, faded away, and 
 were as though they had not been. As our Lord said, in an 
 earlier review of the issue of the conflict, " When a strong man 
 armed keepeth his palace, his goods are at peace ; but when a 
 stronger than he shall come upon him, and overcome him, he taketh 
 from him all his armoury wherein he trusted, and divideth the 
 spoils." The prince of this world was judged. We Christians see 
 this clearly enough now in the light of the past, but to see it then 
 to see it through the thick brushwood of ancient prejudice, which 
 shut out the sunlight from the mind of a Jew was no easy 
 matter, \vas beyond the reach of ordinary human keensighted- 
 ness. It was the unseen Teacher the divine and eternal Spirit, 
 acting with and through the teaching of the apostles who put the 
 resurrection before the minds of men in its true light, as the de- 
 cisive turning-point in the great struggle between good and -evil 
 as the judgment of the prince of this world. In this one victory 
 there lay the strength and the promise of victories to come of 
 what St. Paul calls " the pulling down of strongholds" strong- 
 holds of prejudice, strongholds of error, strongholds of self-interest. 
 Here was the earnest of the coming collapse of the idolatry of 
 the pagan empire to be achieved only after three centuries of mar- 
 tyrdom. 
 
 But here also was the warning of a nearer judgment of which 
 the Jewish world particularly must be convinced. In less than half 
 a century the legions of Titus would encamp around the sacred 
 city, and the blood which had been shed on Calvary would be 
 remembered, all too late, amid the ruin and the despair of 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 But our Lord's words about sin and righteousness and judgment 
 have a wider scope than this. They suggest to us the three moral 
 inoredients of a healthy public opinion in a Christian country. 
 Every society, every nation, has its public opinion, its common 
 stock of hopes, fears, likings, enthusiasms, repugnances, tastes, 
 points of view a common stock to which we all of us contribute 
 something, and by which in turn we all are influenced. The cities 
 of the old world, each of them, had a public opinion of its own 
 Rome and Athens and Jerusalem. And now, too, wherever men 
 
 309
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT CONVINCING THE WORLD. 
 
 meet, and exchange their thoughts, and know themselves to be 
 bound to each other by ties of race, or of common interest, or of his- 
 toric association, there grows up inevitably a common fund of thoughts 
 and phrases which may be barbarous which may be enlightened 
 but which is always influential. Like the smoke and vapour which 
 hang visibly in the air over every large centre of human life, to 
 which every hearth contributes something, and by which every 
 window is more or less shaded, so in the world of public thought 
 there is a like common product of all the minds which think and 
 feel at all, which in turn influences all that contribute to it, more or 
 less. And what I am now insisting upon is that this inevitable pro- 
 duct and accompaniment of human society public opinion if it is 
 Christian, must contain a recognition of the three solemn facts of 
 sin, righteousness, judgment. 
 
 Of sin, when left to itself, the world at large has no adequate 
 idea often no idea whatever. The world knows and speaks only 
 of faults, offences, failures, mistakes, misconduct softer words de- 
 liberately chosen. It does not speak of sin. It avoids the word. 
 It recognizes the existence of moral evil. It cannot help doing 
 that, because moral evil in its exaggeration threatens to break up 
 society, to destroy law, to make life unendurable ; but the world at 
 large has an eye to its effects, not to the nature of the cause which 
 produces them. 
 
 Now, sin is only moral evil as in the light of the law and love of 
 God. Generally speaking, men of the world place moral evil, 
 such as they recognize, in some feebler light in the light of human 
 law in the light of personal obligations in the light of the sense 
 of self-respect in the light of the judgment of the respectable 
 in the light of their own common sense. 
 
 And in the same way the world has no true idea of righteousness, 
 though it uses though it respects the word. It means, by right- 
 eousness, conformity to human right, respect for human laws, ex- 
 ternal propriety, respectability. It has no idea of a righteousness 
 which js an affair of motives which is, when out of sight, much 
 more than it is when it meets the eye which cares, at bottom, 
 only for the approval of the Father who seeth in secret, which 
 will, sometimes which must, sometimes defy public opinion defy 
 current ideas of respectability defy even human law in defence of 
 some higher right disclosed to conscience. 
 
 Nor has the world any true idea of judgment. Judgment is for 
 most men a remote contingency too remote to be made the subject 
 of practical calculations. It is a dim and far off conception, recog- 
 nized as necessary for the ideal discipline of the world, but not 
 taken into account as embodied in a coming event with which, one 
 by one, we have to reckon. 
 
 Now, the Holy Spirit, acting through the teaching of Scripture 
 the teaching of the Christian church the social influence of men 
 who are under His guidance is continually enriching and raising 
 this poor and degraded public opinion at least, in countries where 
 the church of Christ is found by imparting a new and truer estimate 
 of sin and righteousness and judgment. The Holy Spirit, pene- 
 trating into the dark places of national opinion, is like a light borne 
 into ac avern, revealing dangers beneath the feet, revealing beauties 
 at the sides and over the head of the explorer, enabling the 
 explorer to discern what is before him. From age to age the 
 Holy Spirit, employing the ascendancy of men of high character 
 310
 
 tHE HOLY SPIRIT CONVINCING TH1 WORLD. 
 
 and authority as His instruments men who h ave the moral, as 
 distinct from the merely material, interests of their fellow-creatures 
 at heart is deepening- and sharpening- the public sense of sin. 
 Thus the national conscience of one generation is tolerant of 
 evil which the next will disallow. ' And, although there is a 
 reverse side to this, and, in some cases, as in the instance of our 
 own new law of divorce, a nation takes a distinctly retrograde 
 step, yet, upon the whole, the national conscience becomes more 
 sensitive to the perpetration of national wrong : it is convinced of 
 sin. In the same way the Holy Ghost lights up in the conscience 
 of a country the idea of righteousness teaches men to distinguish 
 real greatness from fictitious greatness teaches them to distinguish 
 greatness of character from mere greatness of position to rate 
 simplicity and disinterestedness and honesty of purpose and quick 
 sympathy with wrong, more highly than mere brilliancy or success, 
 combined with ^ood-natured indifference to principle. Above all, 
 He teaches nations to believe that God has not left them to them- 
 selves, tha'. He does take account of their corporate acts, that 
 has hand ? cretched out for judgment is to be seen in events which 
 Hdhitherto looked to them like the natural products of natural 
 causes. In a word, the work of the Spirit upon opinion is to suggest 
 a new and a higher point of view, to make men look with new 
 eyes at contemporary events, to enhance the unseen and the moral 
 at the cost, if it need be, of the visible, of the material, to suggest 
 the transcendent importance of eternal interests when balanced 
 against those which only belong to time. 
 
 There is much else of a very different kind in the public opinion 
 of any Christian country conspicuously, we must confess it, of this 
 country. But the contribution to it which is made by the Holy 
 Spirit made through the influence of the Christian Church among 
 us, and of good Christians is the salt, depend upon it, which saves 
 the nation from perishing of sheer corruption. 
 
 And here we see the great responsibility of all, whether in lowly 
 stations or in high, who have any means of influencing for good 
 the public opinion of their countrymen. The words we utter, the 
 words we write, each and all of us, do contribute a something to- 
 wards the total result. Now, are we, let us ask ourselves, the 
 organs of the Spirit, raising- the moral standard of the time, 
 doing our little to convince the world of sin and righteousness and 
 judgment, or are we merely reflecting and representing the more 
 selfish and degrading elements of contemporary thought I Are we 
 echoing its appeals to bad passions, to unworthy prejudices, its in- 
 difference to questions of right and duty, when balanced against 
 material interests, real or imaginary ? At all times in a nation's 
 history this is a serious question, but especially at a time like the 
 present, when the most thoughtless mind must feel that we are 
 living in presence of great events, and taking our first steps to- 
 wards an unknown but momentous future. Let us, while thank- 
 fully acknowledging God's great gifts to England of a unique posi- 
 tion of influence and power in the world, oh, let us not forget 
 that, whether for men or for nations, no material interests, no sway 
 of empire, no historical prestige, even if these could be threatened, 
 are worth deliberate complicity with barbarous tryanny and wrong ; 
 that the highest interests of a country are in its hatred of evil, its love 
 of righteousness, its faith in the judgments of God ; that, in a word, 
 " righteousness," as distinct from a " spirited policy " " righteous- 
 ness exalteth a nation," while " sin is a reproof to any people/' 
 
 311
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT CONVINCING THE WORLD. 
 
 And in this exterior action of the Spirit upon the public opinion 
 and the conscience of a nation, we see the source of that elevation 
 of character which is sometimes to be found we must admit it 
 in men who own no allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ. When 
 men of this kind are named, it is not uncommon to hear the re- 
 mark that, after all, it cannot matter much whether a country has 
 or has not a faith, because here is such and such a citizen who, 
 morally speaking, does so very well without one who is so generous, 
 so self-sacrificing, so noble, so unselfish. But the question is, 
 whence did the man get these things ? They come to him from the 
 indirect influences of that very faith which he adjures from de- 
 tached fragments of the truth deposited, like some jewel in a rude 
 conglomerate deposit, in the crude mass of public opinion, and he 
 has extracted them. That is all. They are the work of his un- 
 seen teacher of the reality of sin and of righteousness and of judg- 
 ment. But for Christianity, little as he thinks it, this man would 
 never have been what he is, though he repudiates his obligations. 
 
 And lastly, in these three words sin, righteousness, judgment we 
 have before us the three governing ideas the three moments, so to 
 call them of the Christian life. The Spirit who convinces the world 
 of sin and righteousness and judgment carries this three-fold convic- 
 tion with imperious force right into the heart of every true Christian. 
 
 First in order, there comes the conviction of sin of the man's 
 own sins, seen in their number, seen without disguise, seen in their 
 real magnitude. A Christian knows what sin is. He may fall into 
 it again and again, but he does not deceive himself either as to its 
 nature or as to its consequences. The invisible Teacher is there, 
 close at hand, in his very heart, to insist upon the stern truth. And 
 so the Christian is ever on the look-out for sin, ever struggling 
 with its approaches. His falls do not disguise from him for a mo- 
 ment its radical opposition to God and to goodness. 
 
 And next, there is the conviction of righteousness. A Christian 
 knows what righteousness is. He has been taught its true standard 
 by the inward Teacher. He knows a saint of Christ when he sees 
 one, though as yet he may be far, very far, from being a saint himself. 
 He knows that, in the impassioned yet accurate language of scripture, 
 any righteousness which could be furnished out of his own moral 
 resources is regarded, as a moral clothing in the sight of the Most 
 Holy, only as filthy rags. And therefore he looks up to the Lord our 
 righteousness, to that sinless and divine Saviour whose righteousness 
 becomes his own when it is claimed by faith, when it is conveyed 
 through the chartered means of grace granted to the church of God, 
 
 Above all, the Christian is convinced of judgment. He knows that 
 God is judging him day by day, and that, at the last great day, God 
 will judge him finally, and will award him his place in eternity. The 
 thought of this is constantly before him. It colors, it shapes, his 
 whole idea of the meaning of life and of death. To be thus swayed 
 by fear of sin, by love of a real righteousness, by expectation of 
 the judgment this is to be led by the Spirit. This is to have 
 passed under the influence of those great creative truths and ideas 
 with which the Spirit was sent down from heaven, that he might 
 purify and fertilize the lives and hearts of men. 
 
 Brethren, let us pray Him to perfect His blessed work in us one 
 by one, that, while time lasts and eternity is still future, " the law 
 of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus '' may make us, each one, " free 
 from the law of sin and death.'' 
 
 312
 
 THE NATURAL IMMORTALITY OP THE 
 HUMAN SOUL. 
 
 fermtm, 
 
 PREACHED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 22ND, 1877, 
 
 BY THE REV. H. P. LJDDON, D.D. 
 
 (Canon of St. Paul's.) 
 
 " Because I live, ye shall live also." JOHN xiv. 19. 
 
 Tins savins: of our Lord in the supper-room, like so much else 
 which he uttered there, is only to be understood in the light of his 
 resurrection and ascension into heaven. When he said " Because 
 I live " he had death immediately before him. He was taking the 
 measure of death. Death was to be no real interruption of his 
 ever-continuing life. Death with, all its physical, its mental, 
 miseries death was only an incident in his being ; it was in no 
 sense its close. Already he sees the resurrection beyond and he 
 exclaims " I live." It was not possible, as St. Peter puts it, that 
 he, the Prince of Life, should be holden of death. And so he treats 
 death as an already vanquished enemy which cannot have any lasting 
 effect upon bis indestructible life. And, farther, this life of his, 
 inaccessible as it was to any permanent injury enduring, as it was 
 to endure, beyond the cross and the grave is the cause of ours. 
 "Because I live ye shall live also." He describes what he knows to 
 be impending" Yet a little while and the world seeth me no more." 
 He would be hidden away in the grave from the eyes of men. He 
 adds, "but ye see me." His disciples would see him; first, with 
 their bodily eyes during the forty days after his resurrection, and 
 next with the eyes of faith throughout all the ages until he comes to 
 judgment ; and thus " Because I live ye shall live also." Assured 
 of the enduring continuity of his life, the disciples might be certain 
 quite certain of their own. Because he lives after his resur- 
 rectionafter his ascension in the Jife of glory, therefore the 
 disciples, in whatever sense, shall live also. 
 
 Now here, my brethren, let us observe, first of all, what our 
 Saviour's words do not mean. They do not mean that the 
 immortality of the soul of man is dependent upon the redemptive 
 work or upon the glorified life of Jesus Christ. Man is an immortal 
 being, just as he is a thinking and a feeling being, by the original 
 terms of his nature. God has made man immortal whether for weal 
 or woe. "Whether man is redeemed or not, whether he is sanctified 
 or not, he will exist for ever. God might have made man a being 
 subject to annihilation. He has given him a soul which is 
 indestructible; and this quality of the soul of man is just as much 
 a part of man's nature as are the limbs of his body or the 
 peculiarities of his mind. Of late we have heard something of a 
 phrase, new, if I mistake not, to Christian ears, "conditional 
 immortality." We are told that man is not immortal by the terms 
 of his nature, that he may become immortal if he is saved by 
 
 No. 945. K. NKW SERIES.
 
 THE NATURAL IMMORTALITY OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 
 
 Christ. Unredeemed man man in a state of nature, so we are 
 told becomes extinct, if not at death yet very shortly afterwards 
 when anything that may survive death will fade away into nothing- 
 ness. This, it is said, is more in keeping with what we see around 
 us, than the old Christian doctrine that every human being will 
 necessarily exist, in whatever condition, for ever. Everything 
 around us changes, decays, passes away, and this dissolution of all 
 the organized forms of matter seems, it is suggested, to forewarn 
 man of his own approaching and complete destruction unless indeed 
 some superhuman power should take him by the hand and confer on 
 him that gift of immortality which in virtue of his own nature be 
 does not possess. Some of the persons who talk and think thus 
 forget that the New Testament treats man as a being who will live 
 after death, continuously on, whether in happiness or in woe. And 
 others forget that before our Lord came the best and most 
 thoughtful men in the old heathen world were satisfied of this 
 truth, as indeed we may be if we will consider how generally unlike 
 the spirit or soul of man is to any material being. 
 
 Let us dwell for awhile on some considerations which go to 
 establish this radical unlikeness between spiritual and material 
 beings. 
 
 Now the first consideration is that the spirit or soul of man 
 knows itself to be capable, I do not say of unlimited, but certainly 
 of continuous improvement and development. However vigorous 
 a tree or an animal may be, it soon reaches a point at which it can 
 grow no more. The tree has borne all the leaves, buds, flowers, 
 fruits, that it can bear. Its vital force is exhausted : it can do no 
 more. The animal has attained, we will suppose, to the finest 
 proportions of which its species is capable. It has done its best in 
 the way of strength and beauty, and the limit has been reached : it 
 can do no more. With the soul of man, whether as a thinking or a 
 feeling power it is otherwise. Of this we can never certainly say 
 that it has exhausted itself. When a man of science has made a 
 great discovery, or a man of letters has written a great book, or a 
 statesman has carried a series of measures, we cannot say " He has 
 done his all : he is exhausted." Undoubtedly in man the spirit is 
 largely dependent on the material body which encases it. The 
 corruptible body, so says the ancient Hebrew wisdom the cor- 
 ruptible body presseth down the soul. As the body moves towards 
 decay and dissolution it inflicts something of its weakness something 
 of its growing incapacity upon its spiritual companion the soul. 
 But the soul on its part constantly resists and protests against this. 
 The soul asserts its own separate and vigorous existence. The mind 
 of man knows that each new effort instead of exhausting its powers 
 really enlarges them, and that if only the physical conditions which 
 are necessary to continued exertion in the present state of things are 
 not withdrawn it will go on continuously making larger and nobler 
 acquirements. So, too, with the heart, the conscience, the sense of 
 duty. In this too there is no such thing as finality. One noble 
 act suggests another. One great sacrifice for truth or duty prompts 
 another. The virtuous impulse in the soul is not like the life-power 
 of the tree or the animal a self-exhausting force. On the contrary, 
 it is always, even more consistently than thought, moving for ard 
 282
 
 THE NATURAL IMMORTALITY OP THE HUMAN SOUL. 
 
 conceiving of and aiming at higher duties understanding more 
 clearly that, advance as it may, it will not reach the limits of its 
 action. " Be not weary of well-doing." This is the language of 
 the eternal wisdom to the human will, but never has "Be not weary 
 of growing or thriving " been said to the body of man or animal 
 to tree or to flower, because organized matter in its most beautiful 
 forms differs conspicuously from spirit in this that it does reach 
 the limits of its activity and then begins to turn back towards non- 
 existence. 
 
 And the second consideration is this. The spirit or mind of man 
 is conscious of, and it values, its own existence. This is not the case 
 with any material being with any material living forms of life, 
 however lofty or beautiful. The most magnificent tree only gives 
 enjoyment to other beings ; it never understands that it itself exists. 
 It is conscious of losing nothing when it is cut down. Poets may 
 fondly treat it as the object of their pity or their sympathy, but it 
 hss no interest in its own perfections. An animal does, indeed, feel 
 pleasure and pain, but it feels each sensation as each sensation 
 comes to it. It never puts the sensations together. It never takes 
 the measure of its own life and looks at it as if from the outside as 
 a whole. The animal lives wholly in the present : it has no memory. 
 Now and then some object which it has met before rouses in it a 
 sense of association with some past pleasure or pain, but- that is all. 
 Practically, the animal has no past, nor does it look forward. The 
 future is a blank to it. It forecasts nothing. It does not expect 
 the pains or the pleasures of its coming existence. It has no 
 anticipations even of death except such as its senses may immediately 
 convey to it. How different is it with the conscious self-measuring 
 spirit of man. Man's spirit lives more in the past, more in the 
 future, than in the present, exactly in the degree in which man 
 makes the most of himself. Man, as a spirit, reaches back into the 
 past, reviews it, lives it over again in memory, turns it to account 
 in the way of experience. Man, as a spirit, reaches forward into 
 future time gazes wistfully at its uncertainties, maps it out so far 
 as it can, provides for it at least, conditionally, disposes of it. 
 Man, as a spirit, rises out of rises above the successive sensations 
 which make up to an animal its whole present life. Man under- 
 stands what it is lo exist. He understands his relation to other 
 beings and to nature. He sees something something at any rate 
 of the unique grandeur of his being among the existences around 
 him. And thus he desires to exist beyond the present into the 
 future which he anticipates to exist into a very distant future if 
 he may. The more his spirit makes of itself the more it makes of 
 its powers and its resources the more earnestly does it desire 
 prolonged existence. And thus the best heathens had the clearest 
 presentiment of a life beyond the grave. These men of high 
 thoughts and noble resolves could not understand that because 
 material bodies were perishing around them therefore conscience, 
 reason, will, the common endowments of human kind, must or could 
 be extinguished too. These men longed to exist ay, after death, 
 that they might continue to make progress in all such good as they 
 had hegun in this life in their high thoughts and their excellent 
 resolves ; and with these longings tht-\ lu-iievnl t'uat tin-v would thus 
 
 283
 
 THE NATUKAL IMMOBTALITY OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 
 
 exist, after all, when this life was over. The longing itself, you see, 
 was a sort of proof that this object was real. How else was the 
 existence of the longing to be satisfactorily explained ? If all enter- 
 prise in thought and in virtue was to be abruptly broken off by the 
 shock of death, at any rate in this longing and in the power of 
 self-measurement out of which it grew, the spirit of man discovered 
 its radical unlikeness to the lower forms of life around it. It 
 became familiar with the idea of a prolonged existence, under other 
 conditions, beyond the grave. 
 
 And a third consideration which pointed towards the natural 
 immortality of man a consideration of much weight was this : 
 unless a spiritual being is immortal such a being does count for less 
 in the universe than mere inert matter, for matter has a kind of 
 immortality of its own. At any rate, so far as our observation goes, 
 it does not perish. It only changes its form. We speak commonly 
 of the growth and destruction of living things of trees and animals ; 
 but we must be careful how we use any such word as destruction if 
 we mean more than destruction of form, or any such word as 
 growth if we imagine any real addition to the sum-total of matter 
 in the universe. Existing matter may be combined into new forms 
 of life, and these forms may be dissolved, to be succeeded by 
 new combinations of the same matter. No matter within the range 
 of our human experience ceases to exist : it only takes new shapes, 
 first in one being then in another. The body of the dead animal 
 nourishes the plant which in turn supplies nourishment for and is 
 absorbed into the system of another animal, and this animal in turn 
 is resolved into its chemical elements by death, and then the cycle 
 begins afresh. It is possible that the prediction of the destruction 
 of the world at the last day will be only a new disposition of the 
 sum-total of matter which now makes up this visible universe. It 
 is possible that forms will change beyond all power of imagination 
 to conceive, but that there will be no real increase or diminution of 
 existing material. Certainly every thoughtful believer in God 
 knows that there was a time when matter did not exist, and that a 
 time may come when the will which summoned it into existence 
 may annihilate it ; but, within tracts of time so vast as to strain and 
 weary the mind which attempts to contemplate them, matter has a 
 practical immortality an immortality which would place the spirit 
 of man at a great relative disadvantage if man's spirit ceased to 
 exist at death. If man's spirit really perishes at death the higher 
 part of his nature is so much worse o<f than the chemical ingredients 
 of his body, or otjthe bodies of the animals around him, since these, 
 certainly, do survive in new forms. Observe, my brethren, that 
 man's spirit cannot be resolved like his body into form and material, 
 the former perishing while the latter survives. Man's spirit either 
 exists in its completeness or it ceases to exist. The bodily form of 
 William the Conqueror has long dissolved into dust. The material 
 atoms which made up the body of William the Conqueror during his 
 lifetime exist somewhere now beneath the pavement of the great 
 church at Caen : but if the memory and the conscience and the will 
 of the Conqueror have perished, then his spirit has ceased to be. 
 There is no substratum below or beyond these which could per- 
 petuate existence : there is nothing spiritual to survive them, for the 
 284
 
 THE NATURAL IMMORTALITY OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 
 
 soul of man your soul and mine knows itself to be an indivisible 
 whole- ft something which cannot be broken up into parts and enter 
 into unison with other souls with other minds. Each of us is 
 himself. Each can become no other. My memory, my affections, 
 my way of thinking and feeling, are all my own : they are not 
 transferable. If they perish they perish altogether. There are no 
 atoms to survive them which can be worked up into another spiritual 
 existence ; and thus the extinction of an animal or a vegetable is 
 only the extinction of that particular combination of matter not of 
 the matter itself; but the extinction of a soul, if the thing were 
 possible, would be the total extinction of all that made it to be what 
 it ever was. In the physical world, destruction and death are only 
 changes. In the spiritual world the only possible analogous process 
 would mean annihilation. And therefore it is a reasonable and a 
 very strong presumption that spirit is not, in fact, placed at this 
 enormous disadvantage when compared with matter, and that, if 
 matter survives the dissolution of organic forms much more must 
 spirit survive the dissolution of the material forms with which it has 
 been for a while associated. 
 
 These are the kind of considerations by which thoughtful men 
 living without the light of revelation might be led to see the 
 reasonableness, the high probability, of a future life. They are not 
 indeed strict demonstrations which compel belief in immortality. 
 To minds of a certain order they would also, it is probable, seem 
 poor and inconclusive. But they have led many a noble soul before 
 now up to the very gates of the church of God. Do not let us 
 think scorn of them as mere philosophy. Do not let us forget that 
 God teaches up to a certain point through reason and nature and 
 conscience, just as he teaches beyond it through his blessed Son. 
 This teaching of nature is presupposed by Christianity. Christianity 
 appeals to it. It is no true service to our Master Jesus Christ to 
 make light of this elementary teaching which God gives us in reason 
 and conscience with a view of heightening the effect of the work of 
 Christ to man. At the same time it is most true that outside the 
 Jewish revelation the immortality of man was not treated by any 
 very large number of men as anything like a certainty. Our Lord 
 Jesus Christ assumed it as certain in all that he said with reference 
 to a future life. And it is his resurrection the tangible fact of 
 his real survival of the collapse and sharpness of death which has 
 in this, as in so many other ways, opened the kingdom of heaven to 
 all believers. What has been we know may be. What has been at 
 least forbids the thought that it could cot be, and thus the 
 Christian faith has brought immortality to light through the gospel. 
 Christianity did not create immortality for man. It brought it to 
 light as an hscertaiued fact of bis nature imperfectly apprehended 
 until Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead. Christ our Lord 
 does not make any one human being immortal any more than he 
 invests any one with reason or with conscience or with will. 
 Immortality like these other gifts is part of the original outfit of 
 our nature, but then our Lord has poured a flood of light upon its 
 meaning and its reality. And what a solemn fact is the immortality 
 of man, dimly apprehended by reason made certain by revelation. 
 What an unutterably solemn fact that every person in this 
 
 285
 
 THE NATURAL IMMORTALITY OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 
 
 congregation will live, must live, in some sense or other, tor ever. 
 At this moment each one of us has or rather is made up of 
 memory, will, and conscience each of these altogether his own. A 
 hundred years hence no one of us who are here will be still in the 
 body. Ah, we shall have passed one and all to another sphere of 
 being. We shall exist each one with memory, will and conscience 
 intact, utterly separate each one from any other living being ; and 
 ten thousand years hence or if the imagination can take in such a 
 vast track of time, ten million years hence it will be still the same : 
 we shall still exist each one with will, memory, conscience intact, 
 separate from all other beings, each in his eternal resting place. 
 
 And this brings us to consider what our Lord's words do mean. 
 What is the kind of life which we Christians do, or should, live 
 because Christ our Saviour on his throne in heaven lives it ? 
 Clearly, my brethren, something is meant by life in such passages 
 as this which is higher than which is beyond mere existence, 
 not merely beyond animal existence but beyond the existence, the 
 mere existence, of a spiritual being. We English use life in our 
 popular language in this sense of an existence which is not merely 
 dormant, or inert, or unfruitful, but which has a purpose of some 
 sort and which makes the most of itself; and the Greeks had a 
 particular word to describe the true life of man man's highest 
 spiritual energy a word to which our Lord either in language or, 
 more probably, by some marked modulation of his voice must have 
 used an equivalent in the Eastern dialect which he actually 
 employed. This is the word employed when our Lord says " I am 
 the life," and when St. Paul says " Christ who is our life." And 
 thus in the present passage our Lord does not say " Because I exist 
 ye shall exist also," but he does say " Because I live ye shall live 
 also." This life is existence in its best and its highest aspects the 
 existence of a being who makes the most of his endowments who 
 consciously directs them towards their true purpose and object in 
 whom they are invigorated, raised, transfigured, by the presence of 
 some new power by the operations of grace. This enrichment and 
 elevation of being is derived that is the point from Christ our 
 Lord. He is the author of this new lite just as our first parent is 
 the source of our first natural existence. On this account St. Paul 
 calls our Lord the second Adam, implying that he would have a 
 relation towards the human race in some remarkable way resembling 
 that of our first parent, and, in point of fact, Christ is the parent of 
 a race of spiritual men who push human life to its higher ^ome of 
 them toils highest capacities of excellence, just as Adam is the 
 parent of a race of natural men who do what they can or may with 
 their natural outfit. " The second Adam " remember that title of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ. As natural human existence is derived from 
 Adam, so spiritual or supernatural life is given to already existing 
 men, from and by our Lord Jesus Christ. " As we have borne the 
 image of the earthy we must also bear the image of the heavenly." 
 When our Lord was upon the earth he qommunicated this life to 
 man by coming in contact with men. What is said of him on one 
 occasion in reference to a particular miracle is true of his whole 
 appearance upon the earth " Virtue went out of him." A common 
 way of describing this is to say that he produced an impression 
 286
 
 TIIK NATURAL IMMORTALITY OP THE IIUM.AN SOUL. 
 
 deeper and more lasting than has any who has ever worn our human 
 form. Most certainly he did this. He acted, bespoke; and his 
 looks and gestures and bearing were themselves a vivid and most 
 persuasive language; and men observed and listened. They had 
 never seen, they had never heard, anything like it. ' They felt the 
 contagion of a presence the influence of which they could not 
 measure a presence from which there radiated a subtle mysterious 
 energy which was gradually taking possession of them, they knew 
 not exactly how, and making them begin to live a new and higher 
 life. What that result was upon four men of very different casts of 
 character we may gather from the reports of the life of Christ which 
 are given us by the four holy evangelists. But at last he died, and 
 rose and disappeared from sight into the heavens, and it is of this 
 aftertime that he says " Because I live ye shall live also." 
 
 How does he now communicate his life when he is out of reach of 
 the senses when the creative stimulus of his visible presence has 
 been withdrawn ? 
 
 The answer is, first, by his Spirit. "What had been partly visible 
 has now to be a wholly invisible process. The Spirit of Christ 
 that divine and personal force whereby the mind and nature of our 
 invisible Saviour is poured into the hearts and minds and characters 
 of men- - was to be the Lord and giver of this life to the end of 
 time. " He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you." And, 
 therefore, " if any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is'none of 
 his ;" and, therefore, " if any man be in Christ," through being 
 baptized into this one Spirit, "he is the new creation: old things 
 have passed away and all things have become new." 
 
 And, secondly, the means whereby the Spirit of Christ does 
 especially convey Christ's life are the Christian sacraments. The 
 sacraments are the guaranteed points of contact with our unseen 
 Saviour acts in which we may certainly meet him and be invigorated 
 by him as we toil along the road of our earthly pilgrimage. Ah, if 
 those sacraments were only symbols of a grace withheld, if they 
 were only memorials of an absent Saviour, they would have no 
 legitimate place whatever in a religion like the gospel. They would 
 be on a par with the dead ceremonies of the Jewish law. They 
 would belong appropriately to that old religion of mere types and 
 shadows which, since the coming of our Lord, has given way to a 
 religion in which all is real. Certainly in bestowing on us the life 
 of Christ the divine Spirit is not, as the old phrase has it, "tied to 
 sacraments." The Spirit of God fills the world and turns persons 
 and words and circumstances to account in his various dealings with 
 the soul of man, but sacraments are chartered means of grace. 
 And such is our Lord's appointment if we mean to live because 
 Christ lives, we cannot do without them. We could do without a 
 mere symbolical washing in water, but " except a man be born of 
 water and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
 We could do without bread and wine eaten in memory of an absent 
 Christ, but " except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his 
 blood ye have no life in you." And if we cannot understand how 
 rites so simple should convey to us the transcendent blessings and 
 powers which come straight from the very heart of the invisible 
 world, is this wonderful when we understand so little so very 
 
 287
 
 THE NATURAL IMMORTALITY OF THE HUMAN SOUL. 
 
 little of the lower forms of life around us, of those simple yet 
 most mysterious processes of nature which surround us on every 
 side ? What is life in the animal ? What is life in the tree ? Why 
 should food support it in the one case or moisture in the other ? 
 Our common-place and our scientific answers to these questions 
 only reveal to us a world of mystery, the frontiers of which we 
 seem to know by heart the real nature of which is utterly beyond 
 us. It is this new life which comes from Christ our Lord which 
 makes it a blessing to have the prospect before us of existing on 
 individually for ever. It is these new thoughts and affections and 
 dispositions which he gives us which are, in fact, his own by 
 which an endless existence will be raised to the level of an eternal 
 life. What this life is in its highest form we read in the records of 
 the one life, ideal and yet most real, which was once lived on earth 
 and which is described in the gospels. What it may be we see in 
 those great saints and servants of his who have lived from age to 
 age since his coming and have shown to the world by their patience 
 and their heroism what his grace can make of our poor, frail, fallen, 
 humanity. What it is too often we know in ourselves. We know 
 how vast is the interval between the way in which we think and 
 express ourselves and act, and the actions and language and thoughts 
 which are set before us in the gospels. Why is our Christianity 
 too often so poor and feeble and depressed a thing ? Why is it so 
 unequal to its great traditions in the past to the anticipations 
 which in our higher moments even we can cherish for its future ? 
 Before our eyes is the same ideal as that which has shone upon all 
 the generations of Christendom. We have the same hopes and fears 
 the same warnings and encouragements as any of Christ's 
 servants in days gone by. May it not be that we modern 
 Christians have largely put out of sight the fact that the true life 
 comes from him, and from him alone, whose name we bear ? May 
 it not be that we trust to our own energy or common sense or 
 perception for a power and for results which faith and love must 
 receive, if they are to be received at all, from the pierced hands of 
 an invisible Saviour ? " Because I live ye shall live also.' 5 We rely 
 wholly on his death for the pardon of our sins, and we do well. 
 But he has more to give us than this. This is only half of his 
 gospel. If he died for our sins he rose again for our justification. 
 " If when we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death 
 of his Son, much more being reconciled we shall be saved by his life." 
 Let us be up and doing. Let us look to the sources of our true 
 outBt for the eternal world. Let us make the most of them. Our 
 immortality is certain. But what sort of an immortality is it to be ? 
 That is a question before which all else that touches ourselves fades 
 away into utter insignificance. That is a question which can be 
 only well and satisfactorily answered by a soul which hastens to 
 draw water from the wells of salvation which having itself heard 
 the words uttered as of old over the sinner, " Thy sins which are 
 many are forgiven " still kneels on in persevering love at the feet 
 of the divine Master to receive from him the supplies and the 
 strength which are assuredly needful for the life eternal, and to hear 
 more and more clearly, as the closing scene draws nigh, the divine 
 promise " Because I live thou shalt live also." 
 288
 
 PATIENCE UNDER UNDESERVED WRONG. 
 
 A SERMON 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D., 
 
 (Canon of St. Paul's,) 
 
 PREACHED AT 
 
 ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 15ra, 1877. 
 
 " This is thankworthy, if a man, for conscience toward God, endure grief, 
 suffering wrongfully." i Peter, ii., 19. 
 
 The epistle for to-day, it has been suggested, would have been 
 better suited for one of the Sundays before Easter, if not for Good 
 Friday itself. The subject of this epistle is patience under unde- 
 served wrong as illustrated by the example of our suffering and 
 sinless Lord. Such a subject does seem, at first sight, out of 
 keeping with the thoughts and joys of the Easter season ; but the 
 truth is that in those early days when, with a few exceptions, our 
 present epistles and gospels were selected, the death and resurrec- 
 tion of Christ were looked upon, as indeed they are treated in holy 
 scripture, as events inseparably connected with each other as two 
 sides or aspects of a single whole as the self-sacrifice and triumph 
 involved in one supreme effort of the divine love manifested towards 
 ruined man. And thus it is that, even when Easter has come and 
 gone, these lesser lessons of Good Friday are heard echoing down 
 the weeks which follow the great festival. It seems as though the 
 Church of God felt that she could not at the time learn all that the 
 passion of her Lord was meant to teach her, so she must return to 
 the scene of His sorrow to gather up what had escaped her amid 
 the distractions and bewilderment of the day of His death. Cer- 
 tainly this applies to to-day's services. The collect speaks of Christ 
 as a sacrifice for sin. In the gospel He is the Good Shepherd, 
 laying down His life for the sheep ; and here in the epistle He is the 
 Great Sufferer, who, by His sublime endurance, teaches patience 
 teaches resignation to those who suffer wrongfully throughout all 
 time. 
 
 If we look at the context of this passage in our Bibles, we observe, 
 first of all, that St. Peter is writing, not as the extract appointed for 
 the epistle might suggest, to Christians in general, but to one par- 
 ticular class of Christians to household slaves. " Slaves," he begins, 
 " be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and 
 gentle, but also to the froward; for," he adds, "this is thankworthy, 
 if a man, for conscience toward God, endure grief suffering wrong- 
 No. 943, i NEW SERIES.
 
 PATIENCE UNDER UNDESERVED WRONG. 
 
 fully." Our translation " servants " was, perhaps, intended to 
 make the passage practically useful, by suggesting its application 
 to that class among ourselves who have this in common with the 
 ancient slaves that they have duties to perform to a human master- 
 But in truth the word servant, with all its modern associations, mis. 
 leads us seriously here as to the apostle's meaning. A servant in 
 an English house has little indeed in common with the slave of that 
 old world society for which St. Peter wrote. A servant is a free 
 man or woman who undertakes to do a certain kind and amount 
 of work in return for a certain stipend. This undertaking is a con- 
 tract. It may be brought to an end by giving due notice at any 
 moment. It involves, while it lasts, no forfeiture of the protection 
 which the law extends equally to servant and to master. Long 
 before an English servant suffered wrongfully, in the sense contem- 
 plated by St. Peter, the law would step in and punish any personal 
 assault, or cruelty, or withholding of covenanted salary oh the 
 part of the master, with impartial justice. Far otherwise was 
 it with the ancient slave. He had no rights before the law. 
 He was looked upon, so a great writer of antiquity puts it, as 
 an animate piece of property. He was bought just like the cattle 
 in the homestead or the furniture about the room, if, indeed, he was 
 not born and bred on the estate. He was taught a profession, that 
 he might be useful to his master, or might fetch a high price if he 
 was sent to a sale. He was a poet, a jailor, a cabinet-maker, an 
 architect, a physician, a mechanic, a private attendant, a hair- 
 dresser, afield labourer, an epigrammatist, just as the case might 
 be. He was let out to a friend, or he was sold for a song, or he 
 was flogged to death, or he was crucified, or he was made a pet 
 of, just as the caprice of his owner might dictate. He too had his 
 feelings, his attachments, like the rest of us, but he might be willed 
 away from the associations of a lifetime to a strange owner in a 
 distant home without a suspicion of his destiny ; or he might, quite 
 in his old age, pass, at the death of some kind and considerate 
 master to a young heir, selfish and reckless, who viewed him merely 
 as worn-out property, and treated him with indifference and cruelty. 
 Worst of all was the denial to him of those sacred rights which 
 marriage carries with it. He, too, married, yet his wife and child- 
 ren were his only on sufferance, and his family might be broken up 
 at a moment's notice to fill the purse or to gratify the passions of a 
 selfish owner. And all this while the slave was not unfrequently, in 
 everything but his civil position, his master's superior a man of 
 wider cultivation, of larger capacities, of finer moral make, of nobler 
 sympathies. He might be an Epictetus; he might have those 
 rarer gifts and graces which are wont to win the homage even of 
 the best among mankind. It matters not : he had no rights before 
 the law no rights against brutal wrong no claim which would be 
 recognized by public opinion as entitling him to consideration and 
 justice. Not seldom his very superiority was his ruin. It .moved 
 the jealousy or it stimulated the caprice of his owner to some excep- 
 tional act of cruelty and oppression. Certainly, now and then, the 
 
 natural conscience of pagan rulers moved them to do something 
 
 it was little enough to improve the condition of the slave. At one 
 266
 
 PATIENCE UNDER UNDESERVED WRONG. 
 
 time the old pagan Roman law 'restrained the right of the master 
 to kill a slave without some assignable cause : at another it pledged 
 him to get an authorization from the magistrate. At a later period 
 this was when Christianity had made itself felt it only allowed 
 him to afflict severe bodily punishment. In the same way custom 
 allowed the slave to have a little property. Legally, of course, a 
 man who was himself property could not hold property. And in 
 this way sometimes he would save money to buy his freedom. But 
 all this came to very little. The cruelty and degradation attendant 
 on slavery were gigantic, and it produced, from time to time, wild 
 attempts at resistance, sometimes on a terrific scale, when tens of 
 thousands of armed slaves, under some impatient leader, sought free- 
 dom from their oppressors in death on the field of battle, or in 
 victory. In the age of the apostles, no social question was more 
 immediately pressing throughout the Roman empire than this ques- 
 tion of slavery. 
 
 When, then, the apostles addressed themselves to the 
 conversion of the world, they found at once that they 
 had this question on their hands. Christianity was espe- 
 cially the religion of the suffering and the ill-used, and the 
 slaves became converts in numbers. And as St. Peter thinks 
 over his Jewish flock of converts to Christianity throughout Pontus, 
 Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia,he remembers that multi- 
 tudes of them were slaves Christian slaves in pagan households. 
 They have, he reflects, a great claim upon his charity. What 
 should help them to bear the hardships of their lot if the faith and 
 church of Christ does not help them ? The apostle scans them 
 over in his thought, smarting, as they were, under a sense of accu- 
 mulated wrong crushed down, as they were, beneath an iron 
 system, which looked to themselves, no doubt, and to their masters, 
 so fashioned as if it would last for ever. What can he say to 
 them that will lighten their dreary prison-house, that will suggest 
 to them the great consecration of unmerited sorrow by the Divine 
 Sufferer, and the hope of a brighter world hereafter? " This," he 
 will say, " This is thankworthy, if a man, for conscience toward 
 God, endure grief, suffering wrongfully.'' 
 
 St. Peter teaches that suffering is thankworthy, a gift from God, 
 and acceptable in turn to him, if it be accompanied by two condi- 
 tions. First of all, it must be undeserved. A slave, too, might be 
 punished for doing what would merit punishment in a free man. A 
 slave, too, might be violent, or abusive, or careless about that which 
 belonged to others, or intemperate, or dishonest, or treacherous. If 
 punished for offences of this kind, he might not complain. " What 
 glory is it," asks St. Peter, " if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, 
 ye shall take it patiently ? '' The law, the eternal law, that punish- 
 ment follows wrong-doing, is not suspended in the case of the slave. 
 And, secondly, such suffering must be for conscience toward God. 
 It must.be borne for God's cause and sake, and with a good hope 
 of God's approval. This it is which makes pain at once bearable 
 and bracing, when the conscience of the sufferer can ask the Per- 
 fect Moral Being to take note of it, just as David does in so many 
 of his psalms. " Look Thou upon me, and be merciful unto me. 
 
 267
 
 PATIENCE UNDER UNDESERVED WRONG- 
 
 Lord, be Thou my helper.'' Mere suffering, which a man dares 
 not offer to God, though it be borne patiently through physical 
 courage, through " pluck," as we term it, has no spiritual value. 
 " Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit.'' This is the Con- 
 secration Prayer, uttered on the cross uttered, if in other language, 
 wherever men suffer for conscience toward God ; and by it suffering 
 is changed changed assuredly into moral victory. 
 
 In short, St. Peter says to the Christian slaves, " If you like you 
 can turn the hardships of your lot into very choice blessings. Suf- 
 fering is not itself necessarily an evil : it may be a signal good. If 
 it is undeserved, so much the better for its religious efficacy : it is 
 a certificate of honour sent you down from God. Let it be accepted 
 as from Him, and for His sake. It becomes at once a great grace ; 
 it is a token of nearer likeness to the Lord Jesus Christ." And St. 
 Paul deals with this question in a similar spirit. He bids the slaves 
 at Ephesus to be obedient to their masters, " not with eye-service, 
 as men pleasers, but as the slaves of Christ.'' He uses the very 
 same terms in addressing the slaves at Colosse. He desires Titus, 
 as bishop in Crete, to exhort slaves " to be obedient to their own 
 masters, and to please them in all things ; not answering again, 
 not purloining, but showing all good fidelity, that they may adorn 
 the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things." Writing to Timo- 
 thy, Bishop of Ephesus, he desires, generally, that slaves should 
 count their masters worthy of all honour, and, in particular, that 
 slaves belonging to Christian masters are not to think the worse of 
 their masters because they are brethren who yet keep slaves ; but 
 rather do them service, because they are Christian believers, and 
 objects of the life of God. He advises the Corinthian slaves not to 
 care for the circumstance of slavery, but, if they can be free, to use 
 their opportunity. Everywhere the advice which he gives is substan- 
 tially this, submit and obey cheerfully ; endure patiently ; remem- 
 ber that time is very short ; remember that the accidents of this out- 
 ward condition matter little as compared with our state in eternity. 
 
 And here it may be asked, " Why did not the apostles denounce 
 slavery as an intolerable wrong? Why did they trifle with it, and 
 allow the Church which succeeded them to trifle with it? Why did 
 they seem, indirectly at least, to sanction it, by advising slaves to 
 honour and obey their owners ? Was not this of the nature of a 
 compromise between good and evil between the high principles of 
 Christian morality on the one hand, and the debased institutions of 
 heathen life on the other ? Would it not have been better to break 
 with slavery at once and altogether, better for the honour of the 
 Christian revelation, better for the best interest of man ? " Cer- 
 tainly, my brethren, nothing can well be more antipathetic than 
 the spirit of the gospel and the spirit of slavery ; for slavery postu- 
 lates an essential distinction between man and man, which is un- 
 known to the gospel. The gospel proclaims the unity of the human 
 race, and the equality of all its memters before God. The gospel 
 is based upon, and it consecrates, the laws of God in nature ; and 
 slavery, on the other hand, is distinctly unnatural : it is a rejection 
 of the fundamental equality of man. It often, and very consistently, 
 professes to reject belief in the unity of the human race. To 
 268
 
 PATIENCE UNDER UNDESERVED WRONG. 
 
 slavery the deepest of all distinctions between human beings is the 
 distinction between the man who is his own owner and the man 
 who is owned by another. " In Christ Jesus/' exclaims the apostle, 
 " there is neither bond nor free." But the exact question which the 
 apostles had to consider was not whether slavery was a bad social 
 institution, or theoretically indefensible, but this whether slavery 
 necessarily ruined the prospects of the human soul. The business 
 of the apostles, you observe, lay rather with the other world than 
 with this with this world just so far as it bore upon the other. 
 What a man's condition was, or was not, in this world, mattered 
 little in an apostle's judgment, if the man could secure the true end 
 of his being in the world to come. And if this question about the 
 bearing of slavery upon human salvation was raised there could be 
 no doubt about the answer. A slave might be a Christian he 
 might be the best of Christians easily enough. If he was harshly 
 treated that was not peculiar to his condition of life : it might even 
 promote his sanctification. If he was tempted to do wrong, St. 
 James would tell him that he should count this all joy, knowing that 
 the trial of his faith worketh endurance. If he had to choose 
 between sinful compliance with a master's will and punishment, 
 though that punishment were death, he, with his eyes fixed on the 
 Divine Sufferer, would know his part. The grace of God may make 
 the soul ot man independent of outward circumstances ; and there 
 is no real slavery when the soul is free. And it often happens that 
 a Christian slave would live more entirely in and for a better world 
 than other Christians, because, in this world, there was so very little 
 to win the homage of his heart. To the slave-owner, undoubtedly, 
 slavery was more fraught with spiritual danger than to the slave 
 himself; but, however great the temptations of the position, they 
 were, after all, only great temptations. A master of slaves might 
 be just, generous, chaste, charitable, humble, tender-hearted, true. 
 Slavery, then, in Christian eyes, although undoubtedly bad, is not 
 bad in the sense in which a sinful practice is bad, something in 
 which a Christian can, under any circumstances, keep no terms. 
 It may tend to multiply temptations : it can not compel to actual 
 sin, since sin is only possible when the will consents. 
 
 At the same time, although the apostles were working, as I have 
 said, for another world, in the course of doing so, and, as it were, 
 incidentally, they were destined to be, from the nature of the case, 
 great social reformers in this. They could not but detest slavery, 
 but how was it to be done away with ? Was it to be by some 
 sudden revolutionary effort, supposing the thing to be possible? 
 Was it to be by the influence of new principles first upon the 
 opinions of men, and then upon the structure of society ? The 
 apostles chose the latter method, but it \vas a method which took 
 time. The apostles trusted to the infiltration of new principles into 
 the thoughts and actions of men, and not to those violent and tra- 
 gical catastrophes which, even when they succeed, succeed amid 
 ruins. It was not the duty of the gospel to proclaim a social war. 
 There were sects at that time nearly related to Judaism. The 
 Essenes and Therapeutse they were called, and their teaching was 
 certainly very familiar to St. Paul sects which held that the slave 
 
 269
 
 PATIENCE UNDER UNDESERVED WRONG. 
 
 should at once refuse all obedience to his master, in the name of 
 human rights. But slaves, maddened by oppression into rebellion 
 against order, would not, in that age, at least, have put an end to 
 slavery. It was better to teach a higher ideal of life, both to the 
 slave and to the master, and meanwhile to proclaim the truth, 
 "This is thankworthy, if a man, for conscience towards God, endure 
 grief, suffering wrongfully." From the first, brethren, slavery was 
 so changed when in Christian hands as to lose most of its worst 
 features. Christian slave-masters at Ephesus are reminded by St. 
 Paul that they have a Master also in heaven : neither is there re- 
 spect of persons with Him. The Church was incessantly, after the 
 pattern of the apostle, pleading with Philemon for indulgence 
 towards Onesimus. Already, in her eyes, the slave of the 
 civil law was the great freed man of Christ. In a Christian 
 household, the marriage tie between slaves was respected 
 as being what Christ's law had made it sacred and indis- 
 soluble. In Christian households, a hundred courtesies sof- 
 tened the hardship of the legal relation between master and 
 slave. The sense of a common brotherhood in Christ had already 
 sapped the idea of any radical inequality between them. Did they 
 not both owe their existence to the same creative love ? Were 
 they not both redeemed by the same atoning blood ? Were they 
 not both sanctified by the same regenerating and purifying Spirit ? 
 Did they not kneel side by side to receive the body of their com- 
 mon Lord ? Were they not alike striving day by day to deepen 
 the graces of faith, hope, and charity in their souls ? Did they not 
 look forward to being together for eternity in a common home in 
 heaven ? And thus it happened that Christian slaves sometimes 
 rose even to high places in the ministry of the Church. Callistus, the 
 bishop of Rome, at the beginning of the third century was aslave. 
 Thus it happened that slaves were sometimes martyrs for Christ. 
 Blandina, of Lyons, who died for Christ in the year 177, was a Chris- 
 tian slave girl, and martyrdom, the highest act of moral freedom, of 
 which man u> ever capable martyrdom relieved the degradation of 
 slavery enormously, and reduced it within the church almost to a van- 
 ishing point. And then there came the legislation of the Christian 
 councils, and of the Christian emperors. It is welcome on a day 
 like this to remember how, in this great field of human improve- 
 ment, religion and law went for centuries hand in hand,- religion 
 seeking ever and anon the assistance of law, law drawing its best 
 inspirations, in such codes as those of Theodosius and Justinian, 
 from the guidance of religion, until at last slavery ceased within 
 the precincts of civilization, though, alas, it has lingered on to our 
 own days as a result of selfish commercial enterprise pursued among 
 the feebler races of mankind. 
 
 But then, it may be asked, " Does not the advice of the apostle 
 to submit quietly to wrong destroy manliness and force of character 
 if it is acted on ? Does it not tend to create a race of effeminate 
 spiritless men, who may indeed give little trouble to a bad institu- 
 tion or to a bad government, but who have parted with all that 
 can be called moral strength? " The question, my brethren, is, In 
 what does moral strength really consist ? It is sometimes taken 
 
 270
 
 PATIENCE UNDER UNDESERVED WRONG. 
 
 for granted that moral strength must catch the eye must strike 
 upon the ear must inflict itself obtrusively upon the imagination, 
 that it must be something bustling, pushing, demonstrative, 
 aggressive, that it must, at least, have color, body, incident, to 
 recommend it. No, this is not the case. Moral strength may be 
 the exact reverse of all this, and that when it is found in its very 
 finest forms. When it makes no show whatever, and is utterly 
 passive, it is often at its best. Many a man, who can act with great 
 courage in moments of personal danger in a struggle with a 
 brigand, or amid the timbers of a burning house, can not suffer an 
 illness as bravely and as patiently as his little girl. The courage 
 which was shown by the man who, after seeing to the safety of 
 the women and children on board, went down in the Birkenhead 
 was greater than the courage of the men who charged at Bala- 
 clava. Animal effort, or the excitement of a great crisis, makes 
 courage easy. The hardest thing very often is to do nothing, to 
 await the approach of danger or death, and yet not to lose nerve 
 and self-possession. No moral strength in the whole history of our 
 race ever appoached that which was displayed on Calvary, when 
 all that was before Him was present from the first to the mind of 
 the Divine Victim, who, " when He was reviled, reviled not again : 
 when He suffered He threatened not, but committed Himself to Him 
 that judgeth righteously." 
 
 On the other hand, nothing that has been said, I trust, will be 
 so misconstrued as to be taken to imply that cruelty, tyranny, op- 
 pression, are in any sense agreeable to the mind of God. He per- 
 mits these things among men from time to time, just as He per- 
 mits much else that is evil, for His own wise ends. He brings good 
 out of them, yet He condemns them, and, by and by, He will punish 
 them. Who can read the Jewish prophets and not mark how one 
 after another they maintain the cause of the helpless, whether 
 against bad Jewish kings or against heathen conquerors ? Who 
 can use the psalter especially the psalms of David himself 
 without sharing the fire of his moral indignation against oppres- 
 sion and wrong ? If St. Peter advises oppressed slaves to endure 
 grief, suffering wrongfully, for conscience towards God, because this 
 is acceptable with God, he does not, therefore, sanction the caprice 
 or the cruelty of the master. Nowhere does the gospel repeal the 
 stern sentence which prophet and psalmist alike uttered against 
 public or private tyrants. "Why boastest thou thyself, thou 
 tyrant, that thou canst do mischief; whereas the goodness of God 
 endureth yet daily ? Therefore shall God destroy thee for ever. 
 He shall take thee and pluck thee out of thy dwelling, and root thee 
 out of the land of the living." Nowhere is it implied in the Bible 
 that the systematic oppression of man by man has vested rights in 
 the universe of God, or that circumstances and positions which 
 permit it are even tolerable unless they are perpetuated for very 
 different purposes indeed. The days will come when Englishmen 
 will look back to the abolition of the slave trade by the English 
 Parliament as a higher title to national glory than Trafalgar or 
 Waterloo perhaps as the very greatest in the course of our civil 
 history. Wilberforce and Clarkson will rank even before those 
 
 271
 
 PATIENCE UNDER UNDESERVED WRONG. 
 
 celebrated commanders to whose courage and genius, under God, 
 we owe the independence of our country. Great days they were 
 when English gentlemen faced every species of insult and unpopu- 
 larity in pursuit of one noble and disinterested object, when 
 England, not without long struggling and hesitation, at length 
 deliberately sacrificed her material interest, to the amount of thirty 
 millions of money, that she might secure freedom and well-being 
 to the enslaved races of Africa. 
 
 Have there not been symptoms of late, that I do not say the 
 English people, but some sections of English society have lost some- 
 thing of this generous impatience of cruel wrong have learnt to lis- 
 ten to the cries of anguish raised by millions of their fellow creatures, 
 and to listen I will not say unmoved, but without exerting them- 
 selves to help them ? Be this as it may, the truth announced by St- 
 Peter is always widely applicable in every age and country. 
 Among ourselves there are probably almost certainly some who 
 for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. 
 There are no slaves, thank God, on English soil, but there are 
 multitudes of persons in positions of dependence whose lives can 
 easily be made miserable by the cruel ingenuity of their betters, 
 and too often for no worse crime than that of obeying a higher 
 sense of right. Every rank in society has its petty tyrants and 
 its secret confessorships. To suffer wrongfully for conscience to- 
 wards God is the monopoly of no one class. There is a cadet of a 
 noble family who will not consent to a transaction which he knows 
 to be unjust, and he is cut off with a shilling. Here is an apprentice 
 or a clerk in a large city house who will not abandon the duties and 
 the restraints of the Christian life in deference to pressure, or to 
 abuse, or to ridicule, and he has a hard time of it. Yonder is a 
 governess who has caught a higher vision of life and duty than her 
 wealthy and ostentatious employer, it may be, knows of; or a 
 clergyman, who feels keenly the real character of the revelation of 
 God in Christ, and the tremendous issues of life and death too 
 keenly far to acquiesce in some popular but shallow misrepresenta- 
 tion of the gospel which makes his people comfortable without 
 bringing them really nearer to God. These, and such as these, 
 must, for conscience's sake towards God, endure grief, suffering 
 wrongfully. Law can do but little almost nothing for them. 
 The province of law lies outside the spheres of the heart and the 
 conscience. The whole world of inner motive is beyond it. But 
 religion can do much it can do everything by pointing to the 
 crucified and risen Prince of that vast company in all ages who, for 
 conscience's sake towards God, have endured grief, suffering 
 wrongfully by pointing to the unapproached bitterness of His 
 sorrow by pointing to the completeness and the glory of His 
 triumph. 
 
 272
 
 CHRIST FEASTING WITH PUBLICANS AND 
 SINNERS. 
 
 By the Rev. H. P. LID DON, D.D., 
 
 (Canon of St. PauTs,) 
 PREACHED IN ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 27TH, 1876. 
 
 "And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and 
 sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with 
 publicans and sinners ? " MABK ii., 16. 
 
 THE occasion of this question was the presence of our Saviour at the farewell 
 feast in the house of Levi at Capernaum. Levi, or Matthew, as he is 
 generally called, had determined to renounce his profession as a tax-collector, 
 and to devote himself to the service of our Lord Jesus Christ. But, before 
 leaving his old occupation and his old associates, he gave an entertainment 
 a parting banquet to those with whom he had lived and worked for 
 so many years. The native publicans who farmed the taxes under the 
 Roman officials were a hard set of men, accustomed to acts of cruel extortion, 
 and disposed to think cheaply of human feelings when their rough work had 
 to be done ; and yet we may be sure that, on an occasion like this, they were 
 not unmoved when they were going to take leave of one of their own class 
 who had taken what they would have thought so surprising a determination, 
 and who now was with them for the last time. It has been said that there 
 is a soft place in the heart of the worst ruffians, and doubtless, in that gather- 
 ing at Capernaum, eyes were moist and hearts were tender in deference to 
 those instincts of our common nature which a life of crime and cruelty 
 cannot wholly destroy. Together with the tax-gatherers or publicans were 
 some sinners persons who, whatever was their occupation in life, are only 
 noticed by the evangelists on account of their bad character. Levi's business, 
 as holding a lease of the taxes under some high official, would have been to 
 extort as large a surplus as he could for himself out of the poor country 
 people ; and, in order to do this thoroughly, he would probably have had 
 recourse to the ruffianism of the neighbourhood. These sinners, too, had 
 been his friends ; they, too, had a place in his heart now that all was being 
 changed, and that he himself was entering the kingdom of heaven. On 
 them, as on his fellow publicans, he gazed, we may be sure, with a true 
 affection. He could not but hope that, through the divine mercy, it might 
 one day be with them as now with himself ; and they, though they were, as 
 No. 898. x NEW SEKIES.
 
 CHRIST FEASTING WITH PUBLICANS AND SINNERS. 
 
 yet, far, far from following him, must have felt the mysterious attraction 
 and pathos of the time that yearning for higher and better things of which 
 few souls are entirely and always destitute. 
 
 But one other was also at that feast, whose presence has made it memorable 
 to the end of time. In all his tender and majestic grace, Jesus Christ was 
 there. Around him was a band of faithful disciples, but around him, too, 
 were those hard publicans those profligate, those unreclaimed sinners. 
 They sat or they lay all around, marking his gestures, gazing on his counte- 
 nance, listening to his words. No doubt he had kind and encouraging words 
 for them, too, just as for the poor woman taken in adultery just as for the 
 Magdalen whose very presence shocked the Pharisees just as for the thief 
 hanging beside him on the cross. And thus, at the board of Matthew, on 
 that day, the associations of an old life from which he was parting for ever 
 were brought into immediate contact with the privileges and blessings of a 
 new life just opening upon him. 
 
 Such frontier posts there are in many a human career days of critical and 
 lasting consequence, when all that has been and is renounced is, for a moment, 
 close to all that is accepted and is to be. Bare and memorable days are 
 these days which, from the nature of the case, cannot be repeated days in 
 which men crowd into the passing moments the feelings and the thoughts 
 of years. Matthew, we may be sure, looked back upon that entertainment 
 with undying interest to his very last hour ; or, rather, from his glorious 
 place in bliss, he even now looks back to it as marking the moment of his 
 completed passage from death unto life. And Jesus, we may dare to 
 believe, shed on those poor rude sinners on that band of disciples above 
 all on that loving and repentant servant who was now turning to him for ever 
 and in earnest his own approtfng smile and blessing. He lit up an 
 occasion which would else have been insignificant, with the beauty of 
 another world. 
 
 But near at hand there were others beside the publicans and sinners 
 beside the divine Master and his band of disciples. These others had not 
 been present at the feast. No instructed scribe, no highly respected 
 Pharisee, would for all the world have broken bread in the company of 
 publicans and sinners ; but they were alive keenly alive to the iufluences 
 of the time. They were interested in what was passing : they were looking 
 on at it : they were making their observations. As the company broke up 
 and one by one left the house of Matthew, the scribes and Pharisees 
 advanced to ask a question of the disciples of Jesus, " How is it that he 
 eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners ? " 
 
 Now, it would seem likely that this question was asked partly in ignorance 
 and partly in ill will. 
 
 Partly, I say, in ignorance. Some who asked it would, in all probability, 
 have had a very false and artificial conception of the true character and 
 duties of a religious teacher. They understood Jesus Christ to claim to be 
 in the line of the prophets and John the Baptist, but to claim to be greater 
 than the greatest of his predecessors. They did not ask themselves what 
 had been the practice of the prophets, but only what they should like in a 
 religious teacher of their own day. They wanted a man who, whatever else 
 he was or did, would flatter their prejudices. In their inmost hearts they 
 conceived of him, not as the servant of the truth, but as the servant of the 
 respectable. He was, above all things, to flatter the self-satisfaction of the 
 respectable : he was to denounce sinners at a distance : he was on no 
 account to pollute himself by contact with them : he was to be very care- 
 ful to stand well with that narrow section of society which claimed in those 
 days to represent all the truth and goodness that was in Palestine. He 
 must not embark in any fanciful schemes for the good of others at the risk 
 386
 
 CHRIST FEASTING WITH PUBLICANS AND SINXERS. 
 
 of his own character for respectability. These scribes and Pharisees kiiew 
 very well what they would have done, had they been in the place ot Jesus ; 
 and therefore they asked the disciples, in a spirit of puzzled curiosity, " How 
 is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners ? " 
 
 But the question was also in part suggested by ill will. Some there were 
 among the scribes and Pharisees, even at this date, who had no kindly 
 leelings towards Jesus Christ. They saw in him the successor of John the 
 Baptist : they knew that the Baptist had denounced them as a generation of 
 vipers. An unerring instinct told them that, between the elevation and 
 keen-sightedness of our Lord and their own accustomed ways of dealing with 
 questions of life and duty, there could be no real peace. They had not yet 
 listened to the solemn words which he afterwards uttered against their 
 insincerity, just before his death, when the breach had become irreparable ; 
 but they already knew what his judgment about them would and must be. 
 Accordingly, the instinct of a far-sighted hostility made them quick to 
 detect, if they could, in his life and conduct, any trace of inconsistency, 
 and when they saw him seated at a festive board with men of a discredited 
 occupation with persons of low and abandoned character, as they no doubt 
 would have expressed it witli the collected depravity of the neighbourhood 
 they believed that the desired opportunity had come. Was this the 
 successor of the ascetic Baptist whom all counted as a prophet, who had 
 repeated, in a degenerate age, the stem life of the ancient saint and 
 solitary Elijah the TishbiteV Was this mixed rabble the practical com- 
 mentary on that high standard of conduct which Christ had propounded 
 on those unsparing censures of others which had fallen from his lips on that 
 pretension to reconstruct human life on a new basis which was the essence 
 of his teaching on that claim to found on earth a society which should 
 deserve the name of the kingdom of heaven ? How could all this pretension 
 be reconciled with so intimate an association with the assembled profligacy 
 of eastern Galilee, such as they saw before their eyes ? No, these scribes 
 and Pharisees had felt all along that he was not really what he seemed to 
 be. They felt that they had only to wait long enough, and to keep their 
 eyes open, and they would find him out. Their opportunity had come at 
 last : this was their hour. They had only to call attention to his proceedings 
 in eating with publicans and sinners, and even his disciples could not 
 defend so flagrant an inconsistency. When it was generally known, there 
 would be an end of his influence. It was in a quietly bitter tone of simulated 
 embarrassment of ill suppressed satisfaction that this sect of the scribes 
 and Pharisees echoed the question, " How is it that he eateth and drinketh 
 with publicans and sinners ? " 
 
 Our Lord would not leave to his simple and timid disciples the task of 
 answering his critics. The question fell on his ears, and he interposed to 
 meet it by a rebuke and an explanation. 
 
 First of all, he rebuked, with a stern irony, the Belf-righteousneaa of the 
 questioners. He assumes that the scribes and Pharisees were really, before 
 God, what they claimed to be before men morally faultless or whole. 
 Very well, in that case, they, and such as they, did not need his good services. 
 In such society as theirs he could be only in the way. But there were 
 others, as they themselves knew and said, who were not so happily circum- 
 stanced others whom he calls the sick. With them he might be of service. 
 " They that are whole," he said, " need not a physician, but they that are 
 sick.' 1 If the scribes and Pharisees were whole, they could not complain of 
 being neglected by cue whose assistance they did not need who was needed 
 by others. 
 
 And with this tacit rebuke he explains. He is not, he says, a master of 
 the social courtesies ; he is a physician. A physician. He chooses the noblest 
 
 387
 
 CHRIST FEASTING WITH PUBLICANS AND SINNERS. 
 
 of all the secular callings noblest alike in its intellectual elevation, and, as 
 a rule, in its moral disinterestedness to describe his own work for souls. 
 As a physician, his business was not to admire and congratulate the healthy, 
 but to aid and relieve the sick. He, then, was in his proper place at the 
 feast of Levi, where he was confessedly surrounded by moral disease, own- 
 ing itself to be such, in all its forms. He had come not to call the righteous 
 the real or imaginary righteous but sinners who yearned to escape from 
 sin, to the bliss and strength of a real repentance. 
 
 Now, the question which was asked by the scribes and Pharisees is very 
 instructive, for the answer to it illustrates the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 in his work and person. It accounts for much in the action of the Christian 
 church which has seemed constantly to require explanation, and it furnishes 
 a practical rule of conduct in a difficult department of duty for individual 
 Christians. 
 
 The answer to the question of the scribes and Pharisees set forth the 
 glory of our divine Saviour. Why was he at all at the feast of Matthew ? 
 Because he was and is the friend of sinners. " I came to call sinners to 
 repentance." " The friend of sinners.' 1 Here, brethren, I say, we have 
 one of the most glorious titles of our Lord and Saviour ; not merely because, 
 being such as we are, we naturally fix our eyes upon those qualities in him 
 which meet most directly and consolingly the case of our own fallen and 
 wounded nature ; not chiefly because, in ancient words, our wants are the 
 real measure of our enthusiasms ; but because God's condescensions reveal his 
 glory even more completely than it is revealed by his magnificence. The 
 magnificence of God is altogether beyond us. By his condescension he 
 places himself within our powers of, in some degree, uuderstanding him. 
 His condescension is the visible measure of his love. The glory of the love 
 of God would never have been brought close to the imaginations and the 
 hearts of men, had his love remained, for the human understanding, only 
 an abstract attribute, instead of a force, as it is, of which man can take some 
 sort of measure at the cradle of Bethlehem, and at the cross of Calvary. 
 
 And if men stumble at the condescension of God even more than at his 
 majesty, it is because his condescension reveals more of his nature ; it is 
 because brighter light provokes fiercer opposition, where there is opposition 
 at all. Yes, as the friend of sinners, Jesus Christ shows forth more of his 
 eternal splendour than as the King of heaven. The latter is eternal love, 
 but quiescent, inaccessible. The former is eternal love, flashing forth into 
 activity, compelling us, in some sort, to understand, even when we have not 
 yet the grace to worship it. Some centuries ago, there was a great con- 
 troversy in Christendom as to whether our Lord would have taken our nature 
 upon him if maa had never fallen into sin. He would not have died, of 
 course, in that case : that was agreed, because death is sin's penalty, and 
 Christ dies only as bearing, not his own sins, but ours, in his own body on 
 the tree. But would he have appeared in a sinless world, clothed in a human 
 form, to establish a reign which death would not interrupt, or to pass away 
 by an ascension which would contrast with no preceding humiliation or pain? 
 Such a question, of course, could not be really answered. To discuss what 
 would have been, if the world had been other than that which God knew 
 that it would be, even before he created it from all eternity might seem 
 to be an irreverent waste of time. And yet this discussion did great good, 
 by bringing out into full and sharp relief the actual end of the incarnation 
 of Christ in a world of sinners. Holy scripture constantly connects our 
 Lord's coming into the world with the salvation of sinners, just as the creed 
 says that, " for us men, and for our salvation, he came down from heaven." 
 He himself proclaimed that he was come " to seek and to save that which 
 was lost"; that he came "not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and 
 388
 
 CHRIST FEASTING WITH PUBLICANS AND SINNERS. 
 
 to give his life a ransom for many." His apostle explains that, " because 
 the children were partakers of flesh and blood, he, Christ himself, also took 
 part in the same, that through death he might destroy him that had the 
 power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver them who, through fear of 
 death, were all their lifetime subject to bondage." And, therefore, " this is 
 a true saying, and worthy of all men to be received, that Christ Jesus came 
 into the world to save sinners." 
 
 " The friend of sinners." He is much else. "Wonderful, Counsellor, 
 the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace." He is the 
 source of wisdom ; he is the source of strength and of sanctity ; he is the 
 model of all the perfections ; he is the head of principalities and powers. But 
 his glory is greater greater than that of the sage who enlightens the under- 
 standing, but leaves the heart untouched, greater than that of the master, 
 though he were omnipotent, who crushes wills into submission who can 
 never command the homage of hearts. Jesus Christ sat down side by side 
 with the outcast and the profligate, precisely because he was incarnate love. 
 If he would win them, he must not keep them at arms' length. He had, by 
 taking flesh, put himself under human conditions of exerting influence ; and, 
 of these, voice, look, gesture, the felt presence of affection, of earnest con- 
 viction, of disinterested anxiety, are the conditions or the accompaniments. 
 It was as the friend of sinners that Jesus was present at the feast of Levi. 
 It is as the friend of sinners that he haunts the consciences of those who, 
 at this moment, are even defying him, that he pours into the wounds of the 
 penitent the wine and the oil of his divine consolations, that he lightens 
 up, with a brightness all their own, the prayers and the lives of those who 
 have wandered even farthest from his fold. This this is his glory to the 
 end of time. Be thou ruler, eternal Saviour, even in the midst of thine 
 enemies, by thy invincible love ! 
 
 And this, the glory of his work, depends upon and illustrates another 
 glory the glory of his character. How is it that, glowing as he did with 
 human sympathy, he could venture into an atmosphere of crime and pass 
 forth unscathed ? How is it that he could take sinners by the hand nay, 
 fold them to his breast, and yet escape the least contamination? It is 
 because he, and he alone among any who have worn the human form, is 
 sinless. That subtle taint which dulls the intellect, which stains the affections, 
 which warps and enfeebles the will that selflsh aversion from the source 
 and standard of all good, which sometimes expresses itself in high-handed 
 rebellion, and sometimes is lodged in habits of thought and feeling which so 
 bury and disguise it away that it might seem to defy detection had no 
 place in him. Criticism, the most keen-sighted and hostile, could detect no 
 flaw in his speech and action. " Which of you convinceth me of sin ?" 
 And his sanctity was not merely externally complete for defensive purposes : 
 it was solid ; it was real within. It was a thing, not of outward correspon- 
 dence with rule, but of inward obedience with principle. In him was no 
 sin. No secret wandering of affection, no insurgent desire, no wanton love 
 of paradox, afforded the enemy an opportunity. Temptations fell on him, 
 thick and importunate, but they glided away from his pure human soul, as 
 arrows from a surface of polished steel. There was nothing within him on 
 which the tempter could fasten ; and, accordingly, he " was in all points 
 tempted like as we are, yet without sin." This was the prerogative glory of 
 his character among men, and it enabled him, like a warrior whom some 
 unseen protecting power guards, in the thick of the fight, from the bullets 
 and the swords that play around him, to plunge, in his boundless charity, 
 into the haunts of sin, " to give light to them that sit in darkness and the 
 shadow of death, and to guide their feet into the way of peace." He could 
 he can afford to be the friend of sinners. Purity is fearless where mere 
 
 389
 
 CHRIST FEASTING WITH PUBLICANS AND SINNERS. 
 
 respectability is timid, where it is frightened at the whisperings of evil 
 tongues, where it is frightened at the consciousness of inward weakness, if 
 indeed it be only weakness. It was the glory of Christ, as the sinless friend 
 of sinners, which made him eat and drink as he did, to the scandal of the 
 Pharisees, in the house of Levi. 
 
 And the answer to the question of the scribes and Pharisees is a comment 
 on the action and history of the church of Christ. Of her, too, the complaint 
 has been made, age after age, by contemporary Pharisaism, sometimes in 
 ignorance, sometimes in malice, " How is it that she eateth and drinketh 
 with publicans and sinners ?" There has been much in the history and ways 
 of the Christian church to make the question a natural one. Like her Lord, 
 the church of Christ has entered into the life of sinful humanity. As soon 
 as the first days of persecution were over, and Christianity became the faith 
 of the civilized world, the church sat down with publicans and sinners at 
 the great feast of life, to do what she could for them. She allied herself with 
 the civil power. True, the civil power, even after it had acknowledged the 
 name of Christ, was often enough unchristian, violent, tyrannical, unjust. 
 Still she would do what she could for it; and, if she placed the cross of 
 Christ on the diadem of the Caesar, it was with the object and in the spirit 
 of her Master's gracious presence at the feast of Capernaum. If government 
 was ever to be penetrated by Christian principles, if legislation was to be 
 baptized in the name of Christ, the church must not hold aloof. She must 
 do what she could, by her presence, to influence it. And, in the same way, 
 she took part in literature and art. For centuries, these had been, more or 
 less entirely, in the hands of the evil one. The genius, the taste, the 
 imagination of the world had, with some noble exceptions, told simply in the 
 direction of human degradation. The church of Christ set herself down at 
 the feast of literature to purify it, to elevate it, to breathe into it the higher 
 intelligence, the charity, the veracity, the purity, of her Lord. And art, 
 which bad for so long been the slave of sense art was also to be transfigured 
 by her divine companionship. She sat down to feast with its representatives 
 that she might turn their gaze from earth to heaven, turn it to the super- 
 sensuous and to the ideal ; and thus architecture, and sculpture, and painting, 
 and music, and poetry, became her handmaids. She won back these vast 
 districts of human interest and human life from the service of Satan. She 
 bade them guide the imaginations and the hearts of men from earth to 
 heaven. And so in many other departments of human life, on all the 
 occasions when natural feeling makes a feast for friends and neighbours, the 
 Christian church has entered with her kindly presence and blessing, that 
 she might purify and elevate that which, else, might have belonged to a 
 world estranged from God. 
 
 Has the church, too, like her Lord, never taken harm in this work of charity? 
 Has it sat down all these centuries with the publicans and sinners, and 
 remained ever the immaculate bride, inaccessible to temptation, undefined, 
 unscathed ? We cannot say it. Between the church and her Lord there 
 is a striking correspondence ; there is also a striking difference. Like him, 
 she represents a higher existence amid the things of sense and time. But, 
 while he is sinless, high removed in his awful sanctity above the reach of 
 temptation, the church, though holy by virtue of his presence, is yet made 
 up of sinful human beings who have no absolute insurance against damage 
 from contact with sin ; and thus it has often happened that she has suffered 
 from her intimate contact with the life of humanity. The ally of powerful 
 earthly governments, she has sometimes held her peace when she should have 
 pleaded the cause of the poor and needy the cause of humanity and justice. 
 The patroness of art and literature, she has sometimes seemed, though it 
 were lor a moment, to have forgotten those eternal truths which have a first 
 390
 
 CHRIST FEASTING WITH PUBLICANS AND SINNERS. 
 
 claim upon her sympathies. She has postponed religious interests to aesthetic 
 finish, or to intellectual brilliancy. The friend of man in all the joys and 
 sorrows of this passing life, she has sometimes thrown herself into the suc- 
 cessive phases of his existence in such sort and on such terms as to fail to 
 sanctify them. Her annals abound with names which show that, like 
 Delilah, the world has more than once shorn the locks of Samson, and given 
 him into the hands of the Philistines ; and thus, by a natural reaction, her 
 best and holiest sons have sorrowed, with St. Bernard, at being compelled 
 to dwell in Mesech, and to have their habitations among the tents of Kedar. 
 They have longed for the wings of a dove, that they might get them away, 
 far off, and remain in the wilderness. This must be admitted ; and yet the 
 lesson to which it points is not that the Christian church should withdraw 
 altogether from the feast of Levi. It is that she should husband and con- 
 secrate her forces, by new supplies from heaven, to be really of service there. 
 She dares not leave human life, human thought, literature, government, 
 domestic concerns, to themselves, as if her Lord and Master had not a word 
 to say concerning these. Is she not here to witness for him ? Is she not 
 the leaven, of which he himself spake, as put into the three measures of 
 meal, till the whole was leavened ? The idea of a hermit church of a 
 church made up of recluses, such as Donatists such as some Puritans 
 have imagined, involves nothing less than a sacrifice of the whole plan of 
 Jesus Christ for the regeneration of the world. Still must the church do 
 what she may for the blessing and improvement of all departments of human 
 activity and life. Duty is no less duty because it is dangerous. Precautions 
 and safeguards are near at hand, but she may not cease to eat and drink 
 with publicans and sinners. 
 
 And, lastly, these words are not without suggestiveness as to the duty and 
 conduct of private Christians. On what terms, my brethren, ought a 
 Christian to consort with those who openly deny the truth of religion, or 
 who live in flagrant violation of its precepts ? This is one of those practical 
 questions which meet serious men in their daily lives, and there are two 
 dangers to guard against. On the one hand, we must try to keep clear of 
 Pharisaism that rank weed which so soon springs up in the souls of those 
 who are trying to serve God. The interval between " God be merciful <o 
 me a sinner," and " God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are," is 
 not, practically speaking, a very wide interval, and Pharisaism shows itself 
 by social excommunications by narrow and ungenerous prejudices- by a 
 tacit assumption of moral superiority, which is only too common among 
 people who are, generally, trying to lead, by God's grace, Christian lives. 
 On the other hand, we have to guard against an appearance or affectation of 
 indifference to the known will of God, whether in matters of faith or in 
 conduct. To no Christian can it be other than the most solemn of all con- 
 siderations, whether those around are living conformably to the divine will 
 so far as they know and can. No responsibility can well be greater than 
 that of encouraging others in disobedience to the known will of God. And 
 when this is the plain result of social intercourse, such intercourse becomes at 
 once sinful. St. Paul asked the Corinthians with respect to the effect of inter- 
 course on conduct, " What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteous- 
 ness? And what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord 
 hath Christ with Belial? What part hath he that believeth with an 
 infidel ? " And St. John, writing his second epistle to the elect lady and 
 her children, about the effect of social intercourse on faith, says, " He that 
 abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. If 
 there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into 
 your house, neither bid him God speed ; for he that biddeth him God speed 
 is partaker of his evil deeds." These passages, brethren, are not very 
 
 391
 
 CHRIST FEASTING WITH PUBLICANS AND SINNERS, 
 
 popular in the present day, but there they are, in the New Testament. And 
 the question is, How are we to obey them without falling into the sin of 
 Pharisaism ? The answer seems to be supplied by our Lord's own example 
 at the feast given by Matthew the publican. What was his motive in being 
 there ? He tells us himself. He was there simply as a physician to heal 
 the sick. He was there as a prophet to call sinners to repentance. He 
 did not go only because he was asked, out of easy good humour, 
 and prepared to say nothing that would be unacceptable to the pub- 
 licans and sinners. He went because he desired to do them good 
 because he knew that he could do it ; and this, allowing for the necessary 
 variations in the situation, should be the Christian's rule. If a Christian sees 
 no opportunity of doing anything for the cause of his Lord, he had better 
 keep away from the feast of Matthew. If the society which invites his 
 presence is brilliant and sceptical, and he knows that he cannot hope even 
 to hold his own with the minds which shape and rule its intellectual ten- 
 dencies, then he is better away. If it is morally vicious, and he is conscious 
 of weakness of will or secret sympathy with evil, and cannot reasonably hope 
 to stem the impetuous social torrent, then, again, he is better away. It is 
 not charity itis rashness it is folly if, indeed, it benot rather a treacherous 
 indifference to the truth which has come from heaven to voluntarily expose 
 our own souls to risks which are palpable and overwhelming, when no good 
 can be done for the souls of others. But if he can hope, ever so little, that 
 some good may be done, then no social prejudices then no class opinion 
 ought to hold him back. The frontier of Christian intercourse cannot be 
 fixed by our social conventionalisms. Society mutters, " Take care of your 
 character for respectability." A Christian thinks of the presence of Christ 
 at the feast of Matthew. A Christian knows that the difference between 
 men is often much less than it seems to be, that, when the difference of 
 opportunities is taken into account, it is often, where it seems to be greatest, 
 very insignificant indeed. Who is the Christian, that he should think 
 meanly of such and such a sceptic of such a profligate, as if, but for God's 
 grace, he would have been any better himself ? Nay, may he not have even 
 something to learn from the children of undisciplined nature natural virtues, 
 generous impulses, stray bits of the will of God which have escaped him, or 
 which he has forgotten ? Nature without grace may be she is in ruins ; 
 but her ruins are often enough beautiful and suggestive. 
 
 Great need, indeed, is there of the help of God for those Christians who, 
 in this matter, would really follow in the steps of Christ. We can pretend, 
 my brethren, to no sinless nature ; we cannot ensure the loyalty either of 
 our understandings or of our wills to God's truth. But his grace "is sufficient 
 for us : his strength is made perfect in our weakness which admits its 
 necessity. The presence of Jesus at the feast of Levi reminds us that all 
 intercourse between one human being and another is solemn, only less 
 solemn than the intercourse of your soul with the everlasting God. Beneath 
 the fixed social forms beneath the wonted trivialities beneath the measured 
 expressions of sympathy and disagreement which govern our social inter- 
 course, there are currents of thought and feeling flowing from soul to soul, 
 for good or for ill, moulding characters this way or that, for an endless future. 
 Nobody who thinks what social intercourse is can doubt this. No one who 
 keeps this in his mind can deny its importance in the view of eternity. 
 Let us endeavour, when we are thrown with others, be they who they may, 
 to think of our Lord Jesus Christ, present, in his majesty and his love, at the 
 feast of Levi, and pray him for his gracious and ready help, that we, too, 
 sinners though we be, may speak a word in season to him that is weary, 
 and may, in this and all else, so pass through things temporal that we finally 
 lose not the things eternal. 
 392
 
 THE INEVITABLENE88 OF CHRIST'S RESURRECTION. 
 
 nuon 
 
 BY REV, H. P. LIDDON, D.D., 
 
 ( Canon of St. Paul's J 
 Preached in St. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 ON 
 EASTER SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 16th, 1876. 
 
 Whom God hath raised up, having loc sed the pains of death : because it vras 
 not possible that he should be holden of it. ACTS ii. 24. 
 
 THIS is the language of the first Christian apostle in the first sermon 
 that ever was preached in the church of Christ. St. Peter is accounting 
 for the miraculous gift of languages on the day of Pentecost ; and, after 
 observing that it was, after all, only a fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel 
 about the out-pouring of the Spirit in the last days, he proceeds to 
 trace it to its cause. It was the work, he says, of Jesus Christ now ascended 
 into heaven. "He hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear." 
 But Jesus Christ, he argues, had really ascended into heaven, because 
 he had first really risen "from his grave ; and it is to St. Peter's way of 
 accounting for Christ's resurrection that I invite your attention to-day, 
 as being the first apostolic statement on the subject that was given to the 
 world. 
 
 My brethren, even if this point were only one of antiquarian interest 
 it surely would be full of attractions for every intelligent man to know 
 how the first Christians thought about the chief truths of their 
 faith, considering the influence that that faith has had, and still has on 
 the development of the human race. But, for us Christians, concern in 
 this matter is more exacting and more urgent. Our hopes and fears, 
 our depressions and our enthusiasms, our improvement or our deteriora- 
 tion, are bound up with it. " If Christ be_not risen our preaching is vain. 
 Your faith is also vain." 
 
 Let us, then, listen to what the apostle St. Peter says about a subject 
 upon which his opportunites to say nothing of higher credentials 
 qualified him to speak with authority. 
 
 First of all, then, St. Peter states the fact that Christ had risen from 
 the dead. "Whom God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of 
 death." Let us remember that he is preaching in Jerusalem, the scene 
 of the death and resurrection of Christ, and, as his sermon shows, he is 
 preaching to some who had taken part in the crucifixion. Not more 
 than seven weeks have yet passed since those events just about the 
 time that has passed since Quinquagesima Sunday ; and in Jerusalem, 
 we may be sure, men did not live as fast as they do in a European 
 capital in this age of telegraphs and railroads. An event like the 
 crucifixion, in a town of that size so far removed from the greater 
 centres of human life, would have occupied general attention for a con- 
 siderable period. It would have been discussed and redi&cussed in all 
 its bearings; and all that happened at the time and immediately 
 afterwards the supposed disappointment of the disciples, the presumed 
 ruin of the cause, as well as the agony and humiliation of the Master 
 would have been still ordinary topics of conversation in most circles of 
 Jewish society. It was, then, to persons keenly interested in the subject, 
 and who had opportunities at hand of testing the exact truth of what 
 he said, that Peter states, thus calmly and unhesitatingly, the fact of the 
 resurrection. He states it as just as much a truth of history as the 
 crucifixion in which his hearers and themselves had taken part. " Ye men 
 of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of 
 N.O, 875 Z .Ni-vr
 
 THE INEYITABLEKESS OF CHBISl's EESfREECTIOX. 
 
 God among you, by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by 
 him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know, him, being deliver- 
 ed by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, 
 and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." And then he adds, ' ' whom 
 God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death." " This Jesus," 
 he adds a little afterwards, "hath God raised up, whereof we all are 
 witnesses." Not one or two favored disciples, but all, even the doubter 
 all had seen their beloved Master : they had heard the tone of that 
 familiar voice : they had seen the wounds of the passion : they 
 recognized in repeated conversations the continuity of heart, of thought, 
 of purpose. It was the Jesus of old days, only radiant with a now and 
 awful glory. On the very day that he rose he had been seen five times, 
 and " he showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs 
 being seen of his disciples forty days and speaking to them of the things 
 pertaining to the kingdom of God." And some twenty-six years later, 
 when St. Paul wrote his first letter to the church of Corinth, there 
 were, he says, more than two hundred and fifty persons still alive who 
 had seen Jesus Christ after his resurrection on a single occasion. The 
 number of witnesses to the fact of the resurrection, to whom St. Peter 
 could appeal, and whom his hearers might cross- question if they liked, 
 will account for the simplicity and confidence of his assertion. In those 
 days men had not yet learned to think more of abstract theories than of 
 well attested facts. The world had not yet heard of that singular state 
 of mind with which we of to-day are not altogether unfamiliar, which 
 holds that some a priori doctrine about the nature of things, or, stranger 
 etilJ, about the temper and moods of human .thought, is a sufficient 
 reason for refusing to listen to the evidence which may be produced in 
 favor of a fact which interferes with these theories. Nobody, it may be 
 added nobody who professed to believe in an almighty God thought 
 it either reverent or reasonable to say that he could not, for sufficient 
 reasons, modifiy or innovate upon his ordinary rules of working, if he 
 chose to do so. 
 
 St. Peter, then, "preached the resurrection as a fact, and, as we know, 
 with great and immediate results. But how did he account for the 
 resurrection ? What was the reason which he gave for its having 
 happened at all ? This is the second point to which I invite your atten- 
 tion, and it will detain us rather longer than the first. 
 
 St. Peter, then, says that Christ was raised from the dead because 
 it was not possible that he should be holden of death. Thus you will 
 observe that St. Peter's thought about this matter is the very opposite 
 to that of many persons in our day. They say, in so many words, that 
 no evidence will convince them that Christ has risen, because they hold 
 it to be antecedently impossible that he should rise. St. Peter, on the 
 other hand, almost speaks as if he could dispense with evidence, so 
 certain is he that Jesus Christ must rise. In point of fact, as we know, 
 St. Peter had his own experience to fall back upon. He had seen his 
 risen Master on the day of the resurrection, and often since ; but so far 
 was this evidence of his senses from causing him any perplexity, that 
 it only fell in with the anticipations which he had now formed on other 
 and independent grounds. It was not possible, he says, that Christ 
 should beholden or imprisoned by death. 
 
 It will do us good, my brethren, as fellow believers with St. Peter, 
 to spend some little time upon his grounds for saying this, to consider, 
 60 far as we may, the reasons for this divine impossibility. 
 
 And here, first of all, we find the' j-eason which lay, so to epeak, 
 nearest to the conclusion, and it was intended to convince the apostle's 
 hearers in the sermon itself. " It was not possible that Christ should be 
 holden of death ; for David speaketh concerning him." It was, then, 
 Jewish prophecy which, if I may say so, forbade the Christ to remain 
 in his grave which made his resurrection nothing less than a divine 
 necessity. As to the principle of this argument there would have been 
 no controversy between St. Peter and the Jews. The Jews believed in 
 the reality and in the compulsive force of prophecy of that variety of 
 prophecy which predicts events that are strictly future, just as distinctly 
 2J2
 
 THE INEVITABLENESS OF CHRIST'S RESURRECTION 1 . 
 
 as do Christians. The prophets, in the belief of the Jews, were the con- 
 fidants of God. God whispered into the ear of their souls by his Spirit his 
 secret resolutions for the coming time. "Surely," could exclaim the pro- 
 phet Amos, "Surely the Lord will do nothing but he revealeth his secret 
 to his servants the prophets." And when once God had thus spoken, it 
 was felt by Jews as it is felt by Christians. His word standeth sure, 
 his gifts and calling are without repentance. The prophetical word 
 became, in virtue of the moral attributes of God, a restraint upon that 
 very liberty of God, of which it was the product, until it was fulfilled. 
 It constituted, within the limits of its application, a law of necessity, 
 to which men and events, and, if need were, nature, had to bend. And 
 for all who believed in its author, the supposition that it would come to 
 nothing after all was, to use St. Peter's phrase, " not possible." That 
 word could not return empty. It must accomplish the work for which 
 God had sent it forth, since it bound him to an engagement with those 
 who uttered, and with those who heard, his message. Of course, my 
 brethren, the true drift of a prophecy may easily be mistaken, and 
 God is not responsible for eccentric guesses as to his meaning, in which 
 well tntentioned men of lively imagination may possibly indulge. "We 
 have lived, in this generation, to hear some very confident guesses 
 based on the supposed meaning of prophecy respecting the end of the 
 world, or some impending general catastrophe. The dates assigned for 
 such occurrences have passed, and religion would be seriously discredited 
 if, indeed, the sacrol word itself were at fault, instead of the fervid 
 imagination of some apocalyptic expositor. But where a prediction is 
 clear, it does bind him, who is its real author, to its fulfilment, which 
 in the event, will be recognized as such ; and such a prediction of the resur- 
 rection of Messiah St. Peter finds in the 16th psalm, where David, as 
 on a greater scale in the 22nd psalm, loses the sense of his own personal 
 circumstances in the impetus and ecstasy of the prophetic spirit which 
 possesses him, and describes a personality of which, indeed, he was the 
 type, but which altogether transcends his own. "Therefore my heart 
 was glad and my glory rejoiceth ; my flesh also shall rest in hope. For 
 thou will not leave my soul in hell, neither will thou suffer thine Holy 
 One to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life ; in tLy 
 presence is the fulness of joy, and at thy right hand the pleasures for 
 evermore." David, so St. Peter argues, utters these words, but of 
 David himself they are not strictly true. "David," he says, "is both 
 dead and buried, and his sepulchre is among us even unto this day." 
 Or, as St. Paul puts it, when appealing to this very psalm in his sermon 
 at Antioch in Pisidia, " David, after he had served his own generation, 
 by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid to his fathers and saw 
 corruption ; but he whom God raised up saw no corruption." And the 
 meaning of the psalm was so clear to one school of the Jewish doctora 
 that, unable as they were to reconcile it with the facts of David's history, 
 they invented the fable that his body was miraculously preserved from 
 corruption. David was really speaking at the moment in the person of 
 Messiah, and his language created the necessity that Messiah should rise 
 from the dead ; or, as St. Peter puts it, his language made it impossible 
 that the Christ should be holden by death. God had spoken in other 
 passages, no doubt, but especially in this word : his word could not 
 return unto him empty. 
 
 Observe, my brethren, that St. Peter had not always felt and thought 
 thus. He had known this 16th psalm all his life , but long after he had 
 followed Jesus Christ about Galilee and Judea he had been ignorant of 
 its true meaning. Only little by little it is that any one of us learns 
 God's full truth and will ; and so lately as the morning of the resurrec- 
 tion, St. Matthew says of both St. Peter and St. John that, as yet, 
 they knew not the scripture that Christ must rise again from the dead. 
 Since then, the Holy, Spirit had come down. He had poured a flood of 
 light into the mind of his apostles, and over the sacred pages of the Old 
 Testament; and the necessity for the resurrection, which even Jewish 
 expositors might have recognized if they would, became abundantly 
 
 203
 
 TfiE fSEnTABLE3?ESS OF CHRIST'S RESURRECTION'. 
 
 plain to them. May that same Spirit teach us, as he taught our spiritual 
 forefathers, the true meaning of his word ! 
 
 And a second reason which would have shaped St. Peter's language 
 lay in the character of Jesus Christ. It was our Lord's character, not 
 less than his miracles, which drew human hearts to him which led or 
 forced them to give up all that the world could offer, for the happiness 
 of following and serving him. Now, of our Lord's character, its leading 
 feature, if I may so speak with reverence, was its simple truthfulness. 
 It was morally impossible for him to hold out prospects which would 
 never be realized, or to use words which ha did not mean. Nay, he 
 insisted upon simple sincerity of language in those who came into his 
 company. He would not allow the young man to call him " Good 
 Master," when the expression was, in his mouth, a mere phrase. He 
 would not accept preteasions to following him whithersoever he went, 
 or aspirations to sit on his right hand or on his left in his kingdom, 
 till men had weighed their words, and were quite sure that they meant 
 what their words involved. Unless, then, he was like the Pharisee* 
 whom he condemned for laying burdens upon others which they would 
 not touch themselves, it might be taken for granted that if he promised 
 he would perform that his promise made performance morally binding 
 made non-performance morally impossible. This was the feeling of 
 his disciples about him that he was too wise to predict the impossible 
 too sincere to promise what he did not mean. Now, Jesus Christ had r 
 again and again, said that he would be put to a violent death, and that 
 after dying he would rise again. Sometimes, as to the Jews in the 
 temple when he cleansed it in the early days of his ministry, he 
 expressed his meaning in the language of metaphor. "Destroy," he 
 said, " this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." The Jews 
 rallied him on the absurdity of undertaking to reconstruct an edifice in 
 three days which had taken forty-six years to build ; but the real sense 
 of the words was plain to the disciples by the gesture which had accom- 
 panied them. And in later years they understood the full sense in 
 which he termed his human body a temple, namely, because in him dwelt 
 all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. 
 
 And sometimes he fell back upon ancient Hebrew history, and 
 compared that which was to happen to himself with the miraculous 
 adventure of the prophet who shrank from the mission which God had 
 assigned to him. "When the Pharisees, irritated at his stern rebuke 
 of their blasphemous levity in assigning his miracle on the blind and 
 dumb man to the agency of Beelzebub, asked him for a sign 
 that is, for some credentials of his mission he contented himself 
 with saying that as Jonah had been three days and three nights in', the 
 whale's belly, so the Son of man would be in the heart of the earth. 
 In other words, his right to speak and act as he did would be proved 
 by his rising from the dead. But with his disciples he used neither 
 metaphor nor historical parallel. He said simply, on three occasions 
 at the least, as the hour of his sufferings approached, that he should 
 be crucified and should rise from death. Peter himself had, on the 
 first of these occasions, rebuked him, as we know, and had been rebuked 
 in turn. And thus he was pledged, if we may reverently say so, to 
 this particular act of resurrection. He was pledged to the Jewish 
 people. He was pledged to its rulers and its governing classes. He 
 was pledged, especially, to his own chosen band of followers. He 
 could not have remained in his grave I will not say without dis- 
 honor, but without entailing that revulsion of feeling which is always 
 provoked, and justly provoked, by the exposure of baseless pre- 
 tensions. It may be, indeed, it has been urged, that the resurrection 
 foretold by Christ was not a literal resurrection of his dead body, 
 but only a recovery of his ascendancy, his credit, his popular authority 
 obscured as these had been for a while by the tragedy of the crucifixion 
 in the apprehension of his disciples and of the world. The word 
 "resurrection," according to this supposition, is, in his mouth, a purely 
 metaphorical expression. It is used to describe not anything which 
 affected Jesus Christ himself, but only a revulsion of opinion and 
 feeling about him in the minds of others. Socrates had had to
 
 THE KfEVITABLElfESS OF CHRIST'S RESURRECTION. 
 
 drink the fatal hemlock, and the body of Socrates had long since 
 mingled with the dust ; hut Socrates, it might be said, had, in a sense, 
 risen risen in the intellectual triumphs of his pupils risen in the 
 enthusiastic admiration of succeeding ages ; and the method and the 
 words of Socrates have been preserved for all time in a literature that 
 will never die. If Christ was to be put to death by crucifixion, he 
 would triumph, even after a death so shameful and degrading, as 
 Socrates and others bad triumphed before him. To imagine for him 
 an actual exit from his tomb is said to be a literalization natural to 
 uncultivated ages, but impossible when the finer suggestiveness of 
 human language has been felt to transcend the letter. An obvious 
 reply to this explanation is that it arbitrarily makes our Lord use a 
 literal and a metaphorical expression in two successive clauses of a 
 single sentence. He is literal, it seems, when he predicts his cruci- 
 fixion. There is no doubt on any side about that. The world has 
 agreed with the church as to the fact of his being crucified. Tacitus 
 mentions his death as well as the evangelists. But if he is to be 
 understood literally when he foretells his cross, why is he to become 
 suddenly metaphorical when he foretells his resurrection ? Why should 
 not his resurrection, if it be only metaphorical, be preceded by a meta- 
 phorical crucifixion, too, a crucifixion of the thought a crucifixion of 
 the will a crucifixion of his reputation not the literal nailing of his 
 human body to a wooden cross ? Why does this fastidious spiritualism, 
 if it be such, which shrinks from the idea of a literal rising out of a 
 literal grave, not shrink equally from a literal nailing to a literal cross ? 
 It is impossible, my brethren, seriously to maintain, on any grounds 
 that can be accepted by an honest interpretation of language, that our 
 Lord himself could have meant that he would bo literally crucified, but 
 would only rise in a metaphorical sense. He meant that the one event 
 would be just as much, or just as little, a matter of fact as the others, 
 and any other construction of his words would never have originated 
 except with those who wish to combine some sort of faint, lingering 
 respect for the language of the Master, with a total disbelief in the 
 supreme miracle which has made him what he is to Christendom. No, 
 it must be said if Jesus Christ had not risen from the grave, he would 
 not have kpt his engagements with his disciples, or with the world. 
 This was the feeling of the men who knew and who loved him best. 
 This was the feeling of St. Peter, ripened, no doubt, only lately into a 
 sharply defined conviction, but based on years of intimate companion- 
 ship that after he, so scrupulously truthful, so invariably wise, had 
 once said that he would rise from death, any other event was simply 
 impossible. All was really staked thus on his really rising again, and 
 when he did rise, he was declared, as his apostle said, to be the Son of 
 God with power, in respect of his higher eternal nature by this resur- 
 rection from the dead. Those who cling to his human character, and yet 
 deny his resurrection, would do well to consider that they must choose 
 between their moral enthusiasm on the one hand, and their unbelief on 
 the other ; since it is the character of Christ which, even more than the 
 language of prophecy, made the idea that he would not rise after death 
 so impossible to his first disciples. 
 
 Nor have we yet exhausted St. Peter's reasons for this remarkable 
 expression. 
 
 You will remember, my brethren, that in the sermon which St. Peter 
 preached to a crowd shortly after this, after the healing of the lame 
 man at the Beautiful gate of the temple, he went over a great deal of 
 the same ground as that which he had traversed in this his first sermon 
 on the day of Pentecost. He told his hearers, among other things, that 
 they had killed the Prince of life, whom God had raised from the dead. 
 Remark,', brethren, that title the Prince of life. Not merely does it show 
 how high above all earthly royalties was the crucified Saviour in the 
 heart and faith of his apostle: it connects the thought of St. Peter in 
 this, the earliest stage of his ministry, with the language of his divine 
 Master, on the one side, and that of the apostles Paul and John upon 
 the other. Our Lord had said, " I am the way, the truth, and the life." 
 He had explained the sense of this last word, " life, " by saving that 
 
 205
 
 THE ItfEVITABLENESS OF CHRIST'S REStTRRECTION. 
 
 as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have 
 life in himself. He had complained to the men of his time, "Ye will 
 not come unto me that ye might have life ; " and St. John had said of 
 him that in him was life ; and St. Paul, as in to-day's epistle, calls 
 him " Christ who is pur life." When, then, St. .Peter names him 
 the Prince of Life, he is referring to this same truth of his Master, and 
 it is, in fact, the key-note of the gospel. That " What is life? "is a 
 question which, even at this date of the world's history, no man cab 
 really answer. We do not know what life is in itself. We can only 
 register its symptoms. We see growth, and we see movement, and we 
 say, "Here is life." It exists in one degree in the tree; in a higher 
 degree in the animal ; in a higher degree still in man. In beings above 
 man, we can not doubt, it is to be found on a still grander scale ; but in 
 all these cases, be it what it may, it is a gift from another, and having 
 been given, it might be modified or withdrawn. Who is he in whom life 
 resides originally ? he who owes it to no patron he from whom no other 
 being can conceivably take it ? Only he, the self-existent, lives of right 
 lives because he can not but live lives an original as distinct from a 
 derived life. This is true of the eternal three who yet are one, but the 
 Christian revelation assures us that it is only true of the Son and of the 
 Holy Spirit, because, by ' an unbegotten and unending communication 
 of deity, they receive such life from the eternal Father. And hence our 
 Lord says, " As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the 
 Son to have life in himself. " Not merely life, let me repeat it, but life 
 in himself. He is thus to be equal with the eternal Giver, Fountain 
 and Source of life ; nay, rather, he is to be, with reference to all created 
 beings, the life their Creator, their Upholder, their last end. For, 
 Bays St. Paul, " By him were all things created that are in heaven and 
 that are in; earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or 
 dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created by him 
 and for him, and he is before all things, and by him all things consist." 
 
 Thus, then, this is the full sense of St. Peter's expression the Prince 
 of life. 
 
 And in the truth which it teaches as to our Lord's jurisdiction over 
 life, based on the truth of his eternal nature, we may trace a third reason 
 for St. Peter's expression in the text. How could the very Lord and 
 source of life be subdued by death ? If, for reasons of wisdom and mercy, 
 he subjected the nature which he had made his own to the king of terrors 
 it was surely not in the course of nature : it was a violence to nature 
 that this should be. And, therefore, when the object had been achieved 
 he would rise, St. Peter implies, by an inevitable rebound : he would rise 
 by the force of things : he would rise by the inherent energy of his irre- 
 pressible life. The real wonder, from St. Peter's point of view, would 
 be if such a being as Christ were not to rise. The pains of death were 
 loosed, not in an extraordinary effort as in your case or mine, but 
 because it was impossible that he, the Prince of life, should be holden of 
 it. 
 
 Observe, brethren, before we leave this point, how St. Peter deals 
 with the subject. He looks at it, if I may so speak, from above rather 
 than from below. He asks himself what his existing faith about the Son 
 of God points to, rather than what history proves to have taken place. 
 He is, for the moment, more concerned for the honor of his Master than 
 for the value and significance of his acts for ua. To St. Peter it is less 
 strange that there should be an innovation upon nature, like the 
 resurrection of a dead body, than it would be if a being like Jesus Christ, 
 having been put to death, did not rise. St. Peter is very far from being 
 indifferent to the proof of the fact that he did rise, He often insists 
 upon this proof, but just as St. John calls Christ's miracles his works, 
 meaning by that that they were just what such a being might be expected 
 to perform, so St. Peter treats his resurrection from the dead as perfectly 
 natural to him as an event which any man or angel, with sufficient 
 knowledge, might have.'calculated beforehand, just as astronomers predict 
 unerringly the movements of the heavenly bodies. "God hath raised 
 Jesus from the dead," he says, " because it was impossible that death 
 206
 
 i UK IXEY1TABLENESS OF CHRIST'S RESTTKfcECTloij'. 
 
 should continue to hold him." The buried Christ could not remain in 
 his grave. He was raised from it in virtue of a divine necessity, and 
 this necessity, while in its original form it is strictly proper to his case, 
 points to kindred necessities which affect his servants and h\a church. 
 
 Let ua, in conclusion, briefly consider them. 
 
 Sae, first, the impossibility for us Christians, too, of being buried for 
 ever in the tomb in which wo shall be laid at death. We, too, shall 
 rise : we must rise. In this, as in other matters, as he is so are we in 
 this world. To us as to him, although in a different way, God has 
 pledged himself. There is a difference, indeed, such as might be expected, 
 between our case and his. In him an eternal vital force beside the voice 
 of prophecy made resurrection from the dead necessary. In us there is 
 no such intrinsic force only a powerful guarantee to us from without. 
 He could say of the temple of his body, " I will raise it up in three days." 
 We can only say that God will raise ua up, we know not when. But 
 this we do know that " if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the 
 dead dwell in us, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also 
 quicken our mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in us." This we 
 do know that ' we all must be manifest before the judgment seat of 
 Christ, that every one may receive the things done in the body, accord- 
 ing to that which he hath done, whether it be good or bad." The law 
 of justice and the law of love combine to create a necessity which re- 
 quires a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and of the unjust. 
 
 See, too, here the principle of the many resurrections in the church 
 of Christ. As with the bodies of the faithful, so it is with the body of 
 the Redeemer. The church of Christ is, as St. Paul says, Christ himself 
 in history. He says as much when he tolls us that as the body is one 
 and has many members, and all the members of the body being many 
 are one body, so also is Christ. The church is Christ's body the ful- 
 ness of him that filleth all in all. But the force of this language is 
 limited by the fact, equally warranted by scripture, that the church has 
 in it a sinful element a human element which, unlike the humanity of 
 Christ, is weak and sinful. The church of Corinth itself, to which St. 
 Paul wrote the glowing sentence which I have just quoted, was filled, 
 he tells us, with strife, irreverence worse sins than these. Hence 
 the church of Christ has, again and again, in the course of her history, 
 seemed to be dead and buried outright buried away in some one of the 
 lumber rooms of the past ; and the world has gone its way rejoicing, 
 as if all was over as if, henceforth, unbelief and ungodliness would 
 never be disturbed in their reign on earth by protests from heaven. But 
 suddenly the tomb has opened. There has been a profound agitation in 
 men's consciences a moral movement a feeling that all is far from 
 right ; and then a new uprising of the spirit of devotion a social stir 
 literary, missionary, philanthropic activity conspicuous self-sacrifice, 
 and the world awakes one fine morning to an uneasy suspicion that John 
 the Baptist has risen from the dead, and that mighty works do show 
 forth themselves in him. The truth is that the Christ himself has 
 again burst his tomb and is abroad among men. So it was after the deep 
 degradation of the papacy in the tenth century .' So it was after the 
 accumulated corruptions of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. 
 So it was in this country after the great triumph of misbelief and pro- 
 fanity in the middle of the seventeenth century ; and, later after that 
 indifference to all true religion during the greater part of the eight- 
 eenth. The oppression, the degradation, the enfeeblement of the 
 church of Christ is possible enough. Too generally, the world only 
 binds and makes sport of Samson, because Samson has first yielded to 
 the blandishments of Delilah. But there is a vital force in the church 
 of Christ which asserts, and must assert, itself from generation to gene- 
 ration. If the crucifixion is je -enacted in the holy body if, as St. 
 Paul phrases it, we fill up from century to century that which is behind 
 of the sufferings of Christ, the resurrection is re-enacted, too. It is not 
 possible that the body of Christ, instinct with his force and with his 
 vital and quickening Spirit, should be permanently holden down by 
 death. Each apparent failure and collapse is followed assuredly by an 
 
 207
 
 THE Ks'EVITABLENESS OF CHRIST'S RESURRECTION. 
 
 outburst of energy and moral glory which reveals the presence of the 
 living Christ his presence, -who, if crucified through weakness, yet lives 
 by the power of God. 
 
 And we have here, lastly, what should be the governing principle of 
 our own personal livec . If we have been laid in the tomb of sin, it 
 ought to be impossible that we should be holden of it. I say " ought 
 to be," because, as a matter of fact, it is not impossible. God only is 
 responsible for the resurrection of his Son, for the resurrection of the 
 Christian's body, for the perpetuity through its successive resurrec- 
 tions of the Christian church : and therefore, it is impossible that either 
 one or the other of these should permanently succumb to the empire of 
 death. But God who raises our bodies, whether we will or not, does not 
 raise our souls from sin without our corresponding with his grace ; and 
 it is quite in our power to refuse this necessary correspondence. That 
 we should rise, then, from sin is a moral it is not a physical necessity; 
 but, surely, we ought to make it as real a necessity as if it were phy- 
 sical. For any man who feels in his soul the greatness and the love of 
 Jesus Christ, it ought to be morally impossible to remain in this tomb. 
 " Like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, 
 even so we also should walk in newness of life." If Lent is the time 
 for mourning the past, Easter is the time for bracing, definite resolutions 
 for vigorous efforts which shall control the future. If we were unaided 
 and alone, such efforts and resolutions would be failures, in that they 
 would be like the vain flutterings of a bird against the wires of the cage 
 which imprisons it. But he who has broken the gates of brass and 
 smitten the bars of iron in sunder will not fail us if we seek his strength, 
 and the permanence and the splendour of his life in glory may, and 
 should be, the warrant of our own. 
 
 One word more. A real resurrection with Christ will make and 
 leave some definite mark upon our life. Let us resolve this day, brethren, 
 to do, or to leave undone, henceforth, some one thing which will make 
 the needful difference. Conscience will instruct us in this matter if we 
 ask it, and if any of you are looking out for a way of showing gratitude 
 to our risen Redeemer, I would suggest that you should send the best 
 contribution you can afford to the secretary of the Society for the Pro- 
 pagation of the Gospel, in support of the mission at Zanzibar on the 
 east coast of Africa. There, a small band of noble men, under the 
 leadership of a bishop of apostolic life, are making efforts, worthy of the 
 best days of the church, to propagate the faith among races to whom no 
 depths of degradation and misery, that are possible for human beings, 
 are practically unknown, but races which are as capable as ourselves 
 of rising with Christ to a new life of moral and mental glory. Accord- 
 ing to the accounts which have reached this country quite recently, just 
 at the moment when new and unlooked-for opportunities are presenting 
 themselves to the servants of Christ, and a real inroad upon heathendom 
 and upon slavery and the vices which mark its empire is possible as it 
 has never been possible before since the mission began, their scanty 
 means altogether failed them. They literally have not enough to eat, 
 much less to attempt new enterprises of Christian charity sxtch as 
 the circumstances imperatively demand. Shall we leave them to des- 
 pondency, to retreat, to failure, with the heathen before them stretching 
 out their hands, almost within sight of the cross of their Kedeemer, and 
 their God, with the impure imposture of the false prophet hard by, ready 
 to take advantage of our supiueness ? Surely, it can not but be that 
 some who hear me will make an effort worthy of Easter gratitude. 
 There will be no collection after the service, but, as I have said, I am 
 sure that the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 
 will gladly receive subscriptious for an object than which nothing more 
 truly Christian and philanthropic nothing more worthy of men who 
 humbly hope that they have their part in the first resurrection, and 
 in its divine necessities, can well be imagined.
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. H. P. LIDDON, D.D, 
 
 (Canon of St. Paul's,) 
 
 PREACHED IN 
 
 ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 ON 
 
 SUNDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 14th, 1872, 
 
 London: F. DAVIS, (late J. PAUL), i, Chapter House Court, North 
 Side of St. Paul's ; and Paternoster Row. 
 
 No. 575. E. NEW SERIES.
 
 " I am the Good Shepherd." JOHN x. 11. 
 
 FEW gospels, if any, which are appointed dnring the whole course of the 
 church year speak to us more directly, more persuasively, than this. ".The 
 Snnday of the Good Shepherd," as in many parts of Christendom this day has 
 been called, has, or ought to have, a charm for us, the sheep of His pasture, 
 almost, if not altogether, unrivalled. 
 
 Now, if you look at your New Testaments, you will see that in the first 
 eighteen verses of the roth chapter of St. John, there are three distinct allego- 
 ries. First comes the allegory of the shepherd, next the allegory of the door, 
 lastly the allegory of the good, or, as it may be rendered, the beautiful, the 
 ideal, shepherd. These, I say, are allegories rather than parables. An alle- 
 gory differs from a parable just as a transparency might differ from a painting 
 on canvas. In the parable the narrative has a body and a substance (so to 
 call it) of its own. It has a value which ib independent of its application of 
 its interpretation. It often will lend itself quite naturally to more interpreta- 
 tions than one. In the allegory, the narrative suggests the one obvious inter- 
 pretation step by step. The two are, under the circumstances, inseparable. 
 It is impossible to look steadily at the picture presented to the mind's eye by 
 the allegory, without perceiving the real persons and events which it refers to, 
 moving almost without disguise, without mistake, behind. This might have 
 been observed in the allegory of Sarah and Hagar, which St. Paul has been in- 
 terpreting for us at the beginning of the second lesson of this afternoon's 
 service, and it will appear in the present case as we proceed. 
 
 In order to understand these three allegories, we must remind ourselves 
 that in the east a sheepfold is not a covered building, but a simple enclosure, 
 of some considerable extent, surrounded by a wall or palisade. Within this 
 enclosure, many flocks of sheep which have wandered far away during the 
 day, under the care of a shepherd, are collected. The shepherds lead them to 
 the enclosure at nightfall ; and during the night a single shepherd, here called 
 the porter, keeps the gate and guarantees the safety of the collected flock. In the 
 morning the various shepherds return to the fold to claim their respective 
 flocks at the hand of the night porter. They knock at the gate of the enclosure 
 and he lets them in ; and then, each for himself, the shepherds separate their 
 own flocks from the others with which, during the night, they have been inter- 
 mixed, and each shepherd leads his sheep forth to the day's pasturage. If a 
 robber wishes to enter the fold, he does not attempt the door, where he knows 
 that he will be recognized and detected : he climbs over some other part of 
 the enclosure. He comes for no good purpose: he comes to kill and to de- 
 stroy. 
 
 Now, our Lord's three allegories place us here face to face with the 
 pastoral life of the East at three different periods of the Eastern day. 
 In the first, the allegory of the shepherd, it is still the freshness of 
 the early morning. The dew is on the ground: the shepherds are 
 returning to the fold to claim the flocks which have been collected 
 within it during the night ; and if a robber is endeavouring to lead 
 away some of the sheep, he must find his way into the fold through 
 242
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 some dishonourable trick. The porter will open the gate only to the regular 
 shepherd. The shepherd calls his own sheep by name, and they hear his 
 voice, and then he leads them forth from the fold. He does not drive ; he 
 walks before them. They follow him because they know him because they 
 trust him. 
 
 The second allegory, that of the door, places us in the full noontide of 
 the Eastern day. The fold, which is here implied without being mentioned, 
 is not the same fold as that in which the sheep were collected during the 
 night. It is a day enclosure to which, during the hours of the burning sunshine, 
 the sheep may retire for rest, for shade, and out of which they may at will 
 wander to seek pasture. In this allegory, observe, there is no mention of a 
 shepherd at all. The shepherd has for the moment disappeared. The 
 most important feature is the door, in this picture of the mid- 
 day fold. The door of this fold is the guarantee of safety and of liberty 
 to the sheep. " I am the door,'' says the Divine Speaker. " By Me if 
 any man enter in, he shall be saved ; he shall go in and out and find pas- 
 ture." 
 
 In the third allegory, that of the good shepherd, we have reached the 
 evening-tide. Already the shadows are lengthening upon the hills, and the 
 shepherds have collected their flocks to lead them back to the night 
 enclosure. As the darkness gathers, the flock is attacked by wolves 
 which lie in ambush for it on the way. The good shepherd, who loves 
 his sheep with nothing less than a personal affection, throws himself be- 
 tween his imperiled flock and their cruel enemy, and in doing so he sacri- 
 fices himself. " He giveth his life for the sheep." Now, this allegory 
 of the good, or beautiful, or ideal shepherd is no mere repetition of the 
 first allegory of the shepherd, although they both refer to one per- 
 son and to one only ; for the shepherd who knocks at the door in the 
 early morning, is contrasted with the thief and the robber who climbs into 
 the fold some other way ; and the good shepherd who gives his life for his 
 flock at nightfall is contrasted with the hireling or mercenary who flies 
 at the approach of the wolf, and sacrifices his flock to his personal 
 safety. 
 
 If we ask ourselves the question, what would our Lord's hearers have un- 
 derstood what would they have been meant, in the first instance, to under- 
 stand by this language of His ? we must look for an answer in what was 
 actually going on at the time in Judea before the very eye of the speaker. 
 When Our Lord spoke of a fold, every religious Jew would think at once 
 of the commonwealth or church or nation of Israel. In the pastoral lan- 
 guage of the prophets the old theocratic nation was the fold of the Lord 
 Jehovah. And when our Lord spoke of a shepherd, every religious Jew 
 would think of one and one only being, the expected Messiah. In such a 
 Psalm as the 23rd, for instance, David applies the figure to the Lord Jehovah. 
 " The Lord is my shepherd ; therefore shall I lack nothing. He shall feed 
 me in a green pasture, and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort." And 
 Jehovah is announced as destined to appear once more to His people as the 
 shepherd of Israel, in both Ezekiel and Zechariah. In Zechariah especially, 
 the shepherd of Israel is represented as making one last effort to rescue the 
 sacred flock from slaughter. He only attaches to himself the poorest of the 
 flock, and after a month's toil he receives thirty pieces of silver, that is, the 
 wages of a labourer of the very lowest class, as he breaks his tsaff and leaves 
 to the bad shepherds the flock that will not be saved. The whole of this in- 
 structive but difficult passage was, we may reverently conjecture, especially 
 before the mind of our Divine Lord when He was pronouncing these very 
 
 2J3
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 allegories. He was Himself, in His own thought, the very shepherd of pro- 
 phecy who had come to the gate of the Jewish commonwealth to find out 
 His believing sheep among the unbelieving masses, and to lead them forth 
 from it. But who was the porter ? Among various explanations there is 
 one answer, we may dare to say, which would have occurred at once to those 
 who heard our Lord speak, to those who knew the history of the time, an 
 answer which cannot but occur to any of us who has carefully studied St. 
 John's Gospel. John the Baptist is the porter. It was to the Baptist, the 
 last, the greatest, of the prophets, keeping in the wilderness the gate of God's 
 ancient fold, that Christ came at the beginning of His ministry, came as the 
 gospel morning was breaking on the earth. It was from among the Baptist's 
 followers that Christ received his very first disciples. John the Baptist bare 
 Him witness, this is the burden of each and of all the references to the 
 Baptist in the last of the gospels. And who were the thieves and robbers who 
 had not come into the fold through the gate ? We cannot doubt that they 
 were the Pharisees the Pharisees who had established among the Jewish 
 people their great authority by much hypocrisy, by much violence. They had 
 not entered by the gate. Their influence was not based on the old law of 
 Moses : it was based on bad traditions which had grown up around that 
 law, and which they themselves especially had fostered. And the Baptist, 
 when he encountered them, as St. Matthew tells us, had not kept any sort 
 of terms with them. They were, he said, a generation of vipers, whom he 
 warned to flee from the wrath to come to bring forth fruits meet for repent- 
 ance. 
 
 The whole scene of the first allegory is laid at the commencement of 
 Christ's ministry. In the second allegory Christ has led out His own from 
 the old Jewish fold into the pastures of the new kingdom. There is no shep- 
 herd mentioned here. Christ is the door. The new fold of which He is the 
 door is the gospel enclosure in which His person is everything. Through 
 Him the sheep go forth for pasture ; through Him they retire within for safety. 
 Here again He contrasts Himself with the Pharisees as thieves and robbers. 
 The image of the door melts away in His language, as it melts away in the 
 thought of His listeners, into His own actual person. And in the third alle- 
 gory, the last days of His ministry the days which were then actually pass- 
 ing when He was uttering the words are before Him. The evening of His 
 earthly life is upon Him. He is near His Passion. The wolf is already lying 
 in ambush for the flock. The hireling shepherd flees, true to his nature. The 
 good shepherd gives his life. Who is the wolf here ? As always, the 
 Pharisee party which preyed upon the religious life of the people. And 
 who is the hireling ? Certainly not, as some have supposed, the Pharisees 
 against whom the hireling is the natural defender. By the hireling, our 
 Lord's hearers would have understood the Jewish priesthood. It is a 
 mistake to suppose that the interests and views of the Pharisees and the 
 priesthood were identical. The Pharisees were, to a very great extent, a 
 Jay sect. They had obtained a preponderating influence over the religious 
 life of the people, and had corrupted it very seriously. The priesthood ought 
 to have held the Pharisees in check. They would have done so had they 
 done their duty. The priesthood were not indisposed to believe in our 
 Lord. In St. Stephen's day, we are told, a great multitude of the priests 
 were " obedient to the faith ; " and even before the Passion, many of 
 the chief priests believed in Him, " but because of the Pharisees they 
 would not confess Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue." 
 The fact was that the priests did not dare to face the Pharisees, and 
 Jesus was the victim of Pharisaic indignation. It was already plain 
 244
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 what would what must follow. Our Lord, of course, knew it in other 
 ways, but a purely human observer of the forces which were then governing 
 the political life of Judea might have understood the meaning of the words 
 " I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for the 
 sheep." 
 
 When our Lord calls Himself the good shepherd, is He usintj a title which 
 has lost its value since He has ceased to live visibly upon the earth ; or has 
 this title a true meaning for us Christians, for you, for me, at the present 
 day? 
 
 Here we cannot but observe that, writing some forty years after the ascen- 
 sion, St. Peter, in to-day's epistle, calls Jesus Christ the shepherd as well as 
 the bishop of souls : and St, Paul calls Him the great shepherd of the sheep. 
 And the earliest ages of the Christian church, when the cruel stress of perse- 
 cution drove the faithful from the streets and public places of Rome down 
 into those catacombs which were burrowed out beneath the busy life of the 
 vast pagan city, there was one figure above all others, which, in the depths of 
 their dark prison homes, Christians delighted to draw in rude outline upon 
 the vaults beneath which they prayed. It was the figure of the good shep- 
 herd. Sometimes His apostles were ranged on either side of Him ; sometimes 
 the allegory being more clearly adhered to the sheep were standing around 
 with upturned faces, eagerly intent upon their deliverer, their guide : some- 
 times, as in later art more especially, He was carrying a wanderer on His 
 shoulder, or folding a lamb into His bosom, or gently leading the sick, the 
 weary, of the flock. There was that in the gracious figure which represented 
 the tenderness, the active love, of the Divine Saviour, moving, although un- 
 seen moving most really amid His persecuted flock to help and to bless 
 them. And ever since those days of persecution, when Christ has been asked 
 to bless from His throne some work of mercy for relieving suffering, or for 
 teaching the ignorant, or for delivering the captive, or for raising the fallen, it 
 has been as the great shepherd of Christians the good shepherd of humanity. 
 The title has an attractive power for the Christian heart, which is all its own. 
 Not that it is by any means easy to enter into the full force of this beautiful 
 image. To do so we must know something really about ourselves ; we must 
 know something really about the person of our Saviour. We must feel first 
 of all, our weakness, our dependence, our need of a heavenly guide and friend. 
 We must sincerely feel that, face to face with the eternal world, and with its 
 awful monarch, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, is, at the very best, a great mis- 
 take. An old pagan Roman did not could not feel this ; and, therefore, 
 in his unconverted state, he spumed the idea of having a good shepherd in 
 heaven, whom it was his business to love and to worship. It was humiliating 
 to him it was intolerable that he, with the blood of the Scipios and the 
 Caesars in his veins, should think, should speak, of himself as a sheep. To 
 him the Christians who could do so appeared a set of poor-spirited, degraded, 
 contemptible people, who had never known what it was to have a part in the 
 majesty of the Roman name. ^ What did he want of a shepherd in the skies ? 
 He depended on himself ; he trusted himself ; and if life became intolerable, 
 and he was a stoic in opinion, he probably meant quite deliberately to put an 
 end to himself. That he should be led, pastured, folded, guarded, delivered, 
 all this was simply out of the question. He, he did not want to be placed 
 under a sense of obligation to any one, least of all under a sense of obligation so 
 immense, so utterly beyond discharge as this. Certainly, he might have reflected 
 that he owed the very gift of existence itself to some higher being, however little 
 he knew of that being, and that this alone was a debt that he could never repay. 
 But how many of us, my Christian brethren, go through our lives without ever, 
 
 245
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 or, at least, without often, thinking seriously of what it is to be created 
 beings, of what it is to have a being whom we name our creator a being to 
 whose free bounty, all we are, all that we have, moment by moment, is liter- 
 ally due. What wonder, then, if the old pagan Roman did not enter what 
 wonder if some of us do not enter into the blessedness of devotion to the 
 good shepherd. Until a man's heart is broken by a sense of personal sin, 
 and by the love of God revealed to the soul in all His beauty and in all 
 His justice, the figure of the good shepherd must be simply repulsive, 
 because it inflicts upon the man the sense of an immeasurable personal humili- 
 ation. 
 
 And, besides this, to enter into what is meant by the good shepherd, we 
 must know and believe the truth about the person of Jesus. If Jesus Christ 
 was merely a man, how could He, in any rational sense, be a good shepherd 
 to you and to me ? It is now eighteen centuries and a half since He left this 
 planet, and if we only think of Him as a departed saint resting somewhere in 
 the bosom of God, we have no reason whatever to attribute to Him a pas- 
 toral interest in the multitudes of Christians who look up to Him day by day, 
 hour by hour, as He sits upon His throne, for health and for guidance. Can 
 we suppose that any merely created being could be thus a superintending pro- 
 vidence could have thus an all- contemplating, all-comprising love to multi- 
 tudes ? And yet when our Lord says, " I am the Good Shepherd," He 
 clearly disengages Himself from the historical incidents, from the political cir- 
 cumstances, which immediately surround Him. He places Himself above all 
 the narrowing conditions of time. He will be to all the ages what He is 
 already to the faithful few in and about Jerusalem. It is as when He says, 
 " I am the life ; " or, " I am the way, the truth, and the life; " or, " I am 
 the resurrection and the life ; " or, " I am the true vine." All this language 
 in the mouth of a merely human teacher would be pretentious ; it would be 
 inflated ; it would be insufferable. We cannot conceive the best man whom 
 we have known in life permitting himself to speak of himself as the good shep- 
 herd of men. To do so would be to forfeit his claims to our love, to our 
 reverence, to our respect. Why is it not so when our Lord speaks ? Because 
 there is that in Him beyond, yet inseparable from His perfect manhood, which 
 justifies His language, which makes it not pretentious, not inflated, not 
 absurd, not blasphemous in Him, but, on the contrary, perfectly natural and 
 obvious. We feel, in short, that He is divine, and that such sayings as 
 " Before Abraham was I am " " He that hath seen Me hath seen the 
 Father '' " I and the Father are one," are in the background of His 
 thought, and explain and justify what He says about Himself as being the 
 shepherd of human souls. But it is because He is also man, that such a 
 title especially befits Him. Because He is, though abstract providence, but a 
 divine person who has taken part in our frail human nature, and who, 
 through it, communicates with and blesses us, He is the good shepherd of 
 His people. 
 
 Let us very briefly reflect what this truth involves as to our relations with 
 our Redeemer. 
 
 As the good shepherd He knows His sheep. He knows us ; He 
 knows us individually : He knows all about us. He knows us not merely 
 as we seem to be, but as we are. Others look us in the face day by day, 
 and we them. They touch the surface of our real life : perhaps they 
 see a little way below the surface ; but " what man knoweth the things 
 of a man save the spirit of man which is in Him?" What do they know 
 of that which passes in the inmost sanctuary of the reason, of the 
 246
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 conscience, of the heart ? Nay, do they know much of our outward circum- 
 stances, of our trials, of our struggles, of our difficulties, or of what we deem 
 such ? Citizens as we are of this vast metropolis, we live amid a multitude, 
 yet we live in solitude. But there is one Being who knows all, upon whom 
 nothing that passes is lost, to whom nothing that effects us ever so remotely 
 is matter of indifference. To Him " all hearts are open, all desires known ; 
 from Him no secrets are hid ;" and all the warps of our self-love, all the 
 depths and corruptions of our hearts, all that we might have been, all that 
 we are, is spread out before His eyes like a map, to which each moment that 
 passes adds a something which He has already anticipated adds it in the 
 way of extent without diminishing anything in the way of clearness. 
 It is because He knows us thus perfectly, that He is able to help us, to 
 guide us, to feed us, if we will, to save us, aye, to the very uttermost. 
 
 And besides this knowledge, He, the Good Shepherd, has a perfect sym- 
 pathy with each of us. He is not a hard guardian who sets Himself to keep 
 us in order without any sort of feeling for our individual difficulties. He is 
 touched, as His apostle says of Him, with a feeling of our infirmities. His 
 true human nature is the seat and the warrant of this His pure human sympa- 
 thy to which the image of a shepherd, if it were taken alone, does something 
 less than perfect justice. Nothing that effects any one of us is a matter of 
 indifference to His tender heart. He is not interested merely or chiefly in the 
 noble or the wealthy, or the intellectual, or the well-bred. Wherever there 
 is a human soul seeking the truth a human heart longing, however unskil- 
 fully it may endeavour, to lavish its affection upon the eternal beauty there 
 He is at hand, unseen yet energetic, entering with a perfect sympathy into 
 every trial, anticipating, in ways we little dream of, every danger ; not, 
 indeed, suspending our probation by putting us out of the reach of temptation, 
 but " with the temptation also making a way to escape that we may be able 
 to bear it." And yet this sympathy is not a burst of unregulated affection. 
 It is guided by a perfect prudence ; it is guided by the highest reason. In the 
 days of His earthly life this was especially observable. He dealt with men 
 according to their characters, according to their capacities. He did not put 
 the new cloth on the old garment, or the new wine into the old bottles. He 
 did not ask His disciples to imitate the austere life of the followers of the 
 Baptist. He knew them too well. They would come to that, He said, by 
 and by. He did not all at once unfold to them all the truth He had to tell 
 them about Himself, about His kingdom, about the means of living the new, 
 the divine, life. These truths would have shocked them had they been pre- 
 maturely announced. " I have many things to say unto you," He said, '' but 
 ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when the Spirit of truth is come He 
 shall guide you into all truth." Those who were yet in the infancy of the 
 Christian life He, in His tenderness, would feed with milk. He reserved 
 strong meat for those who knew more who could bear more. So it has 
 been since. If we, brethren, have enjoyed opportunities, if we have been 
 denied them, this (believe it) has not happened by chance. The Great Shep- 
 herd of the sheep, who knows us, has ordered it. He has proportioned our 
 duties, our trials, our advantages, our drawbacks, to our real needs, to our 
 real capacities, to our inmost characters. We may have disputed His 
 wisdom, we may have made the most of it, but it is not less certainly 
 a characteristic of His government. " As thy days so shall thy strength 
 be," so runs His most gracious promise. 
 
 And above all, as the Good Shepherd, the Christ, He is disinterested. He 
 gains nothing by watching, by guarding, by feeding such as us. He seeks 
 not ours but us. We can contribute nothing to His majestic glory. He 
 
 247
 
 THE GOOD SHEPHERD. 
 
 seeks us for our own sakes, not for His. He spent His earthly life among the 
 villages, among the hamlets, of a remote province, when He might have 
 illuminated and awed the intellectual centres of the world. He spared Him- 
 self no privations in His toil for souls. He had at times no leisure so much 
 as to eat, so absorbing were His labours. Persecutions, humiliations, rebuffs, 
 sufferings, these could not diminish the ardour of His sacred, of His con- 
 suming zeal, and He crowned all by embracing with the utmost freedom, 
 when He might have declined it, an agonizing death in order to save His 
 flock. He gave His life for the sheep : He gave it once for all, eighteen 
 centuries ago, but His death is just as powerful to deliver us from the onset of 
 the wolf as it was then. Self-sacrifice such as that on Calvary does not lose 
 its virtue with the lapse of years. The precious blood is as powerful to save 
 us as when, warm and fresh, it first ebbed forth from the wounds of the 
 Crucified, for it is, as the apostle says, the blood of the everlasting covenant, 
 and the Great Shepherd of the sheep has been raised from the dead that it may 
 plead for us perpetually on earth and in the courts of heaven. 
 
 Ah ! we look up to Him upon His throne, and here in His courts we sing 
 day by day that we are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Do you 
 mean that ? We kneel day by day, and confess that we have erred and 
 strayed from His ways from the eternal Father's ways like lost sheep. Do 
 you mean that ? If we do, have we yet returned with anything like sincerity 
 to the shepherd and bishop of our souls ? If we do, are we endeavouring to 
 know Him as, whether we will or not, He certainly knows us. We need a 
 guide through the uncertainties of life. Do we recognize one in Him ? We 
 need a physician for our moral wounds : we need a source of strength in our 
 many temptations : we need a rule and a standard of holinsss : we need, all of 
 us, an arm, a strong arm, to lean on when we shall pass, not long hence, 
 through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. All this He is : all this He can 
 give us, and much more. But have we any practical knowledge of Him 
 which enables us to claim these blessings at His hand ? When He has fixed 
 His eye upon us aj some turning point in life, when He has reached out His 
 pastoral crook and beckoned us to follow Him up the narrow way, have we 
 obeyed? No doubt faithfulness, submission, courage, perseverance were 
 necessary ; but did He not merit them ? Has He done so much for us ? shall 
 we do nothing nothing for Him ? Or, if this has been as He would wish, 
 are we associating ourselves in any sense with His work in* the world ? As 
 we all may join in the intercessions of Him our great high priest, so we all 
 may work under His mantle the mantle of the Good Shepherd. How many 
 a work of mercy in the church has that gracious, that tender figure inspired 
 which else had been denied to suffering human beings ! By our individual 
 exertions, by strengthening the hands and hearts of the ministers of Christ, 
 by doing our best to raise their idea and standard of work and life, by entering 
 with sympathy and humility into cases of misery and ignorance which but for 
 His mercy might well have been our own, we may all of us, laymen as well as 
 clergy, women as well as men, simple and unlearned as well as lettered, have a 
 part in promoting that great work of restoration and care for fallen men which 
 is the glory of our Divine Master Jesus, as the Good Shepherd of humanity, and 
 which is our own only ground of hope in time and for eternity. 
 
 248

 
 
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